The Escape

Aharon Appelfeld was born near Czernowitz, Bukovina (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine). Incarcerated in a concentration camp in Transnistria during the Nazi occupation, he escaped and, separated from his parents, spent the next three years in hiding, until he was liberated by the Red Army. At age fourteen, Appelfeld immigrated to Israel, where he adopted the Hebrew language for his short stories and, later, his novels, memoirs, and plays. Appelfeld established his name in Israeli fiction as a teller of spare and disturbing allegorical tales. He created a gallery of Holocaust survivors whose essential condition was defined by their transience, the poverty of their speech, and their sense of estrangement. Although grounded in his own wartime experiences, these stories were set in a symbolic landscape outside of time. He won numerous prizes, including the Israel Prize, the MLA Commonwealth Award in Literature, and Prix Médicis Étranger in France. Appelfeld was a professor of literature at Ben-Gurion University.