SOURCE: “Aharon Appelfeld's The Immortal Bartfuss: The Holocaust, the Body, and Repression,” in Hebrew Literature in the Wake of the Holocaust, edited by Leon I. Yudkin, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993, pp. 85–96.

In the following essay, Goodman traces the development of the protagonist of The Immortal Bartfuss.

Aharon Appelfeld is a survivor of the Holocaust who, in his own words, has been “inclined” by fate for “some reason,” to literature. He tries to speak, as he says, of

the individual whose mother and father gave him/her a name, to whom they taught their language, gave of their love and bequeathed of their belief. This individual who, because of the many, has been obliterated and become one of the many … is the individual whose essence is the core of the literary vision.¹

It is this individual of whom he feels compelled to speak, for

… at the moment that simple...