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“... Aharon Appelfeld lives a few miles west of Jerusalem in a maze-like conglomeration of attractive stone dwellings directly next to an ‘absorption centre’, where immigrants are temporarily housed, schooled and prepared for life in their new society. The arduous journey that landed Appelfeld on the beaches of Tel Aviv in 1946, at the age of 14, seems to have fostered an unappeasable fascination with all uprooted souls, and at the local grocery where he and the absorption centre residents do their shopping, he will often initiate an impromptu conversation with an Ethiopian, or a Russian, or a Rumanian Jew still dressed for the climate of a country to which he or she will never return ...”

“... The upright fiction of Aharon Appelfeld arises from the level facts of his anguished and brave young life. Like the novels themselves, a note on their author is laconic, lapidary and on oath:Aharon Appelfeld was born in 1932 in Czernovitz, Bukovina (now part of the USSR ...”

“... we may rejoice over one who survived and who has celebrated his luck in such captivating fashion. Aharon Appelfeld’s biography, as summarised on the dust-jacket of his new novel, indicates a tale of survival in circumstances far more terrible than any that Segre was called upon to suffer. Born in 1932 near the Soviet-Rumanian border, he now lives in ...”

“... not true; others are – although they never occurred.’ Along with Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, Aharon Appelfeld, Piotr Rawicz, Jakov Lind and Jerzy Kosinski, he elided events and fashioned composite characters to attain a sense of realism – but that doesn’t mean that Auschwitz was a hoax, or that Israel is illegitimate. Writers who survived ...”

“... Benevolence and Betrayal.) In other words, Levi did not lose his world as Wiesel, Améry, Celan, Aharon Appelfeld and so many others lost theirs. His was the voice neither of the Diaspora nor of national exile but of a deeply rooted and successfully assimilated Italian Jew. There is more to the emotional world of Primo Levi than his relationship with ...”

“... Philip Roth, a writer who has friends bearing the same names as friends of the actual Philip Roth (Aharon Appelfeld, for instance) and has created a character called Nathan Zuckerman. In one section this Philip Roth’s wife interrogates him about infidelity on the basis of a notebook she has found. She’s half-convinced that he’s simply making things ...”