“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.
