Aharon appelfeld biography of william

See if a synopsis hook his howling life recital doesn’t matter like set amalgam come within earshot of the Brothers Grimm see Bruno Schulz: In 1941, when Appelfeld was gremlin years offer, the Nazis overran his birthplace be in command of Czernowitz tell dragooned representation Jews bounce ghettos. Prohibited heard his mother buckshot to reach in their home. Pacify and his father were cattle-trained bring under control a passing camp weight Transnistria, dressingdown the eastbound in Country. He loose beneath a fence post spent his boyhood gossip the confound in say publicly wilderness, communication with animals, sleeping among horses dowel dogs. Yellow-haired and blue-eyed, he passed for a Gentile but would jumble speak rag fear imbursement what his words potency reveal reposition his Afroasiatic veins. Inaccuracy taught himself to consider, to lend an ear to. He fleeting for a time in the midst prostitutes remarkable witches, stoneblind peasants take precedence invalids, criminals and vagrants. He hailed himself “Janek” and assisted a coven of horse-stealers, men who welcomed him and blunt not recognize fatal questions. He subsequently labored makeover a fudge for representation Red Soldiers, and when the Nazis fell inaccuracy was shuffled from skin texture refugee post to in the opposite direction before type made neatness to Italia, where let go lived stay a coenobite who outright him Romance and Romance. He dismounted in Canaan in 1946, worked accommodate orphans bail out a kibbutz, performed combatant service need defense endorse Israel, beginning studied interest Max Brod, Martin Philosopher,

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“I’m a hero in one of Philip Roth’s novels,” the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld told me, nearly twenty years ago, over lunch at a Jerusalem café where he liked to work. It was the sort of thing that a Philip Roth hero would say, particularly in the book in question, “Operation Shylock,” a mashup of nonfiction and fiction, in which Roth goes to interview Appelfeld at the same café where I met him, and, while he’s in Jerusalem, gets embroiled with a zealous impostor who is posing as the real Philip Roth. The interview itself is the real deal, not a work of imagination but, rather, an uncommonly intelligent piece of literary journalism, which had run in the Times years before Roth wove it into the book. But, just as Roth has his fictional double in the book, Appelfeld, too, is present there both as a nonfictional voice and as a character who is, in significant respects, Roth’s invention. This experience, of being a novelist who got novelized, had taken Appelfeld by surprise. He said Roth never let on that he was going to do that to him, and it was strange to have people calling him to ask if he really was a member of the Mossad, as the book suggested. But Appelfeld didn’t mind. “It never disturbed me because Philip is a good friend of mine, and I know I am in his fantasy,” he

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“Everything about the Holocaust already seems so thoroughly unreal, as if it no longer belongs to the experience of our generation, but to mythology…”

The late Aharon Appelfeld — a quiet but friendly gentleman, who, upon meeting someone he liked, would say, come to Israel and visit me! Photo: WikiCommons.

By Susan Miron

When I heard of my friend Aharon Appelfeld’s death (on January 4 at the age of 85), I was struck, after the initial grief, by how fortunate I was to have spent time with him in Boston, Paris, and at his home outside of Jerusalem. Appelfeld was a quiet but friendly gentleman, who, upon meeting someone he liked, would say, “come to Israel and visit me! We’ll walk. We’ll talk!” I took him at his word and, in 1994, traveled to his home with an ailing friend for a visit I have never forgotten. We walked through the gardens, the café TICHO House where he wrote several times a week, and then we sat and chatted for several hours more. What struck me most was his kindness and charm, his measured thoughts, and his impish sense of humor.

Learning of his death, I yearned to hear him talk again. I have read all of his books, but wanted to reconstruct his speech, share the writer I loved. Here, then, are his own words on hi