Aharon Appelfeld (b. February 16, 1932 in Czernowitz, Romania) is an Israeli novelist and poet.

Biography

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. After his father's death, 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.

Writing

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 being German. Even though he has lived most of his life there, he writes very little about Israel, instead concentrating most of his writing on Jewish life in Europe before and during World War II. He has received critical and popular acclaim for his novels and poetry and has been awarded the Israel Prize. Among his better-known novels are Badenheim 1939 (ISBN 0879237996) and The Immortal Bartfuss (ISBN 0802133584) which won the National Jewish Book Award for fiction in 1989. In 2003, Appelfeld published an autobiography titled (ISBN 0805241787) which won France's Prix Médicis.

Reference

• Jewish Virtual Library biography