Badenheim 1939; Katerina; The Story of a Life by Aharon Appelfeld review – survivors’ tales full of beauty and pain

Badenheim 1939; Katerina; The Story of a Life by Aharon Appelfeld review – survivors’ tales full of beauty and pain

Memory and trauma go hand in hand in these two novels and a memoir by the late Israeli writer, who shows that hope can be worse than despair

“God is in the sky,” the young Aharon Appelfeld’s grandfather told him, “and there is nothing to fear.” Appelfeld was born into a middle-class Jewish family in 1932 in what is now Ukraine; but by 1938 “the ground was burning beneath our feet”, and later he and his parents were taken to a Nazi labour camp. He managed to escape in 1942, aged 10; he never saw his parents again, and died in Israel in 2018.

Those short facts inform much of Appelfeld’s writing. He found it “annoying” to be labelled a “Holocaust writer”, but it was a designation supported by many of his books, including the three reissued this week by Penguin Modern Classics. But their approach to that infinite subject is always distanced, never direct.

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