The program “All a life” rebroadcasts a component devoted to the writer who disappeared in 2018, which “writing has torn off the depths of despair”.
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What is “a whole life”, since this is the title of the France Culture program which proposes, every Saturday, to draw up “the radio portrait of exceptional women and men”? How, in an hour, is it possible to summarize a life? Is it by favoring the protruding elements or, on the contrary, with infinite details that we approach someone? What if it was – a fortiori when it comes to a writer – first by his voice? So rejoice.
Because it is through the voice of Aharon Appefeld, who died in 2018, that this replay opens up in favor of the publication at the Editions de l’Olivier of his latest book, the stupor, and, in a translation Revue and with a postface signed Frédéric Worms, of three conferences given to Columbia University and grouped under the title L’enitage naked.
“in the ghetto”
A voice which, as his wife Judith Appefeld confides here, of the day when Aharon had a home and a family, “she was relaxed: she came out”. A voice so singular to say so singular things, as the author and translator Valérie Zenatti so rightly illuminates: “In Hebrew, he finds a distance with the historical event which allows him, perhaps, to be Bring closer to the metaphysical questioning that this event can arouse without going towards historical reduction. “” Because, she adds, I think it was one of her great struggles: say that the Shoah-or what is called The Shoah, that is to say the extermination of the Jews of Europe-was much more than a historic event. That it had first been the assassination, one by one, of six million people. He wanted the mass massacre to become, if possible, the destruction of a person because it was what it had been. “
In his books, Aharon Appelfeld did not stop translating his child experience having survived the extermination of the Jews of Europe – he was born in 1932 alongside Czernowitz, then in Romania (today Hui in Ukraine). To always write – “Scripture torn me out of the depths of despair. It is the foundation on which I have rebuilt my life” -, in the middle of necessary silences, horror and also light, living. Like this extract from the history of a life (1999): “More than fifty years have passed since the Second World War. The heart has forgotten a lot. (…) Each time it rains, whether it is cold or whether it Breathe a violent wind, I am again in the ghetto, in the camp or in the forests that have sheltered me for a long time. Memory, it turns out, has roots deeply rooted in the body. Sometimes it is enough the smell of rotten straw or the cry of a bird to transport me far and inside. “