SOURCE: “Aharon Appelfeld and the Uses of Language and Silence,” in Remembering for the Future: The Impact of the Holocaust on the Contemporary World, Volume II, Pergamon Press, 1989, pp. 1602–609.

In the following essay, Langer contends that Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939 is full of narrative ironies, and that “his language contains a Janus-like energy, full of hints and portents that never achieve the clarity of expressed meaning.”

Aharon Appelfeld's art takes us on a journey into the realm of the unsaid; but it rejects the corollary idea, so often maintained by commentators on Holocaust literature, that the unsaid is necessarily unsayable. This distinction is at the heart of his imaginative vision. His fiction invites us to experience not catastrophe, but the avoidance of catastrophe, or the silences surrounding it. This obscures but does not negate the catastrophe, which his characters deny or refuse to discuss while his readers sculpt its outlines...