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Writing in Hebrew, the Romanian-born Appelfeld
penned more than 40 books and was one of Israel's most widely
translated authors.
Appelfeld's "Blooms of Darkness", the tale of an 11-year-old boy
hidden from the Nazis by a prostitute, won the Independent
Foreign Fiction Prize in London in 2012. Appelfeld was also
awarded the State of Israel Prize for Literature in 1983 and was
a Man Booker International Prize finalist in 2013.
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, on Twitter, expressed sorrow
"about the passing of our beloved writer".
Amos Oz, one of Israel's most prominent novelists, said on Army
Radio that Appelfed shied away from graphic depictions of the
Holocaust, choosing instead to describe its effect on the lives
of his characters.
"Appelfeld never wrote about gas chambers, never wrote about
executions, about mass graves, atrocities and experiments on
human beings. He wrote about survivors before and after. He
wrote about people who did not know what was about to happen to
them and about people who already knew everything but hardly
spoke about it," Oz said on Army Radio.
"He didn't want, or he was unable, to write depictions of the
horrors - he said that too. They are beyond the ability of human
language to express them. You have to approach them indirectly,
tiptoeing from afar," said Oz, once Appelfeld's student in a
kibbutz.
Appelfeld was a young boy when his mother was killed by the
Nazis. He and his father were sent to a concentration camp in
Transnistria in an area of Ukraine then under control of the
German-allied Romanian forces. Aged 10 at the time, he escaped
and spent three years hiding in forests in Ukraine.
"I survived in the fields and forests. Sometimes I worked as a
shepherd or taking care of broken-down horses," he told The New
York Times in 1986. "I lived with marginal people during the war
- prostitutes, horse thieves, witches, fortune tellers. They
gave me my real education."
After the war, he immigrated to Israel - he learned Hebrew
beforehand - and when he was 28 he discovered that his father
had survived and they were reunited in Israel.
"Even though I spent time on kibbutzim that tried to change me,
I did not change. I remained, basically, the Jewish refugee
child who survived," he said in an interview with Israel's
Haaretz newspaper in 2015.
American-Jewish author Philip Roth once described Appelfeld as a
"displaced writer of displaced fiction, who made displacement
and disorientation a subject uniquely his own".
Works by Appelfeld translated into English include "Badenheim
1939" (1978), a tale set in a fictional Austrian resort on the
eve of World War Two, and "The Immortal Bartfuss" (1988), a
fictional portrait of a troubled survivor in Israel.
(Writing by Jeffrey Heller; Editing by Maayan Lubell and Gareth
Jones)
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