Aharon Appelfeld
Aharon Appelfeld (Hebrew: אהרן אפלפלד; born Ervin Appelfeld, February 16, 1932) is an Israeli novelist.
Biography
Ervin Appelfeld was born in Jadova Commune, Storojineţ County, in the Bukovina region of the Kingdom of Romania, now Ukraine. In 1941, when he was eight years old, the Romanian Army retook his hometown after a year of Soviet occupation and his mother was murdered. Appelfeld was deported with his father to a Nazi concentration camp in Romanian-controlled Transnistria. He escaped and hid for three years before joining the Soviet army as a cook. After World War II, Appelfeld spent several months in a displaced persons camp in Italy before immigrating to Palestine in 1946, two years before Israel's independence. He was reunited with his father after finding his name on a Jewish Agency list. The father had been sent to a ma'abara (refugee camp) in Be'er Tuvia. The reunion was so emotional that Appelfeld has never been able to write about it.
In Israel, Appelfeld made up for his lack of formal schooling and learned Hebrew, the language in which he began to write. His first literary efforts were short stories, but gradually he progressed to novels. He completed his studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Today, Appelfeld lives in Mevaseret Zion and teaches literature at Ben Gurion University of the Negev.
