Aharon Appelfeld was the child of middle-class Jewish parents living in Romania at the outbreak of World War II. He witnessed the murder of his mother, lost his father, endured the ghetto and a two-month forced march to a camp, before he escaped. Living off the land in the forests of Ukraine 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. Acclaimed writer Appelfeld`s extraordinary and painful memoir of his childhood and youth is a compelling account of a boy coming of age in a hostile world.

A szerzőről:
Aharon Appelfeld has lived in Israel since 1946. His first published novel, Smoke, appeared in 1962, after he had taught himself to write in Hebrew. Since then he has written many highly acclaimed works of fiction, including Badenheim 1939 and Katerina, as well as the lectures Beyond Despair, all in some way inspired by his experience as ‘an émigré, a refugee, a man who carries within him the child of war.’ The Story of a Life, from which those last words are taken, is, among many other things, a passionate account of Appelfeld’s writing life, the loss of his first language, the inhibitions of speech and his position in the post-war Israeli writing scene.