A short life of the author
Aharon Appelfeld (1932–2018) was born on 16 February 1932 in Czernowitz, Bukovina (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine), into an assimilated German-speaking Jewish family. At the age of eight, he was deported with his family. His mother was killed. He escaped from a camp, survived alone in the forests of Ukraine for three years, and eventually made his way to Palestine. He wrote in Hebrew — a language he learned as an adult.
Life and Career
Appelfeld’s fiction is distinguished by what it does not depict. He almost never writes about the camps themselves. Instead, he writes about the world before — the comfortable, assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie of Central Europe, unaware of what is coming — and the world after — survivors who cannot articulate what happened to them.
Badenheim 1939 (1978) — about Jewish vacationers at an Austrian resort who gradually realise they are being prepared for deportation — is a masterpiece of sustained irony and terror. The novel’s calm, lyrical surface — its descriptions of summer weather and spa entertainments — makes the approaching catastrophe all the more devastating.
The Age of Wonders (1978), Tzili (1983), and To the Land of the Cattails (1986) are among his finest novels. The Story of a Life (1999) — a fragmentary memoir — is the most direct account of his wartime experience.
Major Works and Themes
Appelfeld wrote about the destruction of European Jewish culture — about the blindness of assimilation, the failure of European civilisation to protect its Jewish citizens, and the impossibility of recovering what was lost. His prose is deliberately simple — almost childlike — which gives it an eerie power.
Key Works
- Badenheim 1939 (1978)
- The Age of Wonders (1978)
- Tzili (1983)
- The Story of a Life (1999)
Collecting Appelfeld
Hebrew first editions (Keter, Am Oved, Hakibbutz Hameuchad) are the primary collected form. English translations — Badenheim 1939 (1980, David R. Godine) — bring $20–$60. Appelfeld signed at Israeli literary events. He died in 2018.