Books: Magic Mountain

THE RETREAT

by Aharon Appelfeld

Translated by Dalya Bilu

Dutton; 164 pages; $12.95

In Austria toward the end of the 1930s, Jewishness is a defect; there can be no denying such a truth. But life itself is far from perfect, and there is no reason to despair because of that. Perhaps the fault is correctable, a matter of inflamed nerves, bad habits, insufficient exercise. A few months in clean mountain air should help. Early bedtime, rise at dawn. Plain food. Hard work. Early morning runs. Reform is possible. Anything is possible.

The savior in whom this earnest vision burns is a prosperous Jewish horse trader named Balaban. He buys an old mountaintop hotel, formerly a monastery, near Vienna and issues a prospectus promising horseback riding, swimming, and the painless eradication of embarrassing gestures and ugly accents. And soon the place is filled with aging Jews of both sexes who have become burdens to their assimilated children.

For a year or so everything works as planned, and although some visitors cannot endure the strict regime, others are indeed returned to their homes much strengthened and freed of such Jewish characteristics as smoking, card playing and endless, idle conversation. But Balaban himself, strong and idealistic as he is, weakens under the strain of supporting the project psychologically and financially. He allows himself to be drawn into the eternal argumentation, coffee drinking and poker games. Revealing gestures that he rooted out of his nervous system as a young man begin to reappear. He puts on weight. From time to time he descends to the village, gets drunk, and returns muttering that Jews are liars, cheats and money grubbers. But despite this Gentile blustering, the fact is that he has become one of the weakest and most Jewish of the retreat’s inmates.

What Israeli Novelist Aharon Appelfeld relates in this brief, matter-of-fact story, more parable than novel, is the dissolution of life at the imagined spa. In volume after volume the author has been obsessed with the time of clouded horror just before the Holocaust. Two previous novels, Badenheim 1939 and The Age of Wonders, take place in prewar Austria. Tzili: The Story of a Life is a fictional account partly based on Appelfeld’s escape from a concentration camp at the age of nine and his three years of hiding from the Nazis in the Ukrainian countryside.

In The Retreat there is no mention of Nazis or prophecy of war. Most of the inmates have come to the mountain because their lives have fallen apart: they have lost jobs, perhaps, or were embarrassments to their families. They are uneasy, but not really frightened, and certainly not indignant. No one, including the leader Balaban, thinks of protesting against abuse and prejudice. Other groups have defects too, admits one guest who is stalwartly trying to rid himself of tainted habits by the prescribed self-help routines. “But their defects are healthy. People say that the Austrians are heavy drinkers. Of course they are, but that, if it can be called a defect at all, is a healthy defect … If only the Jews knew how to drink … they would surely be different.”

Things get worse in the mountaintop hostel; the men who descend to the village to buy provisions are beaten up regularly. Yet no one thinks this strange; no one seems to be afflicted by a foreboding of doom. The book ends flatly, without the customary distant rumbling of a world’s end and with no sense of cautionary exhortation by the author. Any such message—that tribalistic savagery is mankind’s eternal, bone-bred evil, perhaps—would be excessive. Appelfeld simply and affectingly bears witness, and in the end, his sole, muted voice is more effective than a choir and louder than a roar.

—By John Skow