The Story of a Life by Aharon Appelfeld
This book cannot be judged as typical of Holocaust literature, as the writer was just nine years old when he became a victim of this shocking piece of history.
Aharon Appelfeld’s memories are jumbled incidents and in recording them he jumps from one stage of his life to another.
It is a very disturbing but successful record.
When at last he arrived in Israel, a teenager alone, and attempted to put his life into some sort of coherent order, it was like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces irretrievably lost.
With a family history that was fragmented and a language he had to unlearn to a certain extent in order to make some sort of life in another country with another language, he felt quite torn and alien about his past history and this new country and its people, many of whom were equally as disturbed and torn as he was.
Read the book review in The Seymour Telegraph.