Ervin (Aharon) Appelfeld was born in
Jadova Commune,
Storojineț County, in the
Bukovina region of the
Kingdom of Romania, now
Ukraine. In an interview with the literary scholar,
Nili Gold, in 2011, he remembered his home town in this district,
Czernowitz, as "a very beautiful" place, full of schools and with two Latin gymnasiums, where fifty to sixty percent of the population was Jewish. In 1941, when he was nine years old, the
Romanian Army retook his hometown after
a year of Soviet occupation and his mother was murdered. Appelfeld was deported with his father to a forced labor camp in
Romanian-controlled
Transnistria. He escaped and hid for three years before joining the
Soviet army as a cook. After
World War II, Appelfeld spent several months in a
displaced persons camp in Italy before immigrating to
Palestine in 1946, two years before
Israel's independence. He was reunited with his father after finding his name on a
Jewish Agency list in 1960. (Both Appelfeld and his father had presumed the other had been murdered in
the Holocaust. They had both made their way separately to Israel after the war.) The father had been sent to a ''
ma'abara'' (refugee camp) in
Be'er Tuvia. The reunion was so emotional that Appelfeld had never been able to write about it. In
Israel, Appelfeld made up for his lack of formal schooling and learned
Hebrew, the language in which he began to write. His first literary efforts were short stories, but gradually he progressed to novels. He completed his studies at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He lived in
Mevaseret Zion and taught literature at
Ben Gurion University of the Negev and was often writing in Jerusalem's
Ticho House (
Beit Ticho). In 2007, Appelfeld's
Badenheim 1939 was adapted for the stage by
Arnold Wesker and performed at the
Gerard Behar Center in
Jerusalem. == Choice of language ==