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Aharon Appelfeld is one of the undisputed giants of contemporary Israeli literature. This volume brings together critical papers presented at an international symposium on the work of Aharon Appelfeld held at York University, Toronto. It also includes a number of original short stories by Aharon Appelfeld in English translation, a long interview and, for the first time, a complete bibliography of Appelfeld's works as well as secondary sources on him.

Story of a Viennese Jewish businessman whose faith is restored after being snowbound in a faith centered rural village. He returns to Vienna with a renewed sense of faith and tolerance on the eve of World War II where an anti-Semitic atmosphere pervades.

Describes the response of two generations of a Jewish family to the anit-Semitism of the Nazis in an Austrian town.

A tale of Europe in the days just before the war. It tells of a small group of Jewish holiday makers in the resort of Badenheim in the Spring of 1939. Hitler's war looms, but Badenheim and its summer residents go about life as normal."

The inability to express the horrors of the Holocaust, combined with guilt feelings of the survivors, led to silence. Appelfeld explores the role of art in redeeming pain from darkness, and the conflicting desires to speak out and to keep silent. He forcefully argues that the Jewish people need a spiritual vision. In his conversation with Philip Roth, Appelfeld sheds light on his work and talks with candor about his life, influences, and concerns.

A new novel from the award-winning, internationally acclaimed Israeli writer, "Blooms of Darkness" offers a haunting, heartbreaking story of love, loss, and what it means to be human.

In spare, haunting, almost hallucinogenic prose, the internationally acclaimed, award-winning novelist shares with us-for the first time-the story of his own extraordinary survival and rebirth. Aharon Appelfeld's childhood ended when he was seven years old. The Nazis occupied Czernowitz in 1941, penned the Jews into a ghetto, and, a few months later, sent whoever had not been shot or starved to death on a forced march across the Ukraine to a labor camp. As men, women, and children fall away around them, Aharon and his father (his mother was killed in the early days of the occupation) miraculously survive, and Aharon, even more miraculously, escapes from the camp shortly after he arrives there. The next few years of Aharon's life are both harrowing and heartrending: he hides, alone, in the Ukrainian forests from peasants who are only too happy to turn Jewish children over to the Nazis; he has the presence of mind to pass himself off as an orphaned gentile when he emerges from the forest to seek work; and, at war's end, he joins the stream of refugees as they cross Europe on their way to displaced persons' camps that have been set up for the survivors. He observes the full range of personalities in the camps-exploitation exists side by side with compassion-until he manages to get on a ship bound for Palestine. Once there, Aharon attempts to build a new life while struggling to retain the barely remembered fragments of his old life (everyone urges him simply to forget what he had experienced), and he takes his first, tentative steps as a writer. As he begins to receive national attention, Aharon realizes his life's calling: to bear witness to the unfathomable. In this unforgettable work of memory, Aharon Appelfeld offers personal glimpses into the experiences that resonate throughout his fiction.

A young Jewish girl survives the Holocaust living alone in the forest and among the gentile peasants she fears

Adam and Thomas is the story of two 9-year-old Jewish boys who survive World War II by banding together in the forest. They must learn to survive - and they do. They forage and build a small tree house, although it's more like a bird's nest. Echoes of the war are felt in the forest. The boys meet fugitives fleeing for their lives and try to help them. They learn to disappear in moments of danger. And they barely survive winter's harshest weather, but when things seem to be at their worst, a miracle happens. Illustrated by iconic French artist Philippe Dumas.

The story of a Gentile housekeeper working in a series of Jewish households as anti-Semitism grows in Europe in the years before World War II.