Often, he focuses on the prewar era or on the aftermath of the destruction, rather than the war years themselves. Appelfeld has been at pains to note that he writes not just of the Holocaust, and he resists the label "Holocaust writer." His art, rather, aims to imagine and reconstruct a world that was destroyed, to examine the years that led up to the disaster, and to acknowledge the eternal imprint that the Holocaust left on those who survived.
Appelfeld was born on 16 February 1932 in Jadova, Bukovina, a region of Europe which at that time was governed by Romania, but which was formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and later the Soviet Union and the Ukraine. Appelfeld, whose given name was Erwin, grew up in a German-speaking household of assimilated Jews. He was the only child of Michael Appelfeld and Boniah (Sternberg) Appelfeld. The family was financially comfortable; his father owned a flour mill and sold machinery. While both sets of grandparents were religiously observant, his parents were decidedly secular in their outlook and had distanced themselves from the world of Yiddish-speaking, Hasidic Jews to which the older generation belonged.
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