Aharon Applefeld’s story of unlikely pairings and redemption

“Whores and Jews are always persecuted,” says one of the characters in Aharon Appelfeld’s Blooms of Darkness” (Schocken: $24.00, 288 pps., translated by Jeffrey M. Green). “There’s nothing to be done.”

That surprising and beguiling linkage turns out to be the key to a child’s survival and a woman’s doom in Appelfeld’s latest novel, which is not only a novel of the Holocaust but also an erotic coming-of-age story and a sharp-eyed account of what ordinary men and women can and will do to save their own lives. Appelfeld, the author of more than 40 books and one of Israel’s (and the world’s) greatest living writers, has produced a masterpiece of history and imagination.

Born in 1932 in Bukovina, Appelfeld himself was sent to a concentration camp at the age of eight but managed to escape and lived in hiding until he joined the Red Army as a cook’s assistant, a fate not unlike the one he assigns to the fictional Hugo Mansfeld in “Blooms of Darkness.”  But young Hugo finds refuge in the unlikeliest of sanctuaries — his mother entrusts him to a childhood friend named Mariana, one of the working women in a brothel whose clientele consists of the same German soldiers who are engaged in daily acts of genocide.

At moments, “Blooms of Darkness” is dreamy and even phantasmagorical as Hugo summons up his lost mother and father, his missing classmates, in a series of dreams and visions. Locked away at night in a closet in the same room where his benefactress receives her customers, Hugo comes to realize that the vague explanations offered to a terrified child by his equally terrified mother — his father has been sent “to labor” and his friend, Otto, has gone “to the mountains” — conceal a terrible truth.

“Take me out of your thoughts,” commands a spectral Otto commands in one of Hugo’s night encounters. “Your thoughts are no longer my thoughts.”

Like the young hero of Jerzy Kosinski’s “The Painted Bird,” another novel about the Holocaust as seen through the eyes of a child, Hugo quickly acquires the skills that he needs to survive in a world of murders and betrayers.  Even the women in the brothel who treat him like a pet or a surrogate son may be willing to sell him out to the soldiers who go house-to-house in search of stray Jews after the ghetto has been emptied.  To win favor with the cook who works at the brothel, an untrustworthy woman named Victoria, he displays a crucifix and offers to kiss it in the desperate hope that she won’t betray him to the Germans.

“We’re groping like blind people,” warns Mariana. “In every corner, there’s a pitfall or trap. Who knows where Satan is dragging us?  He’s a cheat, and he’s cunning.”

Mariana is the glory of the tale Appelfeld tells in “Blooms of Darkness.” She is sometimes flirtatious and even openly seductive — “Wash me the way I wash you,” she tells Hugo, “Mariana needs some pampering” — and sometimes full of brandy and despair.  She is capable of both ardor and anger, and she understands and detests the strange workings of sexual desire. Hugo depends on Mariana for food and shelter, for life itself, and yet he discovers that she depends on him, too. “You’re the only one who understands me,” says Mariana, who calls on the boy to trim her toe-nails, to ration her brandy, and to hear her confessions.

“Hugo can’t grasp all of her feelings, but he sees the trembling of her hands,” writes Appelfeld. “More than anything else, that tremor says, ‘It’s impossible for me to bear all the men who follow one after the other. The time has come to flee, and it doesn’t matter where.’”

Remarkably, Appelfeld manages to infuse his story with suspense, even though we can guess what will befall most, if not quite all, of his characters. After we have seen them as Hugo’s saviors, the fate of the women who survived by selling their bodies to German soldiers comes as a heartbreak, but the author knows from first-hand experience how the Red Army treated collaborators.  I will not disclose exactly how Appelfeld’s remarkable book ends except to say that we realize that he has made us fall in love with Mariana in the same way that Hugo does.

For that reason, “Blooms of Darkness” reminds me of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s masterpiece, “The Slave,” another unlikely love story about a Jewish man and a Christian woman.  Like Singer, Appelfeld is frank about what human beings are capable of doing to themselves and each other, and yet bemused by how we fit into the universe in which we find ourselves.

“Look, dear, at what God created! What beauty. What tranquility,” Mariana says to Hugo as she beholds the view from their hill-top hiding place.  “Only people, the crown of creation, as they say, make a commotion with everything they do.  My grandma used to say, ‘Flesh and blood — today quiet and drowsy, and tomorrow a murderer.’”

“What must I do?” Hugo asks, and Mariana replies: “Don’t fear. Fear debases us.  A debased person isn’t worthy of living. If you’re going to live, then live in freedom. That simple thing was what I didn’t know.”

Here is the lesson that Appelfeld learned during his own struggle for survival, and the words that a Ukrainian whore utters to a Jewish boy explain why “Blooms of Darkness” is, above all, a novel about redemption.

Jonathan Kirsch’s, author of 13 books, is at work on an account of the Jewish anti-Nazi resistance in the 1930s.  He blogs at