I see myself as a man who is searching for meaning in life. This is rather different from being a staunch believer in something. A believer is someone who senses a consciousness or a direction and believes in it. The one who searches for meaning has not found the direction yet.
A story is not only meaning, it's music as well.
I am not writing in metaphors. I am writing about catastrophes.
A person has to be by himself a little bit. We weren’t born in a flock. Togetherness drives me out of my mind.
The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation.
I had a feeling that my generation-and me, also-we were naked. We did not belong to anything.
The Holocaust is a central event in many people's lives, but it also has become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it. Besides, in Israel, everyone carries a biography deep inside him.
Can art be completely invented? It's a matter of shaping reality with the help of imagination.
My nights are a nightmare, quite often, but the nightmares are rich. I nourish myself by those nights.
People who lose their parents when young are permanently in love with them.
Author details
Aharon Appelfeld: Biography and Life Work
Aharon Appelfeld was a notable Novelist. The story of Aharon Appelfeld began on February 16, 1932 in Jadova, Romania. The legacy of Aharon Appelfeld continues today, following their passing on January 4, 2018 in Petah Tikva, near.
Ervin (Aharon) Appelfeld was born in Jadova Commune, Storojineț County , in the Bukovina region of the Kingdom of Romania , now Ukraine . In an interview with the literary scholar, Nili Gold , in 2011, he remembered his home town in this district, Czernowitz , as "a very beautiful" place, full of schools and with two Latin gymnasiums, where fifty to sixty percent of the population was Jewish. In 1941, when he was nine years old, the Romanian Army retook his hometown after a year of Soviet occupation and his mother was murdered. Appelfeld was deported with his father to a forced labor camp in Romanian -controlled Transnistria . He escaped and hid for three years before joining the Soviet army as a cook. After World War II , Appelfeld spent several months in a displaced persons camp in Italy before immigrating to Palestine in 1946, two years before Israel 's independence. He was reunited with his father after finding his name on a Jewish Agency list in 1960. (Both Appelfeld and his father had presumed the other had been murdered in the Holocaust . They had both made their way separately to Israel after the war.) The father had been sent to a ma'abara (refugee camp) in Be'er Tuvia . The reunion was so emotional that Appelfeld had never been able to write about it.
Philosophical Views and Reflections
In an interview in the Boston Review , Appelfeld explained his choice of Hebrew: "I’m lucky that I’m writing in Hebrew. Hebrew is a very precise language, you have to be very precise—no over-saying. This is because of our Bible tradition. In the Bible tradition you have very small sentences, very concise and autonomic. Every sentence, in itself, has to have its own meaning."
Appelfeld's work was greatly admired by his friend, fellow Jewish novelist Philip Roth , who made the Israeli writer a character in his own novel Operation Shylock .
