Aharon Appelfeld (1932–2018)

Aharon Appelfeld, né Ervin Appelfeld, was born to a Jewish family in Cernăuți, Bukovina, then Romania (present-day Chernivtsi, Ukraine). In 1941, when he was eight years old, Nazi troops captured the town after a year of Soviet annexation, and his mother and grandmother were murdered. He and his father were deported to a forced labor camp in Ukraine. Appelfeld escaped and spent the next three years roaming the forests, occasionally working for shepherds and peasants and always concealing his Jewish identity. In 1944, he joined the Soviet Army as a cook's helper in field kitchens. After World War II, he spent months in a refugee camp in Italy before making his way alone, at age 14, to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1946. He worked on a kibbutz, fought in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, and studied with Max Brod, Martin Buber, and Gershom Scholem at Hebrew University. He was finally reunited with his father in 1960. Appelfeld became a writer and the Holocaust in Europe was the main subject of his more than 40 books. He was one of the foremost Hebrew language authors despite the fact that he did not learn the language until he was a teenager. His mother tongue was German, and he was also proficient in Yiddish, Ukrainian, Romanian, Russian, English, and Italian. His debut novel, The Skin and the Gown, was published in 1971. Among his other works were Badenheim 1939 (1979), The Age of Wonders (1978), Until the Dawn's Light (1995), and several collections of short stories. His work received international critical and popular acclaim, and he was awarded the Israel Prize for literature and the Bialik Prize for literature among many other honors. His autobiography, The Story of a Life: A Memoir, won the Prix Médicis in France. He taught Hebrew literature for many years at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba.