Les rescapés de la Shoah en Israël dans l’œuvre d’Aharon Appelfeld

• Main Author: Lily Perlemuter
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales 2014-05-01
• Series: Yod
• Subjects: survivors; second generation; Yiddish; Night after Night; Poland a Green Country; literature
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/yod/2141

Several novels by Aharon Appelfeld are set entirely or partly in Palestine or Israel. Their protagonists belong to one of these three categories :1) Young survivors who had escaped from the Nazi massacres, left Europe after the disaster and, with the help of Jewish organizations, immigrated to Palestine. Among these novels : Searing Light, The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping.2) Young survivors who moved to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s and are now living with their memories : inescapable ghosts haunt the survivors. An example may be found in the novel Night after Night.3) Israelis from the second generation, who had expressed ambivalent feelings towards their surviving parents, such as in the novel Poland, a Green Country.In these works, Aharon Appelfeld raises numerous questions which are all related to the sorrowful past of the characters. Among these questions, the acquisition of a new identity and language by the adolescents arriving in a country they did not always choose. The author addresses the weight of the past, the memory, and the forgotten. Through his multiple characters, he confronts the Israeli image to that of the Jew, antagonists for some, intimately connected for others.