Aharon Appelfeld — author with roots in the USSR
He was born Ervin Appelfeld in February 1932 at Jadova near Czernowitz, in the Bukovina province of the Kingdom of Romania. The household was prosperous, assimilated and German-speaking; he spoke German with his parents and did so fluently for the rest of his life, Yiddish with his grandparents, and Ukrainian with everyone else. He regarded Czernowitz as a university city. He completed one year of primary school.
In 1940 the Soviet Union annexed northern Bukovina and the family lived a year under Soviet administration. In 1941 the Romanian army retook the region alongside German forces, and his mother and grandmother were murdered. He and his father were deported on foot to a forced labour camp in Romanian-controlled Transnistria - his father carried him for part of the way, though he was nine. In later life he was careful about the terminology and declined to call it a concentration camp.
Father and son were separated there. The boy escaped, and spent roughly three years alive and alone in the countryside of what is now western Ukraine, sheltering in forests, working for farmers in exchange for food, and passing as a Gentile. He later said he had grown used to not speaking. In 1944 the Red Army reached the area and he attached himself to it, working as a cook in its field kitchens until the end of the war.
Afterwards he crossed Europe with other survivors, reached Italy, and sailed for Palestine in 1946, arriving at thirteen or fourteen without family, education or the language. He served two years in the army, and only then resumed the schooling that had stopped after first grade, going on to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
He wrote in Hebrew, which he did not begin to learn until he was a teenager, and about European Jewry rather than Israeli life - the reverse of his contemporaries Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua and David Grossman. His subject was most often the years before the catastrophe rather than the catastrophe itself: assimilated, comfortable, unsuspecting people in the last season of a world about to end. The manner is spare and oblique, and almost nothing is shown directly.
He published some forty books, translated into more than twenty-eight languages, and held the chair of Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He received the Israel Prize in 1983, the Bialik Prize, the Prix Medicis and the National Jewish Book Award, and was a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Philip Roth's long interviews with him were published as a book.
He met his father again twenty years after they were separated, both of them by then in Israel. He died at Petah Tikva in January 2018, aged eighty-five.
"Transnistria labour camp 1941; three years hiding; Red Army field kitchens 1944; Palestine 1946"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Jadova, near Czernowitz (Ukraine)
He survived about three years alone in the countryside of what is now western Ukraine after escaping the Transnistria labour camp, and served as a cook in Red Army field kitchens from 1944. He reached Palestine in 1946 aged thirteen or fourteen, with no family, schooling or Hebrew.
Born Ervin Appelfeld in 1932 at Jadova near Czernowitz, then in Romanian Bukovina, to an assimilated German-speaking Jewish family. Northern Bukovina was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940 and retaken by Romanian and German forces in 1941, when his mother and grandmother were murdered.
Jadova, near Czernowitz (Ukraine). At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.
A career defined by ambition
"I write about the world that was destroyed. I am its last witness."