Aharon Appelfeld

In 1960, when Appelfeld was twenty-eight years old, he found his father’s name on a Jewish Agency list of immigrants due to arrive from Eastern Europe. He then located him in a refugee camp in Be’er Tuvia, Israel.

He married his wife Judith, an Argentinian immigrant, in 1964. They have three children, Meir, Yitzak, and Batya, and several grandchildren.

He continues to empathize with displaced people and often speaks with Ethiopian and Russian Jewish immigrants residing in the absorption center near his home.

He was born as Ervin Appelfeld on February 16, 1932, in Czernowitz, Romania to Michael and Bunia Appelfeld.

He lived under Soviet occupation, from 1940 to 1941. In 1941 , the Romanian army retook the territory, storming Jewish neighborhoods. He heard a soldier shoot his mother, killing her in their home. He was transported with his father to a concentration camp in the Romanian-occupied region of Transnistria.

He escaped from the concentration camp and hid in the forests for three years, finding refuge among peasants, prostitutes, criminals, and vagrants. In 1944, he became a kitchen boy for the Soviet Army.

After the war ended, he traveled with other children and teenagers to a displaced persons camp in Italy, where he learned French and Italian from Catholic monks.

He immigrated to Palestine in 1946 and served in the Israeli Army from 1948 to 1950.

Although he had no formal schooling since the age of nine, he eventually graduated from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, studying with Max Brod, Martin Buber, and Gershom Scholem.

After graduating from Hebrew University, he taught at high school. He began publishing poetry in 1959, expanding to short stories with his collection, ‘Smoke’, in 1962 and novels with ‘The Skin and the Gown’ in 1971.

He became a literature professor at Ben Gurion University in Beersheba in 1977.

By the late 1970s, he had gained international acclaim as a writer for his examinations of the Holocaust. Yet he prefers to describe himself as a writer of Jewish stories who happens to have grown up during that era.

His first language is German, but he has mastered Yiddish, Ukrainian, Russian, English and Italian. He chooses to write in Modern Hebrew, the language of his adopted country, Israel, even though he did not learn it until he was a teenager.

Appelfeld’s novel ‘Badenheim, 1939’ published in was his first work translated into English. An allegorical satire, the novel crafts a fictional tale of a Jewish resort town in Austria shortly before its citizens are sent to Nazi concentration camps.

In 1999, he published a memoir, ‘The Story of a Life’, detailing his childhood escape from a Ukrainian labor camp, his evasion of capture for the remainder of the war, and his emigration to Palestine.

His 2006 novel ‘Blooms of Darkness’ tells the story of a young Jewish boy sheltered within a brothel in Ukraine during World War II.