Blooms of Darkness

Aharon Appelfeld was born in a town near Czernowitz, Romania on February 16, 1932. When he was 8 years old, he and his father endured a forced march to a labor camp in Ukraine. He escaped the camp and spent the next three years as a shepherd working for various peasants and always concealing his Jewish identity. He then joined the Soviet Army as a cook's helper. After World War II, he spent months in a refugee camp in Italy before going to Palestine in 1946. He worked on a kibbutz, fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and studied philosophy at Hebrew University.

The Holocaust was the main subject of his books. His first novel, The Skin and the Gown, was published in 1971. His other works include Badenheim 1939, The Age of Wonders, To the Land of the Cattails, The Healer, The Immortal Bartfuss, For Every Sin, and Writing and the Holocaust. He received the Israel Prize for literature, The Prime Minister's Prize for Creative Writing, and two Anne Frank Literary Prizes. He taught Hebrew literature for many years at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Beersheba. He died on January 4, 2018 at the age of 85.

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