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More than any other novelist, Aharon Appelfeld brought the Holocaust and its impact on survivors to the forefront of Israeli literature. A contemporary Hebrew writer, Appelfeld is himself a survivor, and the Holocaust is a theme he has returned to repeatedly in his writing. In the early years of the Jewish state, when many Israelis were channeling their energy into forging a new society and looked on the Jewish past in the Diaspora as a shameful history of vulnerability and victimization, Appelfeld insistently voiced the experience of Jews who, like himself, personally faced Nazi persecution. Drawing on his own background and his childhood in Central Europe, he explored questions of Jewish identity and transformation. He focused especially on those assimilated Jews who were immersed in German culture and who, because they considered themselves wholly integrated into European culture, did not foresee the coming catastrophe. For much of his career Appelfeld has pursued an art of understatement and minimalism, avoiding direct reference to the most chilling horrors.
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