Aharon Appelfeld

Aharon Appelfeld says that in order to be a serious writer you need to have a routine. For years his routine has been to write with a Biro on sheets of ordinary white paper in the café at Ticho House, in Jerusalem, which was once the house of a wealthy doctor and where this interview took place.

Appelfeld’s manner, his gestures, and his soft voice recall the vanished provincial Romania of his childhood, where the bourgeoisie retained traces of cosmopolitan Austro-Hungarian culture. The son of a wealthy landowner, he spent his early years speaking German with his parents, Yiddish with his grandparents, Ukrainian with the maid, and Romanian at school.

In 1941, when Appelfeld was nine years old, the Romanian army invaded his home village of Jadova, near Czernowitz. His mother and grandmother were shot. Appelfeld and his father escaped but were soon rounded up and marched, over two months, to the Transnistria concentration camps, where they were separated. Once again Appelfeld escaped. He spent the next two years hiding in the forest, doing odd jobs for a group of prostitutes and thieves. When the Soviet army arrived, in 1944, he joined them as a kitchen boy and eventually made his way, via Italy and Yugoslavia, to Israel. In 1960, he discovered that his father had also survived and come to Israel, and the two were reunited.

The story of Appelfeld’s survival is told in his memoir, The Story of a Life (1999). The war years have also provided material for the majority of his novels, including The Age of Wonders (1978), Tzili (1983), and the book for which he is best known abroad, Badenheim 1939 (1975).

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6324/aharon-appelfeld-the-art-of-fiction-no-224-aharon-appelfeld