Appelfeld takes readers to the ‘Edge of Sorrow’ in WW II story

“We have a great mission at this hour, to rescue the Jews from the talons of the foe and ourselves from despair,” announces Kamil, the wise, determined commander of a band of four dozen Jewish resistance fighters.



The end of the Second World War is nigh. Having escaped from a nearby ghetto, the diverse crew hides in a Ukrainian forest, doing all they can to sabotage the Nazi war effort and rescue Jews from trains en route to the concentration camps. It’s not only the threat of German soldiers that looms over them. There’s also rampant hunger, disease and cold – and their own gnawing sense of grief and despair. Their solution? To find whatever wisdom, whatever shred of hope there is, in the books of faith and philosophy that they manage to salvage from abandoned Jewish homes.



With “To the Edge of Sorrow,” the late Israeli author and Holocaust survivor Aharon Appelfeld has produced a spellbinding novel, a kind of Jewish, World War II-era answer to “All Quiet on the Western Front.” First published in 2012 in Hebrew, it has been masterfully translated by Stuart Schoffman into English.



The story is told by Edmund, a 17-year-old fighter, whose brushes with death and sacrifice quickly strip him of his youthful naïveté. Through difficult raids for food and supplies, Edmund is propelled by his memories of his parents and girlfriend back home – and the shame he feels for leaving them behind.



At first, Edmund is almost invisible in his own narration. He recounts their endless raids and travails, not to boast or complain, but to illuminate possible paths away from sorrow. Various fighters – each simultaneously human and heroic – arrive at ways to purge their inner demons.



For Kamil, the revered leader, who sees the farthest and hurts the deepest, the guiding light is a mix of self-sacrifice and diligent Jewish study. He sums up his philosophy: “The world is enveloped in deep darkness, and we will do whatever we can to minimize that darkness.” Then, Kamil adds a caveat: “If we do not come out of these forests as complete Jews, we will not have learned a thing.”



There’s Karl, a skilled squad leader and second-generation communist. While Karl is a fearsome anti-fascist, he also resents Judaism and blames it for putting Jews in the ghetto in the first place. In the struggle against fascism, he says, “The human being comes before the Jew.”



Yet, for all their internal disagreements, Edmund sees the resistance to Nazism as a unified effort. At their base camp, young students get along with the elderly storers of memories, weavers with warriors, communists with cooks. Their overall esprit de corps hints at (without promising) the Jewish state to come.



Another Edmund emerges later in the novel, more complicated than the fighter who seeks Jewish wisdom and strives to thwart Nazism. The second Edmund is wistful, nostalgic and wracked with guilt over the son he has been (or failed to be). This Edmund cannot justify how coldly he neglected his parents, the same way Europe neglected its Jews. He laments how he ignored them to spend time with Anastasia, his non-Jewish girlfriend, who never understood or respected his Jewish ways.



Edmund wasn’t alone in his obliviousness. “No one imagined what lay in wait for us at every turn,” he remarks, a sentiment that echoes an older novel of Appelfeld’s, “Badenheim 1939.” Says Edmund: “Everyone was certain in his opinion, but no one, apart from a few pessimists, saw what was obvious.”



Indeed, this is a book of conflicting certainties. Appelfeld suggests everyone must accept the present on its own terms, with no conception of a future. His characters live in darkness, without hindsight, without knowing how history will play out. Yet, through Appelfeld’s piercing narrative, we see occasional cracks of historical light creeping in.



“To the Edge of Sorrow” develops slowly, like a fugue. The narrative seems simple, repetitive, at first, as though you are being assaulted with its themes: the bromide of faith, Nazism’s horrors, triumph through solidarity. And then, somewhere, amid the dreamlike repetition, Appelfeld sells you on his vision, his story and his prose. You, too, are taken to sorrow’s edge and across it.