Death of Aharon Appelfeld, survivor of the Holocaust and great Israeli writer
Aharon Appelfeld, a survivor of the Holocaust and recognized as one of the greatest Israeli authors, died on the night of 3 to 4 January 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 was murdered by the Nazis in 1940. Aharon and his father were deported to a camp in Transnistria.
In 1942, Aharon manages to escape and wanders in the forest of Ukraine until the arrival of the Russian army in 1944. Aharon then went to work for the Red Army for nine months. He joined Palestine a year later and was reunited with 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.
The Shoah Memorial received, on 25 March 2012, Aharon Appelfeld at the colloquium "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, seize on the child as a figure of the witness: a figure that goes beyond autobiography, which is transported into poetic country by Appelfeld. A figure of a child who looks like a foreigner at a world delivered to the inhuman.
Arthur Nauzyciel, Marin Karmitz and Valérie Zenatti discuss 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.
