Aharon Appelfeld, R.I.P. May his name be a blessing.

January 4, 2018 2:01 PM

"I am not a Holocaust author”. Novelist and Israel Prize winner Aharon Appelfeld has died. Appelfeld, a survivor of the Shoah, basically wrote about living in a world where the Shoah is about to happen, or has happened, and how to be human in that world. Haaretz obit linked above, NYTimes obit here. (Previously)
posted by OmieWise (12 comments total)

Alevasholem.
posted by languagehat at 2:21 PM on January 4, 2018

Ugh, that "previously" link. Literally four of the first five comments are people complaining about the way Jews keep going on about the Holocaust. And it doesn't get much better after that.

Thanks, Omiewise, for directing my attention to this author, and my condolences to his family.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:28 PM on January 4, 2018 [4 favorites]

Thanks for posting this.
posted by paduasoy at 6:04 PM on January 4, 2018

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posted by julie_of_the_jungle at 6:11 PM on January 4, 2018

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posted by JoeXIII007 at 8:29 PM on January 4, 2018

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posted by motty at 1:17 AM on January 5, 2018

He was a visiting scholar at my college for a year and i was lucky enough to take one of his seminars. IIRC, one was on literature of the Holocaust (arguably his area of expertise), and the other was on Chassidic tales (primarily of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, but also others). I chose the latter. I remember him as being incredibly intelligent, very patient, and a warm sense of humor, and a thick accent that wasn't always easy to understand. But I was so interested in the stories and how he was able to draw interconnections between them and psychology, and the way different tellings of the same story highlighted how things were and weren't changing for Jews in Europe at the time. At the time most of my lit courses were exercises in deep Deconstructionism, so being able to approach a text as a story and almost entirely at face value was so refreshing. I never really thought to talk with him as a person rather than a conveyor of information. Though we were all a little in awe of him, so I probably wasn't alone in that.

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posted by Mchelly at 4:11 AM on January 5, 2018 [5 favorites]

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posted by cass at 8:04 AM on January 5, 2018

Ugh, that "previously" link. Literally four of the first five comments are people complaining about the way Jews keep going on about the Holocaust. And it doesn't get much better after that.

Yes. That was a bad period, and the first Appelfeld post, which stands on its own, was actually part of several I made on purpose about Jewish subjects in protest to the toxic environment and one particular toxic user.
posted by OmieWise at 1:01 PM on January 6, 2018 [4 favorites]

He and his father were deported to a ghetto and from there, his father carried him on a forced march to a labor camp in Transnistria

The situation there was very bad indeed.
posted by thelonius at 2:12 PM on January 6, 2018 [2 favorites]

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posted by vert canard at 3:02 PM on January 7, 2018

Thelonius, I don't know if I'd read about Transnistria before. As you say it was very bad.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:48 PM on January 7, 2018