A Story to Break Your Heart : KATERINA, <i> By Aharon Appelfeld (Random House: $18; 224 pp.)</i>

Sometimes a novel lets you see something you’ve never seen before, or see it in a way that changes forever how you think, what you know, what you can imagine. It creates its own landscape, its own vision, which then becomes a personal point of reference, a guidebook to future experience: A Proustian moment, a look, a sexual encounter, a geography, a war, can take on its tinge, its resonance, its place in your mind, from a novel. The peasant villages of Eastern Europe, the fatal interplay of Jew and peasant, the tavern, the jail, the railroad station, the raw edges of antisemitism, these are forever shaped in my mind by Aharon Appelfeld’s searing, clear, powerful sentences.

When the subject is the horror of the Holocaust, the beast in the human spirit, the relationship of Gentile and Jew at the cusp of the Shoah, the difficulty in writing is enormous. This is a place where historians and witnesses and survivors and novelists, poets and film makers have gone again and again, all the while saying they cannot speak the unspeakable, nevertheless creating for us a written memorial; Primo Levi, Elie Weisel, Andre Schwarz-Bart, Anne Frank and so on, a long, dark testament. Distinct holiness surrounds the most remarkable of these books. A few are not only acts of witness but also works of art. Those meld excoriating pain with the wonder of language. A clarity of vision emerges that by the mere fact of its creation gives us hope for ourselves. “Katerina” is one of those those novels.

Aharon Appelfeld, the Israeli writer who escaped the Nazis as a child and survived in the interiors of Eastern Europe, has given us eight novels that lean on the Holocaust. He splits the Holocaust open backward, as it were, examining its dawning moments, its roots in the corruptions of soul and society--Jewish and non-Jewish--that afflicted prewar Europe, with its pretense of civilization and its underbelly of violence. “Katerina,” perhaps his most amazing and brilliant novel, is the life story, in her own voice, of a Ruthenian peasant who, fleeing an indifferent father and a bitter childhood, leaves the cherished trees and the meadows of her home and comes to work in the nearest city as a domestic servant for an Orthodox Jewish family.

Katerina starts out sleeping with drunks and thieves in the railroad station. She has a child she gives away to the nuns. She works for Rosa and Benjamin and cares for their two young sons. Gradually she learns the rhythms of the Jewish home, its prayers and its holidays and she finds a peace in the candles and the Hebrew and the Yiddish and the separation of dishes. She mourns when Benjamin is killed by a peasant. She mourns when the same fate overtakes Rosa. She flees to her village with the children until they are taken from her.

In the descriptions of the Jews who come to the village to sell stockings and blouses and are beaten and robbed again and again, we see the rubbing against each other of Jew and Gentile, merchant and farmer, the people of the field against the people of the book. In this peasant life, bitterness and anger rage, Ruthenian nationalism colors an earthy and brutal existence. The Jew represents the alien, the other, the enemy one must avoid. Katerina crosses the highly mined border between Jew and Gentile because of her love for her Jewish family. Once on the other side she can never go back, and from there the tragedy that is her life unfolds while the tragedy that is Jewish life in the Diaspora waits.

Katerina plays in the taverns, drinks too much, loves with a ferocity that reeks of a need for gentleness in a society that has none. She finds a Jewish lover who betrays her. She is alone and defenseless in a vicious world. She cooks and cleans for a secular Jewish pianist, Henni, a woman who hasn’t the stamina for survival: no religion, no community, no inner toughness. Katerina becomes her friend and loses her, too. As the story winds toward its climax, Katerina takes trains and wagons, moving back and forth into the country and out of it, into the town and away.

In Appelfeld’s world, people seem to be on endless journeys in and out of villages, forests, meadows and cities; all are way stations toward a terrible destination. This rootless movement serves both as a foreshadowing of the trains that moved one after another toward the death camps and as a representation of the unsettled, the seething of the world at the edge and over the edge of eruption.

Katerina has a son, by a Jewish father. She insists on circumcising this child and names him Benjamin after her first employer. This circumcision touches us as with an echo of the Akedah (The Binding of Isaac). The Jewish child will be sacrificed in the maelstrom of hate that stifles and kills, aborts and mangles all hope.

Appelfeld examines the prewar Jewish world with an unsentimental eye. His perception is that Jews accepted their fate with too much stoicism, their eyes cast down so far they couldn’t see the end approaching. He sees the failure of the Diaspora Jew to know the land, to love the surrounding beauty, to be strong and aggressive in body as well as mind. He sees the secular Jew as cut off, neurasthenic, unable to survive without religion and unable to assimilate or escape.

Most shocking of all, most damaging to our American, optimistic hope for brotherhood and peace is Appelfeld’s picture of the deep-seated hatred of Jews by the peasants. He describes their greedy consumption of Jewish clothes and goods as the Final Solution begins. It is a stark and gloomy picture, a Zionist vision of prewar Europe:

“In the village, the Jews used to appear at any time and in places you wouldn’t have expected them, near the lake or behind the chapel. The way they dressed made them very conspicuous. People would beat them or run after them, but like the crows, they used to return, in every season the year.

“ ‘Why are they like that?’ I once asked my mother.

“ ‘Don’t you know? They killed Jesus. . . . ‘

“I didn’t ask any more. I was afraid to ask. They filled my dreams and blackened many nights. They always had the same look: thin, swarthy, hopping on birds’ legs, and suddenly rising up.

Read this book. The subject will break your heart. But think how remarkable it is that a Jewish survivor can make you leap into the mind of a peasant woman and bring you to the common disaster, the tragedy that it was from the other side. Think what a gift of lyric language and style, of emotion purified by pain this is. Be happy in the artist and the man who wrote this. Be happy for us all.