Appelfeld, Aharon << AH pehl fehlt, AIR ruhn >> (1932-2018), was a leading Israeli author who wrote in Hebrew. Most of his novels and short stories are rooted in the Holocaust, the systematic, state-sponsored murder of the Jews and others by the Nazis during World War II (1939-1945). With restraint and sensitivity, Appelfeld’s works deal both with the Holocaust and with the emotional and psychological damage it inflicted on its survivors. His fiction does not explicitly describe the Holocaust, but an atmosphere of approaching doom is generally present. His characters typically ignore the warning signs of the Nazi campaign against the Jews and try to lead normal lives.
Appelfeld wrote about the Holocaust from personal experience. In 1940, his mother was killed by the Nazis, and he and his father were sent to a concentration camp, where the two were separated. After a few months, Aharon escaped. He eventually immigrated to Palestine, the region that includes what is now Israel, in 1946.
Appelfeld’s first books were collections of short stories, such as In the Wilderness (1965). He gained international recognition with his short novel Badenheim, 1939 (1979), his first work to be translated into English. The story deals with a group of middle-class Jews at an Austrian resort as the Holocaust approaches.
Appelfeld’s first novel, The Age of Wonders (1978), is about a Jewish family, all of whom perish in the Holocaust except for one son. Tzili: The Story of a Life (1983) describes a young Jewish girl’s experiences during the Holocaust. Appelfeld’s other Holocaust-influenced novels include The Retreat (1984), To the Land of the Cattails (1986), The Immortal Bartfuss (1988), Katerina (1989), For Every Sin (1989), The Iron Tracks (1991), Blooms of Darkness (2006), All Whom I Have Loved (2007), and Adam and Thomas (2015). In Laish (1994), Appelfeld describes a group of Eastern European Jews making a difficult pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping (2010) follows the life of a Jewish man who escaped death during the Holocaust and tries to make a fresh life for himself in the new country of Israel after the end of World War II. Until the Dawn’s Light (2011) portrays the world of Austrian Jews during the early 1900’s. Suddenly, Love (2014) focuses on an elderly Israeli man haunted by his past as a Russian Communist who persecuted Jews during World War II.
Appelfeld also wrote nonfiction. A collection of essays about the Holocaust was published as Beyond Despair: Three Lectures and a Conversation with Philip Roth (1994). He wrote The Story of a Life (1999), an autobiography describing how he survived the Nazi persecution as a youth.
Appelfeld was born on Feb. 16, 1932, in Cernauti, Romania (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine). He graduated from the Hebrew University in 1956 with a degree in literature and taught Hebrew literature at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Appelfeld died on Jan. 4, 2018.
