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Aharon Appelfeld
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Aharon Appelfeld (Hebrew: אהרון אפלפלד) (born February 16, 1932 in Czernowitz, Romania) is an Israeli novelist and poet.
In 1940, after his mother was killed by invading Nazis during the Holocaust, Aharon Appelfeld and his father were forced into a ghetto and later deported to a concentration camp. He escaped and hid in Ukraine for three years before joining the Soviet Army.
After World War II, he went to Italy as a refugee before emigrating to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1946, two years before Israel's independence. He graduated from Hebrew University and is now a professor at Ben Gurion University of the Negev.
Appelfeld is one of the foremost living Hebrew-language authors, even though he did not learn the language until he was a teenager. His mother tongue is German. He lives in Israel but writes little about life there. Most of his work focuses on Jewish life in Europe before and during World War II.
Appelfeld's novels have won critical and popular acclaim. He was awarded Israel's top honor, the Israel Prize, in 1983. Among his better-known works are Badenheim 1939 (ISBN 0-87923-799-6) and The Immortal Bartfuss (ISBN 0-8021-3358-4) which won the National Jewish Book Award for fiction in 1989. Appelfeld's autobiography, The Story of a Life: A Memoir (2003, ISBN 0-8052-4178-7), won France's Prix Médicis. The German city of Dortmund awarded Appelfeld the Nelly Sachs Prize in 2005.
Other novels by Aharon Appelfeld available in English translation are: "The Age of Wonders" (1978, tr. 1981), "Tzili" (1982, tr. 1983), "To the Land of the Cattails" (tr. 1986), "Katerina" (1989, tr. 1992), "Iron Tracks" (1991, tr. 1998), and "The Conversion" (1998, tr. 1999).