Aharon Appelfeld

Aharon Appelfeld (1932–2018) was an Israeli novelist and one of the most important literary chroniclers of the Holocaust. His hundreds of spare, deceptively simple stories — including Badenheim 1939 and Katerina — circle the lives of Jewish families in Central Europe and of survivors rebuilding themselves after catastrophe.

Born in the Bukovina region, he lost his mother in the Holocaust, escaped a camp as a boy and, after wandering Europe, emigrated to what would become Israel in 1946. Appelfeld wrote in his adopted Hebrew while drawing on the German-Jewish world of his childhood, producing fiction admired for its obliqueness, restraint and depth.