The Retreat     by Aharon Appelfeld, Translated by Dalya Bilu Published by Schocken Books Pub. Date: February 1998 Format: Paperback, 164 pages Dimensions: 0.25 x 8.25 x 5.25 in. ISBN: 0805210962 List Price: $13.00, £11.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £11.95 Published by Texas Bookman Pub. Date: March 1996 Format: Paperback ISBN: 0704334879 List Price: $3.98, £3.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £3.95 Buy online from Amazon.com for $3.98 Published by Penguin Books Format: 164 pages Not available for ordering Published by Schoken Not available for ordering Published by NY, Dutton Not available for ordering

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The Retreat of the work’s title could be any number of large mountain resorts in the Austrian Alps, except for two distinctive features: it is peopled exclusively by Jews and — this is the highly original and chilling premise of the book — it has been set up for Jews by a Jew (the brooding Balaban) in order to eradicate the ’hereditary defects’ which Balaban and most of the guests assent to having: the Retreat is there to build good Aryans.

This work of Appelfeld looks at some of the themes of the earlier Badenheim 1939 (also reviewed here), such as Jewish self-alienation and forms of anti-Semitism, but looks at them from a different angle, and picks up on different facets of late 1930s Austria. For example, The Retreat can be read as an oblique commentary on the racist theory of ’Entartung’ (degeneracy), a concept which the Nazis harnessed to justify their separating off or ’concentrating’ the Jews; in this respect, it is significant that the novel is set in 1938, the year after the large Munich exhibition of ’Entartetete Kunst’, where works by Modernist artists from all over Europe were publicly displayed and ridiculed as ’degenerate art’. The desire to eradicate ’hereditary defects’ can be seen, in this light, as a direct response to Nazi theories.

While in Badenheim 1939 we see the ’divide and rule’ logic which sets Austrian Jew against Polish or Russian Jew, one of the focal points of The Retreat is how the racial vilification of the Jews is internalised as Jewish self-hatred, a self-hatred so familiar to all and sundry that the non-Jewish coachman can present as a compliment to the vain actress Lotte Schloss the words: ’But you do not look like a Jewess, my lady’. We forget for a moment that Lotte, like so many other of the ’guests’, ends up at the Retreat because she was fired from her job — precisely for being Jewish.

The model which the guests of the Retreat are encouraged to emulate is that of the ’simple peasant’ whose powerful body and stunted mind incarnate a collective fantasy of wholeness and heartiness. And it is a fantasy which is so powerful that it goes unchallenged by most of the guests. So Lotte nurses her desire for ’tall blond Austrians’, while we find out in a way which seems almost casual, such is Appelfeld’s technique of understatement, that Lotte’s daughter Julia is regularly beaten by her farmer husband, just such a ’tall blond Austrian’.

So the guests of the Retreat benignly set about building themselves up into ’simple peasants’ through a regime of heavy foods, sports and ’non-Jewish’ leisure activities (billiards rather than poker for example). Nevertheless disorder reigns, and the guests are subject to ’disgracefully Jewish arrangements’, as the haughty Jewess Isadora states, that is to say the guests are forever involved in argument and dissent, and quickly reverting, incorrigibly, to their own chaotic ways. Even the founder Balaban’s efforts to reform himself prove fruitless: in his last days, struck down by illness, he loses his acquired perfect German accent and babbles inconsolably about his ancestors in his mother tongue of Yiddish.

So the days pass by and Appelfeld sketches with precision how each character cultivates their own faint dreams over empty days: Lotte prepares the poems of the German lyric poet Rilke for some imagined future performance, the ever-chattering Betty longingly pursues the janitor Robert, Lauffer and Lang argue over their visions of life, the former altogether unimpressed by nature, muscle and tankards of beer, the latter still hoping for transformation (and ’salvation’) through strenuous exercise. For the Retreat is a place where ’everything is different, including the climate’, where time seems frozen in an aimless present, marked only the rhythm of breakfast, lunch and dinner (over which presides a formidable matron who slams the serving hatch on the dot, intent as she is on teaching Jews punctuality). It is an ugly fairytale whose spell is hardly broken.

Yet it is broken. For although never stated in so many words, such is the spareness of Appelfeld’s style, the reader knows that just outside of this hushed, unreal realm on a mountain-top policies of segregation and persecution are preparing the way for extermination, not of character traits or habits, but of lives. In fact this menacing outside world makes itself felt as supplies run out, suicides take place, and the suave Herbert — formerly a leading journalist — returns from the plain at the foot of the mountain where he has been beaten up.

In this short, flowing novel, Appelfeld achieves a compelling portrayal of the terrifyingly good-natured faith of these assimilated Jews: they believe that somehow life will go on and things will get better. The fatal blindness is most poignantly summed up by Lotte who, still resisting the incontrovertible evidence, stares down at the grave of the first suicide victim at the Retreat and murmurs: ’there must be some mistake’.

’"I told him", said Mrs Kron in her old maternal voice, "but he wouldn’t listen to me. He refused to give up his evening run. What sane person goes running in winter, in the frost?" Rauch, his morning running mate, stood wrapped up in his winter coat, silent and erect, looking for some reason like the possessor of vast properties. To tell the truth, it was Betty who was now the centre of attention. She ranted and raved, screaming at the top of her voice. "What am I doing here? Why did I let myself be talked into staying here?" Her outburst was a mixture of words, complaints and ancient fears. Herbert’s pleas were in vain. She was insistent: "What am I doing here?".

"Becoming a human being", said Rauch, raising his voice.

"I’m a woman".

"You’re a jellyfish, not a woman".

"Did you hear what he called me?" Betty interrupted her screaming.

This exchange, for some reason, relieved the tension.

Order, needless to say, was not maintained. The search party descended the hill, holding on to each other and shouting at the tops of their voices: "Lang, Lang, where are you? Give us a sign of life". And a certain satisfaction was felt. Some of them were reminded of scouting camps in the winter season, and some of the First World War.’ p96-7