To read it today is to learn humanity in a time when the world is once again becoming fragile.
Aaron Appelfeld (Hebrew: אהרן אפלפלד) is an outstanding Israeli writer, one of the most subtle, original, and sensitive authors who have dedicated their work to the memory of the Holocaust.
He was born on February 16, 1932 in the village of Stara Zhadova, Chernivtsi region (then the Kingdom of Romania) into a wealthy family of assimilated Bukovina Jews, Michael and Bonnie Appelfeld. Therefore, Aaron’s first languages (name at birth Erwin) were German and Yiddish, which he learned from his grandmother. In 1941, when the boy was nine years old, the Romanian army, as an accomplice of Nazi Germany, returned after a year of Soviet occupation. The future writer experienced all the horrors of the Holocaust – his mother was shot before his eyes, he and his father ended up in the Chernivtsi ghetto, and was deported to a concentration camp in Transnistria, from where he managed to escape. However, he lost his father*. After three years of hiding and the hardships of the German-Romanian occupation, the teenager ended up in the Red Army. He served as a cook. After the end of World War II, Appelfeld spent several months in a displaced persons camp in Italy before immigrating to Palestine in 1946.
In Israel, the native of Bukovina compensated for his lack of formal education** by learning Hebrew. After serving in the army, he studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem at the Faculty of Yiddish and Yiddish Literature. However, it was mastering Hebrew that gave him the impetus to begin his creative work. Thus, Aaron Appelfeld became a writer who learned to remain silent in Hebrew about what was screaming within him in German, Ukrainian, and Yiddish. Since the themes of his work revolved around the Holocaust, he could not bring himself to write in German. His debut novel Smoke (1962) exposed the pain of immigrants building a new life on the ruins of the past. Badenheim, 1939 subtly hints at the approaching Holocaust, and To All I Have Loved shows the tragedy through the eyes of a child.
Appelfeld wrote about memory and trauma, proving that there is no future without the past. His prose teaches us to listen to silence and appreciate fortitude. The winner of the Israel Prize, the country’s highest award, and many other international and Israeli prizes and awards, he wrote and published over 40 books that have been translated into over 30 languages. Three of Aaron Appelfeld’s books, in which the writer tells about the terrible times of his childhood, have been translated into Ukrainian: “Katerina” (translators – V. Radutsky, I. Bilyk), “Pages of My Life” (V. Radutsky, P. Rykhlo) and “Flowers of Darkness” (V. Radutsky, O. Penderecka). When “Katerina” was published in Ukrainian in 1995, Appelfeld said: “I returned to Ukraine!” In 1998, his return took place physically – he visited his native land, in the Bukovina village of Stara Zhadova, where he was born.
The quintessence of all the writer's tender, poignant feelings for his homeland is formulated in the “Word to the Ukrainian Reader,” which opens the translation of his book “Katerina”: “…But, perhaps, even more often than before those years of wandering, full of childish suffering and mortal danger, my soul plunges into other memories: my parents' home in Chernivtsi and the Ukrainian woman, my nurse. No, there was not just one woman, there were several of them during the years of my childhood, but they were all distinguished by kindness, care and sincere affection. I loved them all equally, and their faces, voices and actions strangely merged for me into a single image, which became Kateryna in my story.
… Thanks to these women, the Ukrainian village entered my life and consciousness for the first time and forever. Thanks to them, the Ukrainian language entered my soul - I learned it from them, as they learned Yiddish from me. Later, during the terrible war years, when I had to hide my origin, the Ukrainian language, which I spoke in a boyishly perfect and lively way, became a kind of shield for me, so I have the right to say that it was they, those women, who saved my life, covering me with the invisible wing of their maternal love…”
The last years of his life, Aaron Appelfeld lived in Mevaseret Zion and taught literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. The great writer died on January 4, 2018.
Dilfuza Hlushchenko
* In 1960, Aaron was reunited with his father after finding his name on a Jewish Agency list. Both believed the other had been killed in the Holocaust and had come to Israel on separate routes. The reunion was so moving that Appelfeld was never able to write about it.
** Appelfeld's native language was German, he was also fluent in Yiddish, Ukrainian, Romanian, Russian, English and Italian, but he could practically not write in any of them.