To the Land of the Cattails by Aharon Appelfeld

First published: 1986

Type of work: Allegory

Time of work: 1938-1940

Locale: En route between Austria and Bukovina, a region in the border area between Romania and the Ukraine, now Russia

Principal Characters:

• Toni Strauss, nee Rosenfeld, a Jewish woman returning to her birthplace after a seventeen-year absence
• Rudi Strauss, her son by August Strauss, a Gentile
• Arna, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl who saves Rudi’s life

The Novel

To the Land of the Cattails describes the two-year journey of Toni Strauss and her son Rudi Strauss from Austria to Dratscincz in Bukovina, a region in the border area between Romania and the Ukraine, now Russia. Related by a narrator who reveals Toni’s thoughts, the story of the protagonists’ metamorphoses is told by means of episodic events that occur both before and during the allegorical journey from nationalistic assimilation to strong Jewish self-identification.

Made possible by a legacy willed to Toni by her final lover, an old man, the journey is prompted by Toni’s desire to see her parents, whom she has not seen since she eloped with August Strauss seventeen years earlier, and by her desire to prevent her son from becoming like his callously brutal and abusive father, who divorced Toni after three years of marriage and saw his son only once.

Although Toni has not been an attentive mother because her extraordinary beauty brought her many lovers with whom she has spent her time, Rudi loves her deeply. His education in the Austrian Gymnasium, however, leads Rudi to disparage his mother’s lack of knowledge and encourages him to think like his Austrian peers, whom he resembles in appearance and behavior. Not until his last years at the Gymnasium does Rudi learn that to be a Jew is to be despised. The journey, then, affords mother and son the opportunity to learn more about each other as they discuss Judaism and values, and Rudi discovers that although Toni is a “non-believer,” ironically, she is “ready to die” for her faith.

Each encounter with other travelers, innkeepers, and guests expands Rudi’s perceptions of being Jewish, especially as he notes how differently the common people react to him because of his handsome, tall, Aryan appearance as compared to the way they react toward his mother’s beautiful but stereotypically Jewish appearance. Toni is both pleased and frightened by her son’s Austrian bearing and behavior. When he is strongly self-confident and physically aggressive against those who insult Toni’s Jewishness and when he shows none of the Jewish restraint bred by centuries of anti-Semitism, she is pleased. Yet when he displays other similarly non-Jewish characteristics such as a fascination with horses, gambling, womanizing, drinking, and carousing, she is frightened that she will lose him. Nevertheless, Toni wants her son to be Jewish. As she tells Jews in one inn along their way, “I brought my son here to learn Jewishness—he needs it very badly.”

The journey lasts much longer than the distance warrants and as the pair near Toni’s birthplace, the land of the cattails bordering the river Prut, Toni becomes critically ill with typhus in the town of Buszwyn. In the three months it takes for Toni to recover and for the weather to become suitable for travel, Rudi’s Jewish veneer begins to rub off. He forgets his mother’s condition and makes love to a peasant girl who leaves him after being given an expensive gift: a very valuable bracelet belonging to Toni. Yet the illness appears to have wrought positive changes in Toni. She becomes happy and enjoys being the center of attention and gaiety until spring allows their departure. Whereas Rudi was accustomed to setting tests of values for Toni, Toni begins to set tests for Rudi and “a quiet joy dwelt in her face.” Her composure, self-assurance, and resolve to return are strengthened by her illness. She gains new insight into her purpose and finalizes her determination to return home. All the while, evidence of escalating hatred and violence against Jews surrounds them.

Unexpectedly, as Rudi nears the land of the cattails, physically and mentally he becomes less and less Jewish. Toni fears that bringing her son home with her was a poor idea—that he is not ready for the epiphany:

Deep inside herself she knew he wouldn’t understand. Perhaps it was good that he didn’t understand. The suffering of the Jews was far from glorious. That night the word goy rose up from within her.... Her father would sometimes, though only occasionally, use that word to indicate hopeless obtuseness.

Toni is right. When they are only two hours away from her parents’ home, they stop at an unpleasant inn and remain there for weeks as Rudi drinks himself into stupor daily and finally proclaims: “The Jews are the root of all evil.... I hate the Jews. They are merchants and thieves.”

Finally, Toni leaves her son sleeping, hires a wagon, and goes to her home. After two days, Rudi leaves to find his mother, and as he travels he thinks about the even more militaristic Austrian education he wished he had had, and he longs for the company of a woman. The two-hour journey takes him a full day, and at Dratscincz he learns that all Jews were deported earlier that day to the railroad station. Instead of starting immediately, he goes to sleep and reaches the station the next morning—only to find that the train has already left and that the next station is two hours away. He eats, smokes, and goes to sleep for an hour before leaving, arriving at the next station to see masses of Jews herded together by police. Making only a desultory attempt to find his mother, Rudi watches the train fill with Jews, sure that his mother “could not be among those wretches.” Rudi continues to wander from station to station, getting drunk, hitting and being hit, seeing Jews running away from the stations and furtively dissolving into the forests, but the police and peasants accept him as one of their own.

Finally, one evening Rudi meets thirteen-year-old Arna, a hungry, frightened girl who has been in hiding ever since her family was taken away from the station as she sought water for her mother. They begin to travel together, and Arna tells Rudi about the Jewish way of life, one his mother had not lived. They wander across the countryside, seeing plundered, abandoned Jewish homes. With the onset of winter, Rudi becomes mortally ill and feverish, and they take shelter in an abandoned home. Arna’s innocent, persevering determination to save Rudi is joined by her belief in God, and as the arrival of spring coincides with the end of their meager food supply, Rudi recovers enough for them to leave the cold house and ask for shelter in a common inn.

Demanding to see Rudi’s papers, the innkeeper cannot believe that Rudi is Austrian, and the peasants are suspicious of him and roar with laughter at the pair, in sharp contrast to the former unquestioning acceptance of Rudi’s heritage. Arna’s innocent belief and the cleansing fire of prolonged illness as Rudi “wrestled with the angel of death” have led to Rudi’s physical and spiritual conversion to Judaism. Rudi “lost his former essence. Astonishment filled his soul.” Lengthy travel leads them to a train station where Arna and Rudi eagerly await being picked up and brought together with their people. At last they see it:

It was an old locomotive, drawing two old cars—the local, apparently. It went from station to station, scrupulously gathering up the remainder.

The Characters

There are only three major characters in To the Land of the Cattails, and in most of the book only two are present, Toni and Rudi Strauss. Their characters can best be revealed by relating their changes as the book progresses.

Toni Rosenfeld Strauss represents a character type who, before the pre-Holocaust years, envisioned herself as an Austrian first and a Jew only by a coincidence of birth, which she fully acknowledges but from which she dissociates herself. Although reared by traditionally Jewish parents, she eloped at seventeen with August, a handsome, intelligent, kind-seeming Austrian engineer who “remove[d] his mask” as soon as they reached the city, where he beat her, even though she was pregnant. Divorced by August when she was twenty and had a child, she was too guilty to return to her parents’ home, but because she is beautiful and could attract a series of lovers who gave her money, she was able to survive, even without an education. She has been tormented by memories of her parents for seventeen years and is torn between what she knows she should do for her son and what she does do. Despite her avowals of being a “non-believer,” she sees marked differences between Jews and non-Jews and determines that she must do what is best for her son—make him a Jew by going on a pilgrimage to her family and place of birth.

The allegorical pilgrimage is very dangerous and the goal is elusive, because Toni is not a dedicated pilgrim, as a result of her internal ambivalence about Jews. She sees her people as compassionate, kind, and intelligent, a contrast to the brutality, drunkenness, gaming, and coarseness of the “goyim.” Yet she also sees her people as physically small, weak, and timid, unwilling to stand up for their rights or even their lives, and she magnifies the flaws of a few and applies them to the whole. Therefore, she is proud that her son has Aryan features and can be physically and vocally strong in standing up for his rights while, at the same time, she deplores his father’s heritage of drinking, gambling, womanizing, and disliking Jews. Before Toni can witness her son’s change, she must first change—one purpose of her pilgrimage, although she does not know it.

With each group of people and each instance of increasingly violent anti-Semitism that the travelers encounter, they are tested for commitment, and the narrator records their reactions, almost as if they were being kept on a scoreboard. Toni’s initial delight with her easy acceptance by non-Jews is progressively tempered by her increasing awareness of their deep hostility toward Jews.

When Toni falls ill with typhus and barely recovers, her self-imposed veil of intentional disregard for the seriousness of this hostility appears to be lifted, and she views her position among non-Jews more realistically. She has been tested and has passed; Rudi, however, does not pass the test, because of his coarse behavior during his mother’s illness. With this episode, the role of mother and son are reversed: Instead of Rudi testing his mother, Toni tests her son, as she watches carefully to see how he handles the obstacles that they meet during the pilgrimage.

The next major episode, their experiences at an inn run by a fine Jewish woman—Rosemarie—who had just been killed for no reason other than her Jewishness, is an even more difficult test for Toni. Toni reaches out to help others and feels herself as close to the “lost people” grieving for Rosemarie as if they were her brothers, and she reveals that she has regained the belief she once lacked as she prophetically states that she believes in miracles. Because his mother is praised and respected by others, Rudi gains a new respect for Toni and regrets his “many past years of contempt” for her. Yet he himself does not change; his last thoughts before they leave the inn are a “murky hatred” for a man whom Rudi senses had “lusted for his mother grossly.”

As their trip continues, Toni becomes more fearful of non-Jews. Yet even as she continuously tests Rudi and notes his continuing failures, Toni remains dependent upon her non-Jewish son who, instead of becoming more Jewish as a result of his pilgrimage, looks, acts, smells, and takes his pleasure more in the way of the peasants.

With Toni’s extended stay at an inn two hours from her home, her unrealized pilgrimage for commitment culminates, although she loses the battle for her son. She watches Rudi take on the musculature, eating habits, and the alien peasant redness on the nape of his neck, and she even experiences his brutality as he hits her for asking him to leave the inn. Realizing that Rudi is beyond her help, she uses the strength gained from her pilgrimage, sets out alone for her parents’ home, and disappears into the freight cars of the Holocaust.

Toni’s history and wavering ambiguity up until the very end of her pilgrimage are neither strong nor worthy enough to overcome the heritage that she gave her son when she married August Strauss. She could enable only herself to be reborn into commitment. It falls to the lot of the third major character, Arna, an innocent, naive girl who believes in the God of Israel because of her mother’s teachings and in spite of her father’s denials, to lead Rudi to the Jewishness that Toni believed he so needed.

Ultimately, it is the religious pilgrimage interrupted by her serious illness that restores Toni’s self-worth and Jewish identification. Yet it is the same religious pilgrimage, also interrupted by Rudi’s serious illness, that allows the miracle of the girl, Arna, to effect Rudi’s conversion. Both mother and son are reborn into Judaism, but ironically, it is just this rebirth that leads them, as well as the miracle-giver, Arna, into the Holocaust.

Critical Context

To the Land of the Cattails is representative of Appelfeld’s “hopeful” work, which began with Tor-ha-pela’ot (1978; The Age of Wonders, 1981) and includes Kutonet veha-pasim (1983; Tzili: The Story of a Life, 1983). The hopeful work is characterized by the presence of youth and by the indication that the return to home and to tradition and the finding of the true secrets of Jewishness permit the survival of youth into the post-Holocaust period. An interesting difference between To the Land of the Cattails and the other two noted above is the absence of a post-Holocaust epilogue. Yet Appelfeld leaves the reader with the unmistakable hope that Rudi and Arna, young, vigorous, and secure in their Jewishness, will somehow survive the ensuing Holocaust years and share what they have learned with a future generation. It is almost as if the author, emulating the films of the 1980’s, has left an opening for a sequel.

To the Land of the Cattails also is noteworthy in its stronger echoes of the images and motifs of the earlier novels. Travel, used effectively, but as an incidental motif in earlier novels, becomes a major theme here, pervading the entire novel and leading almost hypnotically to the other grotesque travel image, the Holocaust train. The forest is used not only as a symbol of refuge but also as a signal of the coming of peace and as an interlude of safe haven. Rudi and Arna are epitomes of the abandoned child, and Toni is the lost mother of Appelfeld’s earlier works. The theme of intermarriage, for the first time, is tied to the protagonist in an Appelfeld novel, and the ugly father image is attached to the Gentile male spouse. Although the author is slightly kinder in his portrayal of prewar Jewish society than he is in other works, a somewhat negative portrayal persists. In this novel, Appelfeld upholds his reputation as a chronicler of the Holocaust who studiously avoids its mention while brilliantly forcing the reader to think his own haunted thoughts about that period.

Bibliography

Alter, Robert. “Mother and Son, Lost in a Continent,” in The New York Times Book Review. XCI (November 2, 1986), p. 1.

Coffin, Edna Amir. “Appelfeld’s Exceptional Universe: Harmony out of Chaos,” in Hebrew Studies. XXIV (1983), pp. 85-98.

Lewis, Stephen. “Aharon Appelfeld,” in Art out of Agony, 1984.

Library Journal. Review. CXII (January, 1987), p. 54.

Yudkin, Leon I. “Appelfeld’s Vision of the Past,” in Escape into Siege, 1974.