Aharon Appelfeld’s work is recognized worldwide as among the most profound literature revolving around the Holocaust. His Modernist works do not offer a realistic depiction of the events – instead, they evoke the Holocaust metaphorically without relating to it directly. Appelfeld was born in 1932 near Czernowitz, Romania (now in Ukraine). When he was eight years old, his mother was killed by the Nazis, and he and his father were deported to a concentration camp. Appelfeld escaped and spent three years in hiding in the forests before joining the Soviet Army and eventually finding his way to a displaced persons camp in Italy, and then to Palestine in 1946. He is now one of the last living survivors of the Holocaust

One of the world’s most important and influential writers, Appelfeld has been a candidate for the Nobel Prize. Together with Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua, he was one of the literary pillars who created Israeli Hebrew literature in the aftermath of Israel’s War of Independence, and for this was awarded the Israel Prize in 1983. Appelfeld belongs to the pioneering generation of Israeli writers who created a thriving Hebrew literature that gave voice to the Jewish and Israeli experience in the turbulent years of the early Israeli state. He has published twenty-five novels, novellas, and books of essays and short stories in Hebrew, and his fiction has been translated into over twenty-eight languages. Philip Roth’s interviews of Appelfeld in the New York Times were also published in Beyond Despair. Later, Roth made him a character in one of his novels. Appelfeld received the Brenner Prize, the Bialik Prize (1979), the Prix M!dicis Etranger (2004) and the Nelly Sachs Prize (2005). He has been visiting Professor at Boston, Brandeis and Yale Universities and a visiting Scholar at Oxford and Harvard.