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Appelfeld and His Times: Transformations of Ahashveros, The Eternal Wandering Jew

People do not live in one time only. We live simultaneously in several times, within several pasts, as well as within different circles of the present. We also project different views of the future. This multi-temporality of existence is a human experience which only literature is capable of com municating. Individuals usually believe that they live strictly in the here and now.1 The work of a literary artist, however, is multi-temporal from a number of perspectives. The work's external times include the time of the author's life, which will always have a certain influence upon the text. The time in which the work is created and the times of its reception are also important factors, in that the same work will have a different meaning and significance in different times and in different places. The work's internal times are those that are submerged within it; they do not exist indepen dently but emerge from a complex reciprocity among themselves. Appelfeld's external times begin with his birth in 1932. The principal formative years of his life seem to be the period between 1940 and 1945. He began to publish poems and stories during the Fifties, and his first book, Ashan [Smoke], was published in 1962. The year of his first and perhaps determinative reception is, therefore, 1962. The fact that this was one year after the Eichmann trial is of considerable significance with regard to this particular writer. Readers of Appelfeld's work are inevitably influenced by the figure of the writer himself, who is closely linked to the myth of the Shoah?a historical time which has become mythic time. Whether he writes about the nineteenth century, the nineteen-fifties, or was to write about the year two-thousand, Appelfeld's work would always stand under the sign of this myth.