Le yiddish : un passé proche et un souvenir éternel dans l’univers d’Aharon Appelfeld

The article takes a look at what we know about the role of languages in the life of Aharon Appelfeld. He heard Yiddish only in his early childhood, as a language spoken by his grandparents, but in Israel, after the war, learning Yiddish appeared to him as an essential step in the appropriation of Hebrew. Yiddish is an integral part of his relationship to some of his masters, like Dov Sadan or Leib Rochman. His choice of Yiddish as the main subject of his academic studies was the first step of a very painful identity process. The main work concerning this language is a novel called Night After Night (2001). It is about a boarding house in Jerusalem in the fifties. The lodgers, who are all survivors of the genocide, set themselves the task of keeping Yiddish alive. The novel is full of human conflicts between myth and reality, between the fantasy of resurrecting the past and the demands of present life. For Appelfeld, the duty of memory is essential, but it does not stand before the duty of life. Appelfeld speaks perfect Yiddish, he even uses it in public when he has the chance, but he only writes in Hebrew. It is a personal identity choice. He transmits the memory of the Yiddish world in Hebrew, and thus defeats oblivion forever.