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places, the Badenheim Sanitation Department. "It's hard to understand," another Jew answers.
    There's no news from the public realm that might serve as a warning to an Appelfeld victim, nor is the victim's impending doom presented as part of a European catastrophe. The historical focus is supplied by the reader, who understands, as the victims cannot, the magnitude of the enveloping evil. Your reticence as a historian, when combined with the historical perspective of a knowing reader, accounts for the peculiar impact your work has, for the power that emanates from stories that are told through

such modest means. Also, dehistoricizing the events and blurring the background, you probably approximate the disorientation felt by people who were unaware that they were on the brink of a cataclysm.
    It's occurred to me that the perspective of the adults in your fiction resembles in its limitations the viewpoint of a child, who has no historical calendar in which to place unfolding events and no intellectual means of penetrating their meaning. I wonder if your own consciousness as a child at the edge of the Holocaust isn't mirrored in the simplicity with which the imminent horror is perceived in your novels.
    Appelfeld: You're right. In
Badenheim 1939
I completely ignored the historical explanation. I assumed that the historical facts were known to readers and that they would fill in what was missing. You're also correct, it seems to me, in assuming that my description of the Second World War has something in it of a child's vision, but I'm not sure whether the ahistorical quality of
Badenheim 1939
derives from the child's vision that's preserved within me. Historical explanations have been alien to me ever since I became aware of myself as an artist. And the Jewish experience in the Second World War was not "historical." We came into contact with archaic mythical forces, a kind of dark subconscious the meaning of which we did not know, nor do we know it to this day. This world appears to be rational (with trains, departure times, stations, and engineers), but in fact these were journeys of the imagination, lies and ruses, which only deep, irrational drives could have invented. I didn't understand, nor do I yet understand, the motives of the murderers.
    I was a victim, and I try to understand the victim. That is

a broad, complicated expanse of life that I've been trying to deal with for thirty years now. I haven't idealized the victims. I don't think that in
Badenheim 1939
there's any idealization either. By the way, Badenheim is a rather real place, and spas like that were scattered all over Europe, shockingly petit bourgeois and idiotic in their formalities. Even as a child I saw how ridiculous they were.
    It is generally agreed, to this day, that Jews are deft, cunning, and sophisticated creatures, with the wisdom of the world stored up in them. But isn't it fascinating to see how easy it was to fool the Jews? With the simplest, almost childish tricks they were gathered up in ghettos, starved for months, encouraged with false hopes, and finally sent to their deaths by train. That ingenuousness stood before my eyes while I was writing
Badenheim.
In that ingenuousness I found a kind of distillation of humanity. Their blindness and deafness, their obsessive preoccupation with themselves, is an integral part of their ingenuousness. The murderers were practical, and they knew just what they wanted. The ingenuous person is always a shlemazl, a clownish victim of misfortune, never hearing the danger signals in time, getting mixed up, tangled up, and finally falling in the trap. Those weaknesses charmed me. I fell in love with them. The myth that the Jews run the world with their machinations turned out to be somewhat exaggerated.
    Roth: Of all your translated books,
Tzili
depicts the harshest reality and the most extreme suffering. Tzili, the simple child of a poor Jewish family, is left alone when her family flees the Nazi invasion.