Discussion:
Aharon Appelfeld, 85, Romanian-born Holocaust-surviving Israeli novelist
(too old to reply)
That Derek
2018-01-04 19:28:41 UTC
Permalink
https://www.newsday.com/entertainment/books/aharon-appelfeld-israeli-novelist-dies-1.15827027

Entertainment/Books

Aharon Appelfeld dead; Israeli novelist and Holocaust survivor was 85

By The Associated Press

January 4, 2018 1:42 PM

Aharon Appelfeld, an esteemed Israeli novelist and Holocaust survivor who became a leading voice in Holocaust literature, has died. He was 85.

Appelfeld was born in Romania before the rise of the Nazis, lost his mother in the mass murder of Jews during World War II and was only reunited with his father 20 years later.

He later rose to become one of Israel’s most prolific Hebrew-language writers, even though he only learned the language as a teenager.

Appelfeld wrote more than 40 works of fiction and nonfiction that were translated into many languages, including the novel “Badenheim 1939” and a memoir, “The Story of a Life.” Among the awards he received are the Israel Prize, the National Jewish Book Award and the Prix Médicis Étranger. His novel “Blooms of Darkness” was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013.

Acclaimed American-Jewish author Philip Roth called him “a displaced writer of displaced fiction, who has made of displacement and disorientation a subject uniquely his own.”

Appelfeld is survived by his wife and three children. His novel “The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping” will be published in the United States by Schocken on Jan. 31.
l***@yahoo.com
2018-03-14 22:38:36 UTC
Permalink
More info:

He won the 2016 Sydney Taylor Book Award.


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/04/obituaries/aharon-appelfeld-dies.html

Excerpts:

...Mr. Appelfeld’s indirection allowed for an intellectual engagement that won him a strong following that awaited his every novel — and he did not disappoint. He delivered books in Hebrew almost every couple of years, and at least 16 novels were translated into English from 1981 to 2011.

He was a major figure in a constellation of world-class Israeli writers that included Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua and David Grossman. Mr. Roth called him a “displaced writer of displaced fiction who has made of displacement and disorientation a subject uniquely his own.” The critic Eva Hoffman wrote, “In his call to break the concealed silence, he has courageously begun to illuminate regions of the soul usually darkened by secrecy and sorrow.”

Mr. Appelfeld, an elfin, round-face man with what Mr. Roth described as “the playfully thoughtful air of a benign wizard,” was born Feb. 16, 1932, in a town near Czernowitz, in what is now Ukraine but what was then Romania. The family was proudly middle class, speaking the treasured German of the area’s better-off inhabitants and forbidding the earthier Yiddish. They spent summers in spa towns like Badenheim.

“It took years to understand how much my parents had internalized all the evil they attributed to the Jew, and, through them, I did so, too,” he told Mr. Roth. “A hard kernel of revulsion was planted within each of us. The change took place in me when we were uprooted from our house and driven into the ghettos. Then I noticed that all the doors and windows of our non-Jewish neighbors were suddenly shut, and we walked alone in the empty streets.”

Mr. Appelfeld and his father endured a forced march through mud to a labor camp in Ukraine. He escaped the camp and resourcefully spent the next three years as a shepherd working for various peasants and always concealing his Jewish identity, and then joined the Soviet Army as a cook’s helper. It was the kind of anxious vagabond existence that his child characters reprised. When the war was over, he returned to his hometown, which was now devoid of Jews, an experience he captured in “The Age of Wonders.”

After months in a refugee camp in Italy, he made his way in 1946 to what was then the British mandate of Palestine, worked on a kibbutz, studied Hebrew at night and fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

“Naïvely I believed that action would silence my memories, and I would flourish like the natives, free of the Jewish nightmare, but what could I do?” he told Mr. Roth. “The need, you might say the necessity, to be faithful to myself and to my childhood memories made me a distant, contemplative person. My contemplation brought me back to the region where I was born and where my parents’ home stood. That is my spiritual history, and it is from there that I spin the threads.”...


https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/aharon-appelfeld-holocaust-survivor-who-chronicled-its-traumas-dies-at-85/2018/01/04/b26a4e20-f162-11e7-97bf-bba379b809ab_story.html?utm_term=.52b34abde04d
(another obit)

https://www.google.com/search?ei=jp-pWvPYOsbTjwSK1KjgDw&q=aharon+appelfeld+85&oq=aharon+appelfeld+85&gs_l=psy-ab.3...3128.4526.0.4638.4.4.0.0.0.0.101.288.2j1.3.0....0...1.1.64.psy-ab..1.0.0....0.3ccOAXc1bTY
(multiple obits)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aharon_Appelfeld


Lenona.

Loading...