Aharon Apelfeld

A tale of Europe in the days just before the war. It tells of a small group of Jewish holiday makers in the resort of Badenheim in the Spring of 1939. Hitler's war looms, but Badenheim and its summer residents go about life as normal."

Badenheim Nineteen-thirty-nine

Hidden in a brothel from the Nazis, smitten 11-year-old Hugo is fiercely protected by an increasingly depressed Mariana, who clashes with visiting soldiers and is wrongly accused of being a Nazi collaborator. By the National Jewish Book Award-winning author of The Iron Tracks.

Blooms of Darkness

From the award-winning, internationally acclaimed author ("One of the greatest writers of the age" -The Guardian): a young Holocaust survivor takes his first steps toward creating a new life in the newly established state of Israel. Erwin doesn't remember much about his journey across Europe when the war finally ended because he spent most of it asleep, carried by other survivors as they emerged from their hiding places or were liberated from the camps and made their way to the shores of Naples, where they filled refugee camps and wondered what was to become of them. As he struggles to stay awake, Erwin becomes part of a group of boys being rigorously trained both physically and mentally by an emissary from Palestine for life in their new home. The fog of sleep slowly begins to lift, and when Erwin and his fellow clandestine immigrants are released by British authorities from the detention camp in Atlit, he and his comrades are assigned to a kibbutz, where they learn how to tend to the land and speak their new language. But a part of Erwin desperately clings to the past-to memories of his parents, to his mother tongue, to the Ukrainian city where he was born-and he knows that despite what he is being told, who he was is just as important as who he is now becoming. When he is wounded in an engagement with snipers, Erwin must spend long months recovering from multiple surgeries and trying to regain the use of his legs. As he exercises his body, he exercises his mind as well, copying passages from the Bible in his newly acquired Hebrew and working up the courage to create his own texts in this language both old and new, hoping to succeed as a writer where his beloved, tormented father had failed. With the support of his friends and of other survivors, and with the encouragement of his mother (who visits him in his dreams), Erwin takes his first tentative steps with his crutches-and with his pen. Once again, Aharon Appelfeld mines heartrending personal experience to create dazzling, masterly fiction with a universal resonance.

The Man who Never Stopped Sleeping

The inability to express the horrors of the Holocaust, combined with guilt feelings of the survivors, led to silence. Appelfeld explores the role of art in redeeming pain from darkness, and the conflicting desires to speak out and to keep silent. He forcefully argues that the Jewish people need a spiritual vision. In his conversation with Philip Roth, Appelfeld sheds light on his work and talks with candor about his life, influences, and concerns.

Three Lectures and a Conversation with Philip Roth

Beyond Despair

Set in contemporary Israel, The Immortal Bartfuss is perhaps the most profound and powerful portrait of a Holocaust survivor ever drawn. Using the techniques of omission and indirection perfected in such masterpieces as Badenheim 1939 and To the Land of the Cattails, Appelfeld tells the story of Bartfuss, enigmatically "the immortal" because of his experience in the camps. Now locked in a hopeless marriage, Bartfuss struggles to suppress the emotions and recollections he fears and despises, while trying to keep alive the poise, dignity, and compassion essential to a human being. The Immortal Bartfuss is an overwhelming and unforgettable study of a man reduced to his tragic limits.

The Immortal Bartfuss

"Ernst is a gruff seventy-year-old Red Army veteran from Ukraine who landed, almost by accident, in Israel after World War II. A retired investment advisor, he lives alone (his first wife and baby daughter were killed by the Nazis; he divorced his shrewish second wife several years ago) and spends his time laboring over his unpublished novels. Irena is the unmarried thirty-six-year-old daughter of Holocaust survivors who has been taking care of Ernst since his surgery two years ago; she arrives every morning promptly at eight and leaves every afternoon precisely at three. Quiet and shy, Irena is in awe of Ernst's intellect. And as the months pass, Ernst comes to depend on the gentle young woman who runs his house, listens to him read from his work, and occasionally offers a spirited commentary on it. But Ernst's writing gives him no satisfaction, and he is haunted by his godless, communist past; his health, already poor, begins to deteriorate even more. As he becomes mired in depression, Ernst seems to lose the will to live. But he has reckoned without the devoted Irena. As she becomes an increasingly important part of his life--moving into his home, encouraging him in his work, easing his pain--Ernst not only regains his sense of self but realizes, to his amazement, that Irena is in love with him. And, even more astonishing, he discovers that he is in love with her"--

Suddenly, love

For the first time, the author of eleven internationally acclaimed novels draws upon his own experiences as a Holocaust survivor to tell the story of a man searching postwar Europe for the Nazi who murdered his parents. 20,000 first printing.

The Iron Tracks

Berel Lang

Several prominent writers reflect on the degree to which the atrocities of the Holocaust have affected contemporary writing on the subject. a very extensive and well documented historiographical and literary analysis.

Writing and the Holocaust

Karl, an ambitious young civil servant, plans to convert from Judaism, like most of his friends, in order to remove all obstacles to advancement, but an unexpected crisis forces him to reexamine his decision.

The Conversion

'A Table for One' throws light on an unknown side of Aharon Appelfeld, the internationally acclaimed author of more than 30 works of fiction and non-fiction. It reveals the centrality of Jerusalem, in particular the cafe culture, to his life.

Under the Light of Jerusalem

A Table for One

אהרן אפלפלד

מסות בגוף ראשון

ירושלים : הזיכרון והאור

עוד היום גדול

A hotel in 1930s Austria where Jews are taught to be less Jewish. Founded by a Jew, the hotel features open-air activities to eradicate such Jewish traits as bent backs, melancholia and Jewish nerves. By the author of The Iron Tracks.

Aharon Apelfeld

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