Böcker av Aharon Appelfeld

Aharon Appelfeld was the beloved only child of middle-class Jewish parents living in what is now Ukraine at the outbreak of World War Two. Their peaceful life is upended when soldiers invade their town. His mother is shot dead in her own garden. The then-seven-year-old Aharon does not witness her murder, but he does hear her scream.Aharon and his father are sent to a concentration camp and separated. Memory and trauma combine to create a patchwork of reminiscences. Aharon is ten years old when he escapes from the camp into the forests of Ukraine, and is overwhelmed by the sight of an apple tree laden with fruit.Living off the land for two years before making the long journey south to Italy and eventually Israel and freedom, Appelfeld finally found a home in which he could make a life for himself, eventually becoming one of Israel¿s most acclaimed writers. This is the extraordinary and painful memoir of his childhood and youth and a compelling account of a boy coming of age in a hostile world.

The teenage Katerina flees her abusive home in a poor, Christian village in the 1880s, finding work and shelter in the home of a Jewish family, and in the warmth of their family life and beauty of their Jewish rituals she begins to know safety for the first time. Their life is brutally disrupted when a pogrom is wrought upon the family, and Katerina finds herself alone again. Decades later, having suffered and retaliated for that suffering, she looks out of the window of her prison cell and sees the trains carrying Jews across Europe.Released from prison into the chaos following the end of World War II, a now elderly Katerina is devastated to find a world that has been emptied of its Jews and that is not at all sorry to see them gone. Ever the outsider, Katerina realizes that she has survived only to bear witness to the fact that they had ever existed at all.A rare glimpse into Jewish and gentile life in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century, Katerina explores the long origins of the Holocaust, alongside darkness and light, cruelty and mercy.

'A masterpiece ... the greatest novel of the Holocaust' The Guardian Badenheim, a resort town near the forests of Vienna, is preparing for the arts festival of the summer season. The hotel workers and local tradespeople rush to prepare the small town for the influx of vacationers. But just as the season is getting into full swing, a small note appears on a municipal notice board: the Sanitation Department is announcing an increase in its jurisdiction. No one knows what the Sanitation Department is, but no matter ¿ the festival carries on.Soon inspectors are spread all over town, bringing estrangement, suspicion and mistrust wherever they go. Meanwhile, the guests carry on pursuing their pleasures and the townspeople attend to their troubles. Then another announcement appears: all Jews must register with the Sanitation Department.An allegory, satire and fable all in one, Badenheim 1939 is a story of denial and normalisation, masterfully creating an atmosphere of impending dread and horror. Gripping and unforgettable, this is one of most intriguing and eerie books ever written about the Holocaust.

The second and last children's book by the extraordinary Holocaust survivor and Hebrew-language author of the award-winning Adam & Thomas.A mystical and transcendent journey of two wanderers, an eleven-year-old boy and an old man to whom the boy has been entrusted by his father, a Jew, fleeing the ravages of the war by the late award winning author, Aharon Appelfeld. The old man is a former Ukranian commander, revered by the soldiers under his command, who has gone blind and chosen the life of a wanderer as his last spiritual adventure. The child, now disguised as a Ukranian non-Jew, learns from the old man how to fend for himself and how to care for others. In the tradition of The Alchemist, the travelers learn from each other and the boy grows stronger and wiser as the old man teaches him the art of survival and, through the stories he shares, the reasons for living. Long Summer Nights carries its magic not only in the words, but also in the silences between them.