This article is taken from PN Review 282, Volume 51 Number 4, March - April 2025.

Aharon Appelfeld
‘Writing on the edge of existence’: Aharon Appelfeld (1932–2018)

David Herman
Aharon Appelfeld, Badenheim 1939, Katerina, The Story of a Life (Penguin Modern Classics)

In an interview in the Jewish Quarterly in 1984 Bryan Cheyette asked the Jewish writer Clive Sinclair about the Israeli and Eastern European writers he admired. Sinclair replied, ‘One envies the writing yet, at the same time, you don’t envy the history that has created that writing. These are writers who are […] writing on the edge of existence.’

There is no one this is more true of than the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld. Appelfeld died in January 2018, aged eighty-five. There was an immediate response in America and in Israel. Serious, thoughtful pieces, as well as obituaries. Here, not so much, though, of course, there were notable exceptions. Why not? Appelfeld was one of the great modern Jewish writers. Where were the British obituaries and tributes?

It is in part a problem bound up with Appelfeld’s relation with Israel. There are two kinds of great Israeli writers, those born in Israel like A.B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz and David Grossman, and those born in Central and Eastern Europe: Hayim Nahman Bialik, born in the Russian Pale, S.Y. Agnon, born in Galicia, Benjamin Tammuz, born in Kharkov, now in Ukraine, Yehuda Amichai, born in Würzburg in Bavaria, Dan Pages, born in Czernowitz, and Appelfeld, born in Bukovina. Yehoshua once said that although Appelfeld lived in Israel for most of his life, he could not be characterized as an Israeli writer, because he did not write about Israel. Writing in a tribute to Appelfeld ...
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