Aharon Appelfeld was a novelist who resided in Israel but wrote little about life there. He focused instead on the world that surrounded his childhood—Jewish life in Europe before, during, and after World War II. Much of this work focuses on the search for a mother figure, which perhaps reflects his losing his own mother at a young age. He was also separated from his father during the Holocaust and only found him twenty years later. Appelfield’s sparse, metaphorical fiction evokes rather than outright describes these tragic events and the horrors of the Holocaust.
Aharon Appelfeld
Israeli, 1932 – 2018
