Death of Aharon Appelfeld, Holocaust survivor and great Israeli writer
Aharon Appelfeld, a survivor of the Holocaust, recognized as one of the greatest Israeli authors, died during the night of January 3 to 4, 2018 at the age of 85.
Aharon Appelfeld was born on 16 February 1932 in Romania, in the village of Jadova, near Czernowicz, to a Jewish family. His mother is murdered by the Nazis in 1940. Aharon and his father are deported to a camp in Transnistria.
In 1942, Aharon manages to escape and then wanders in the forest of Ukraine until the arrival of the Russian army, in 1944. Aharon then goes to work for nine months for the Red Army. He joined Palestine a year later and will meet his father, also a survivor of the Holocaust, in 1957.
Since his first book in 1962, Aharon Appelfeld has published an abundant body of work imbued with the experience of the Shoah but refused to be categorized as a «writer of the Shoah». He had received the Israel prize in 1983 and the Médicis foreign prize in 2004.
On 25 March 2012, the Mémorial de la Shoah received Aharon Appelfeld for the conference "Aharon Appelfeld, fifty years of writing". Find below the video of this conference:
More recently, on March 16, 2017, the Shoah Memorial organized a meeting entitled "Imre Kertész and Aharon Appelfeld: from the first generation of witnesses to the 9th art" as part of the cycle "D'une génération à l'autre: l'écriture des grands témoins". We invite you to watch this conference on video:
During this meeting, Catherine Coquio evokes the way in which Imre Kertész and Aharon Appelfeld, through their very inventive works, take hold of the child as the figure of the witness: a figure that goes beyond autobiography, which is transported into poetic land at Appelfeld’s. A figure of a child who casts an alien gaze on a world delivered to the inhuman.
Arthur Nauzyciel, Marin Karmitz and Valérie Zenatti dialogue on the impact of the works of Imre Kertész and Aharon Appelfeld on their own creations: writing, translation, theatrical and cinematographic productions as well as their relationship to his works.
All our thoughts today go to the loved ones of Aharon Appelfeld.
