Language and Silences in two of Aharon Appelfeld’s Coming-of-age Tales

Abstract

Hugo, the eleven year old protagonist of Appelfeld’s novel Blooms of Darkness (first published in Hebrew in 2006) ‘likes to listen to words’, their sounds often evokes an image in his mind. When the Nazis begin to liquidate the Ghetto, his mother smuggles him out, and leaves him at the care of her childhood friend, Mariana, a Ukrainian prostitute. When his mother turns to leave and kisses him for the last time, Hugo cannot pronounce the word ‘mother’. Language is suppressed, and with it, all of Hugo’s memories of pre-war years and of his parents. It is replaced by silences, and a new functional lexis. “Now it isn’t words that speak to him, but silence,” Appelfeld writes. “This is a difficult language, but as soon as one adopts it, no other language will ever be as effective.” In a much earlier short story, ‘Kitty’ (first published in Hebrew in the collection In the Fertile Valley, 1963), Appelfeld introduces his readers to a young Jewish girl who is hiding from the Nazis in a convent. Kitty is about the same age as Hugo, and she too is surrounded by silence and her muteness allows her to create a parallel reality. In this paper I will look closely on language, silence and the inability to use language as they are linked with the coming of age of Appelfeld’s young protagonists who find themselves in the most unspeakable reality.