“The fowl are in fact our enemy”: Appelfeld's Fowl and Their Source in the Writings of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav

Moshe Goultschin

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

The metamorphosis of Jewish identity portrayed by Aharon Appelfeld in his early stories and essays relates closely to the perspective of Jewish society in a process of assimilating, and in the sea change that the “Holocaust that descended suddenly” forced onto the “depleted Jewish consciousness” that characterized it, as Appelfeld describes it in First Person Essays, (1979): “All of their beliefs were as if overturned in a day. Nothing was left but Jewish bareness” (Appelfeld, 10). Exposed with the appearance of the enemy, the “Jewish bareness” became a founding stone of the new Judaism, “reborn” in response to the rage of the oppressor. It is this central intuition that Appelfeld examines in the story “The Fowl.”. Appelfeld's “The Fowl” is based on one of the lesser known texts of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, which appear together in the book Hayyei Moharan. This story, as portrayed in the essay, symbolizes a decisive shift in consciousness for Rabbi Nahman, a metamorphosis that, as in Appelfeld's story, reveals Jewish bareness symbolized by vultures.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)209-240
Number of pages32
JournalOrbis Litterarum
Volume72
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2017

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons A/S. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Keywords

  • Aharon Appelfeld
  • Holocaust
  • Jewishness
  • Nahman of Bratslav
  • phenomenology

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