Aharon Appelfeld, The Retreat. Dalya Bilu, translator. Quartett Encounters, 1984.
I recently read Appelfeld’s For Every Sin, which takes place after the liberation of the camps. Like Badenheim 1938, The Retreat is set before deportations began. For Every Sin focuses on a single character, Theo; likewise, the main character of The Retreat is Lotte Schloss. Theo is trying to piece together his identity–his humanity, really–after the trauma of surviving three years in the camps. Lotte and the other inhabitants of a mountain retreat struggle with Jewish identity, which they have worn lightly or hardly acknowledged but has become a trap in the present moment of the novel.
The novel begins with Lotte’s daughter, Julia, taking her mother to a Jewish spa hotel in the Austrian mountains for a period of rest and recovery: think of Hans Castorp from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain but without the tuberculosis. Lotte is an actress who was let go by a regional theater troupe and has not been able to find any other work, theatrical or otherwise. She is well-educated (humanities), independent, extroverted, eccentric, and a divorcé. She identifies as an actress but doesn’t self-identify as Jewish. She has sought help from friends and family but has been rebuffed, including by her daughter’s husband. There is friction between mother and daughter, but the daughter is concerned enough to find her mother this hideaway of last resort. In the coach to the retreat, the driver tells the mother she does not look Jewish, while the mother thinks her daughter looks too Jewish, which alarms her. As anti-semitism peaked before the war, Jews lost their jobs, businesses, and property as they did their best to assimilate or erase traces of their Jewishness. Julia, the daughter, has married a nice, bland non-Jewish, Austrian farmer and started a family.
The retreat is called the Institute of Advanced Studies, and it reminds Lotte of the seedy hotels where her family vacationed when she was a child and where she spent too much time in her peripatetic theater career, but it is less a hotel or school than it is a sanitarium. The retreat is full of people at the end of their tether, who have no place else to turn. Lotte meet a violinist, who has lost his orchestral job and says that he is there on a grant to improve his playing and his strength, not admitting to the reality that he lost his job because he’s Jewish. Another complains that he cannot administer his business in the local village while he lives at the retreat, but he does not admit that his business is in ruins because the locals stopped paying him and creditors hounded him. Like Lotte, others at the retreat hesitantly and awkwardly identify as Jewish, not simply because of the looming threat of anti-semitism but because their lives did not revolve around their Jewishness.
In For Every Sin, as Theo walks he remembers the past (his childhood, mother, and father) which he uses to reconstitute his identity. In The Retreat, Lotte walks in the abundant nature around the sanitarium, and she, too, thinks about her past, but only as a way to understand how she has ended up so isolated. She had a bibliophile father whose wife hated him because he spent too much money on books and could not satisfy her wanderlust and need for nice vacations. The mother loved Lotte and supported her eccentricities, education, theater career ambitions, a pregnancy and abortion. She supported her daughter’s independence. Lotte graduated from the theater academy after her mother dies but gets only minor, poorly paid roles in theater productions. She marries Manfred, a boring man (not cultured, creative) and gives birth to her daughter, Julia, whom the father takes cares of, so Lotte can pursue her career. She separates from Manfred because he is boring, and her career fizzles, so she goes to stay with her daughter, who has married a boring middle class Austrian who finds his mother-in-law too independent and, thus, offensive. Lotte burns through family and friends–or perhaps the hostile, paternalistic anti-semitic country burns through Lotte–and she ends up at the sanatorium. Whereas Theo begins to build an identity after the liberation of the camps, in the lead up to the horrors of WWII all that Lotte can do in her walks in the woods is come to grips with her own emptiness. Timing is everything.
The retreat was created by Balaban, a wealthy Jewish farmer and businessman, as a rehabilitation center for fellow Jews who are down on their luck; Balaban would provide them with a healthy life. The sanitarium is really a reeducation camp, a way of remaking the inmates and erasing their Jewishness, physical, professional, and spiritual. They would transform themselves from what is perceived as “useless” or parasitic professions, like actress or shopkeeper, to become upright laborers who might, for example, work hard on a farm. But such education and exercise are too late, because, with just a few exceptions, all the inmates have been abandoned. There is no one and nowhere for them to return to once they are rehabilitated. The reason for the sanitarium was to bring the patients back to health, cure them of their weaknesses––through exercise, nature, elocution lessons, etc.--which would allow them to return rehabilitated to the plains (the non-Jewish world). Instead, the residents just sit around and play poker..Just as they have been abandoned, there is no better symbol than poker for how they have capitulated and abandoned themselves to whatever fate is coming their way.
Eventually, everything falls apart. The villagers turn against Balaban and ruin him. The most posh of the inmates, Isadora, commit suicide, leaving instructions that she be given no Jewish rites, that her family notified not be notified, and that she be buried in the forest. The retreat afforded her no hope, and nether does the larger world. Even the hopeful and robust of the residents, Lang, who maintains a health regimen long after everyone else has given up and taken up poker, he is found drunk in the mud in village, having given in to despair. Balaban gets sick and eventually dies, and residents are left to shift for themselves. The residents have to sell their clothing and other possessions in the village to buy food, but those who go into the village are beaten, so even that minimal commerce ends. After a year, Lotte’s daughter Julia visits but only to leave a few things (jam, etc.) and then departs. Lotte’s attempts to initiate discussion fail, because Julia just wants to leave. It is af is she knows that her mother and everyone else at the sanitarium are doomed, which they are.
Appelfeld ends the novel before the residents are rounded up and deported, but he doesn’t need to do more than leave us with the overwhelming hopelessness of the retreat. As effective as The Retreat is, I think that For Every Sin is the better realized work, because in the latter Appelfeld develops a much more focused and through character study of Theo than he does of Lotte in The Retreat. After being set up as the main character,, Lotte is often sidelined for the sake of other characters, whose arcs are not as well developed. As a result, when the focus returns to Lotte in the end, it lacks punch, and the horrific loss that it foretells seems duller than Theo’s collapse at the end of For Every Sin.