1. Aharon Appelfeld, The Immortal Bartfuss, trans. Jeffrey M. Green (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 107. The depiction of the money-grubbing, petty Jews in this novel succeeds in undermining the Israeli desire for "positive" heroes without succumbing to the same allegorical reductiveness as Badenheim because in Bartfuss, and in other stories set in contemporary Israel, the Shoah has already occurred and the characters (who often lived through it directly), as well as the author and reader, know about the genocide. Consequently, the Shoah cannot serve as a privileged focus of knowledge by which we can judge the characters and their actions without anyone in the book being aware of the terms and criteria of judgment. In Bartfuss, the Shoah does not function as a guarantor of authoritative judgment precisely because of its availability to and presence in everyone's consciousness.

2. Alan Mintz, Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 227-28.

3. Ibid., 228. A basically optimistic assessment of the ideals and accomplishments of novelists whose work was composed within the "Palmah" ethos is found in Gershon Shaked, The Shadows Within: Essays on Modern Jewish Writers (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1987), 145: "The earliest Hebrew writers in Eretz Israel—the majority of them native-born, or 'sabras'—were the first children of a culture in formation. Born in the 1920s and raised on a Hebrew vernacular and a Hebrew literary tradition, they built upon the foundations for a new society that had been laid by their parents. Most of these young writers identified with the ideals of the parent generation—the pioneering elite of the Labor movement. . . . Not without reason were they called the '1948 generation' or the 'Palmah generation,' after the vanguard brigade of the Jewish armed forces during the 1940s. The 1948 generation was educated to fulfill the pioneer ethos of their parents—most were educated according to a curriculum that broke completely with those that had molded the youth of the heder, the yeshiva, and the gymnasium. . . . This tendency was marked by an increasing dissociation from religious traditions and from the social values of the Diaspora . . . [and was marked by an] acute distaste for the image of the 'Diaspora Jew.'" For a more skeptical, and I think more accurate assessment, see Robert Alter, "A World Awry," in Times Literary Supplement, May 3, 1985, p. 498: "'Normalization,' . . . was once an important plank in the Zionist platform: the Jews, after centuries of deformation in the Diaspora were to become kekhol ha -

      goyim, like all the nations. The Generation of '48 struggled with this ideal and . . . wrote fiction under its aegis. This was above all a fiction about life in peer groups . . . [and] the novelists tended to derive their models of fiction from Hebrew translations of Soviet Socialist realism. . . . Almost all the characters were young, male, native Israelis . . . baffled by their historical predicament rather than by their own neuroses. Fiction was thus imagined out of the center of national life and evinced little interest in anything away from the center."

4. Shaked, Shadows Within, 18.

5. Haim Hazaz, "The Sermon," trans. Ben Halpern, Partisan Review, no. 23 (Winter 1956): 171-87. The lines quoted are from pages 173-75. The story has been reprinted, with a helpful introduction by the editor, in Robert Alter, ed., Modern Hebrew Literature (West Orange, N.J.: Behrman House, 1975), 253-87.

6. Hazaz, "The Sermon," 183. See, however, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi's ingenious but implausibly affirmative reading of "The Sermon": "This story, written in 1942, can be viewed as a proximate and radical response to catastrophe. What is being put forward here is a daring proposal for non-Apocalyptic closure ." Ezrahi, "Considering the Apocalypse: Is the Writing on the Wall Only Graffiti?" in Berel Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988), 145-46. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), 97, quotes from ''The Sermon" to illustrate a somewhat different argument from the one at issue here, but its interpretation of the story is much closer to my reading than to Ezrahi's. For an explicit critique of Yudke's view of Jewish history, see Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 7-8. The larger historical questions that Yudka's speech so simplifies are persuasively analyzed in David Biale's fine study, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History (New York: Schocken, 1986).

7. Gershom Scholem, "With Gershom Scholem: An Interview," in Werner J. Dannhauser, ed. and trans., On Jews and Judaism in Crisis (New York: Schocken, 1976), 40-41.

8. Emil Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History: Reflections in the Age of Auschwitz and a New Jerusalem (New York: Schocken, 1978).

9. Jonathan Boyarin, Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 125.

10. Gershom Scholem, "Israel and the Diaspora," in Dannhauser, ed., On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, 248.

11. Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion: The Burning Ground, 1886-1948 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 539.

12. This sentence is quoted in The New York Times, April 3, 1992, p. A9. The prevalence of such a view cannot, however, be attributed purely to the Israeli right-wing parties. In the Knesset, Menahem Begin liked to point out that Abba Eban, the liberal ambassador to the United Nations (1948-49) and to the United States (1950-59), later a minister of education and culture (1960-63) and foreign minister (1966-74), had also described the pre-1967 borders as "Auschwitz lines." Quoted in Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 393.

It is worth pointing out, however, that increasingly there are encouraging signs suggesting that Israeli political debates are moving beyond a rhetoric of self-justifying ressentiment . For example, during the Knesset debates on how to help the Muslims being slaughtered in the "ethnic cleansing" in the former Yugoslav republics, the memory of the Shoah was regularly invoked, not out of self-interest but as a reason to assist strangers of a different faith and historical/ethnic allegiance. Quoted in The New York Times, August 9, 1992, p. Y11.

13. The text of the letters exchanged between Rabin and Arafat are printed in The New York Times, September 10, 1993, p. A8.

14. I have taken Yaron Ezrahi's description from an article by Thomas Friedman, "The Brave New Middle East," The New York Times, September 10, 1993, pp. A1, A10.

15. On the history of the agonizing debates raised by these questions among Zionist thinkers, see especially, Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948, trans. William Templer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

16. Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 70.

17. Aharon Appelfeld, The Retreat, trans. Dalya Bilu (New York: Penguin, 1985), 62, 74. All further references are to this edition and are to be acknowledged in the body of the text.

18. Segev, Seventh Million, 109. The very term yishuv, as Benjamin Harshav rightly notes, is "a loaded word, meaning 'a stable settlement,' as opposed to the 'Exile' of the 'Wandering Jew.'" Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution, x.

19. Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 212n5.

20. Yael Feldman offers just such an interpretation of Appelfeld's thus far untranslated novel, Michvat Ha'or (Searing Light) published in 1980. According to Feldman, "this whole novel in fact reads like a ferocious parody of the Zionist enterprise of re-education, of the attempt to 'baptize' the survivors as 'new Jews.' . . . At certain moments the distinction between Zionist and Nazi rhetoric is blurred (as in the repetition of the phrase 'Work is good. Work purifies' . . . or in the constant talk about the survivors' deformities and blemishes [ moomim, pegamin ] that need 'correction.')" For Feldman, though, " Searing Light stands alone in his [Appelfeld's] oeuvre," and she adds the fascinating detail that "rumor has it that the author forbade any translation of this work.'' Feldman, "Whose Story Is It Anyway: Ideology and Psychology in the Representation of the Shoah in Israeli Literature," in Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution" (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 232-34. But if my reading of Badenheim 1939 and The Retreat is valid, then the same uncanny parallelism between Zionist and Nazi rhetoric that dominates Searing Light governs Appelfeld's earlier books about prewar European Jewry as well. I suspect that because Searing Light deals with survivors, whereas the characters in Badenheim 1939 and The Retreat presumably will all be murdered in the Shoah, it has been easier for critics to recognize, and for the novelist to acknowledge, the bitterness of the book's perspective on Israeli attitudes. But what is intended as a critique of Zionist contempt in a text set in Israel is actually the only judgment voiced and given implicit authorial sanction in the novels set in the final days of Austro-German Jewish existence. Appelfeld simultaneously accepts (in his "European" novels) and indicts (in his "Israeli" books) a particularly harsh Zionist interpretation of the psychological and moral worthiness of the European Diaspora, and he does so without ever confronting that central contradiction in his thinking. It is as though he has internalized the very attitudes he wants to contest, because he sees them as the only terms by which to understand the culture that perished in the Shoah.

21. Gary Saul Morson, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky's "Diary of a Writer" and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 118.

22. Meir Shalev, The Blue Mountain, trans. Hillel Halkin (New York: Harper and Row, 1991), 226.

23. I say "probably" deliberately because, at his best, Appelfeld is a very canny writer, and his relationship to the rhetoric and ideology of left-Zionism is sufficiently embattled to make it just conceivable that the parallelisms

      I have mentioned also figured in his own awareness while he was writing The Retreat . But if this is so, he has been extremely careful to cover his traces, and none of the reviews that I have read interpret the novel as anything other than a critique of Austro-Jewish self-hatred in the period just before the Shoah.

24. The term "semiotic totalitarian" was coined by Gary Saul Morson in Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in "War and Peace" (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).

25. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), 98.

26. There are too many well-known instances of this phenomenon for me to make any example truly representative. But the American-born painter R. B. Kitaj's First Diasporist Manifesto (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989) can serve as an instructive instance of the most common tendencies. Kitaj, born in 1932, has become increasingly aware of his Jewishness but sees it almost exclusively as defined by the Shoah. Kitaj regards himself as a kind of "survivor" who identifies with "menaced Jewry," and links the alienation of modern artists to the fate of the Jews. Similar identifications, although formulated with more subtlety, have marked some of the most impassioned texts by writers like Susan Sontag and George Steiner. Finally, at the extreme of self-aggrandizement, there is a volume like the Canadian poet Irving Layton's Fortunate Exile (Toronto: McClelland and Stuart, 1987), in which "the Jews' unique and tragic encounter with history" serves largely to validate the author's claims for his own historical importance. I discuss Layton's collection from this perspective in ''Usurpations: A Poetics of Catastrophe and the Language of Jewish History," TriQuarterly, no. 79 (Fall 1990): 207-19.

27. David Evanier, "Invisible Man: The Lynching of Yankel Rosenbaum" New Republic, October 14, 1991, pp. 21-22.

28. Kristallnacht was ably defined by one letter writer to The New York Times, who had witnessed it directly, as the beginning of "the physical and institutional destruction of the Jewish community by the political power of the state." The writer goes on to say that "however ugly were the anti-Semitic slogans and the assaultive behavior of people in the streets [during the Crown Heights riots] . . . one thing that clearly did not take place was a Kristallnacht." Letter by Henry Schwarzschild, New York Times, October 5, 1991, p. A18.

29. Similarly, on October 29, 1992, when seventeen-year-old Lemrick Nelson, Jr., was acquitted of all charges in the murder of Rosenbaum, the Hasidic and black communities were united in the conviction that the whole trial was determined by racist motives. But for the one group, Nelson's initial

      arrest and trial was the result of collusion between a corrupt police force and a suborned city medical examiner's office eager to find a "black sacrificial lamb"; for the second group, the teenager's release was seen as due largely to the jury's anti-Semitism and fear of mob violence. An official report of the Crown Heights episode, commissioned by New York Governor Mario Cuomo and overseen by Richard Girgenti, the state's Director of Criminal Justice, concluded that the entire city administration, including the Mayor David Dinkins, Police Commissioner Lee P. Brown, and top police commanders, were all at fault for not preventing the escalation of violence. The report also blamed Nelson's complete acquittal on inept police procedure in handling the evidence against him, and prejudicial "statements and demeanor" by the presiding judge, New York Supreme Court Justice Edward Rappaport. Racism, the report concluded, was not a major issue in the jury's verdict. New York Times, July 21, 1993, pp. A1, B10.

30. For a history and internal logic of the theme of the victim-turned-oppressor, see Michael André Bernstein, Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

31. A. B. Yehoshua, Between Right and Right, trans. A. Schwartz (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981), 17.

32. For example, an anonymous African American senior at the University of California, Berkeley, told the local campus newspaper that he had participated in the April-May 1992 riots that followed the acquittal of the four Los Angeles police officers in the Rodney King beating case. He "confessed to beating up innocent white bystanders after the King verdict was announced. 'I admit I've beaten up so-called "innocent" white people this weekend—[they've] never owned slaves, but [they're] reaping the benefits of [their] ancestors,' he said. 'I have no guilt,' he added. 'How else can you learn how it feels to have shit done to you just because of the color of your skin?' he asked." Kim Balchios, "Searching for Justice," Daily Californian, May 5, 1992, p. 2.

33. Gush Emunim (The Block of the Faithful) is among the most powerful of the militant orthodox movements dedicated to expanding Israeli settlements throughout the greater territory of Biblical Israel. One of its official slogans is af sha'al (not an inch), which aptly summarizes the group's position on any negotiations involving territorial compromise. Baruch Goldstein's rampage occurred on February 25, 1994, at a mosque in Hebron.

34. Robert Alter, "Deformations of the Holocaust," Commentary, February 1981, 49. Emphasis mine.

35. Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 59.

36. Ibid., 204.

37. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 79. I have included the original Italian phrasing in order to make clear that Levi does not believe that the world of the Lager unmasks fundamental human traits, always present but normally kept hidden beneath a fragile layer of quotidian civility. Levi, Se questo è un uomo, in Opere 1 (Turin: Einaudi, 1987), 88.

38. Sylvia Plath, "Daddy," in The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 223. It is, no doubt, only fair to point out that a different reading of the poem would emphasize its rhetoric as the re-creation of a child's distorted vision—the language of a child who grew up in America during the war and internalized American propaganda images. But such a reading, defended to me most forcefully by my colleague, Alex Zwerdling, still seems to me ultimately unpersuasive.

39. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, ed. Thomas C. Moser (New York: Norton Critical Editions, 1968), 197, 130-31.

40. Ezrahi, "Considering the Apocalypse," 149.

41. Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide, 65.

42. Caryl Emerson, "Bakhtin and Women: A Non-Topic with Immense Publications," an unpublished paper the author generously showed me in manuscript.

43. Michael Frayn, Constructions (London: Wildwood House, 1974), no. 205, no pagination.

44. Michael R. Marrus, "The Use and Misuse of the Holocaust," in Peter Hayes, ed., Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 116.

45. Frayn, Constructions, no. 26.