Verweile doch

1. Aharon Appelfeld

In late 1996, Aharon Appelfeld and I travelled together to Lewes for the meeting commemorating the mother of our mutual friend Gabriel Josipovici. She, Sacha Rabinovitch (1910–1996), wrote and published poetry in English, her third or fourth language. She was also a translator of Clarice Lispector. Aharon Appelfeld, born in Czernowitz and one of the great Hebrew novelists of our or any age, wrote his books in his third or fourth language. On the train, I told him about or reminded him of my Parisian friend Piotr Rawicz, who was from L’viv, 200 miles south east of Czernowitz, passing through my ancestral town Ivano-Frankivsk.

Rawicz survived Auschwitz and later wrote his only novel, that masterpiece Blood from the Sky, in French, his fifth or was it sixth language. That’s nothing, said Aharon, where he and I come from even the peasants speak six languages. Ah, I replied, but they don’t write novels, even in their first language, let alone a masterpiece. Aharon conceded the point with his familiar world-weary smile. The previous time I had seen him was about a year earlier when he took me to lunch at Anna Ticho House, the loveliest museum in Jerusalem: chicken soup followed by apple strudel. Of course.

2. Joseph Rudolf

During his Austro-Hungarian army service at the end of the nineteenth century, my paternal grandfather, Joseph Rudolf, rose to the rank of sergeant in an Ulan, a cavalry regiment. His colonel was Herz Herzog alt Altbrecht von Wissenbach. Joseph lived in various places in East Galicia ...