Aharon Appelfeld was born near Czernowitz, Bucovina in 1932. The war broke out when he was seven and his mother was murdered shortly afterwards. He and his father were forced to go on a death march to the Ukrainian labor camp Transnistria. Following a successful escape he lived in hiding in the woods and then joined the Soviet troops as a scullion in 1944. In 1946 he arrived in Palestine – via Romania, Yugoslavia and Italy – and there studied philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and also started to write. In 1962 he published his first volume of short stories, and subsequently close to 35 further volumes of prose, mostly novels, have appeared. Appelfeld was Professor of Hebrew Literature at Ben Gurion University in Beersheba until 2001 when he was made Professor Emeritus. He has also been visiting professor at the universities of Boston, Brandeis and Yale as well as visiting scholar at Oxford and Harvard.

In his autobiographical novel »Sippur chajim« (1999; t: The story of life) Appelfeld describes his own loss of speech in the face of persecution and war. Raised with German as a mother tongue and familiar with Yiddish, Ukrainian and Romanian, quiet observation became his way of survival during the war. »For me, speaking was difficult which is no wonder: during the war I didn’t speak. Every disaster seemed to whisper: What is there left to say? Nothing.« In order to counter this linguistic void as well as the radical ideology of the founding of the young state of Israel, Appelfeld wrote his own story in the new language Hebrew, with caution, step by step. Thus, in a laconic flow, images and observations arise in Appelfeld’s work in their naked existence as both amazing and wonderful without any emphasis or meditative embedding within a theoretical context. With his »gloomy Surrealism« Appelfeld encircles the unspeakable: his work mirrors above all the background to and the aftermath of the Holocaust.

The author became internationally known with the story »Badenheim Ir Nofesh« (1979; Eng. »Badenheim 1939«, 1980). It describes the uncanny idyll at an Austrian spa in the year 1939 during which the familiar lifestyle of Jewish guests draws to an unnoticed end, without their fully grasping what is taking place around them. The novel »Messilat barsel« (1992; Eng. »The Iron Tracks«, 1998), meanwhile, depicts the ritualized train journey of a Holocaust survivor who restlessly collects objects from the lost Jewish world. Ultimately, he encounters and shoots his former camp commander but this act can not cure his shattered existence any more than the liberation of the camp. Appelfeld’s most recent novel to appear in German, »Elternland« (2007; OT: »Polin erez jeruka«), tells of a young Israeli’s journey to Poland, the land of his parents, where he experiences an unexpected romance with a Catholic woman farmer and a scarcely concealed atmosphere of anti-Semitism.

Appelfeld’s work, envisioned within the same tradition as that of Imre Kertész and Primo Levi, has been translated into over thirty languages. Among his many distinctions are the Brenner Prize, the Bialik Prize, the Israel Prize, the Prix Médicis Etranger and the Nelly Sachs Prize. The author lives in Jerusalem.

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