Aaron Appelfeld, in Hebrew, אהרן אפלפלד (Stara Zhadova; February 16, 1932-Petach Tikva; January 4, 2018) was an Israeli novelist.

Appelfeld was born in Zhadova near Czernowitz, Romania - today Ukraine. In 1940, when he was eight years old, the Nazis invaded his hometown and murdered his mother, and he and his father were deported to a Nazi concentration camp in Transnistria, in territory then occupied by Romania. Later, he ran away and was in hiding for three years before joining the Red Army as a cook. After World War II, he spent several months in an Italian refugee camp before settling in Palestine in 1946, two years before Israel's independence, and was able to reunite with his father because he found his name on an Agency list. Jewish for Israel. Her father had been sent to a maabara in Be'er Tuvia. The meeting was so emotional that the writer says he has never been able to write about it.1 He knew and skillfully handled several languages ​​- German, Polish and English, as well as Romanian and Hebrew. The interview with his friend, the American Jewish writer Philip Roth in 1988 (Editorial Seix Barral, De Bolsillo 2011) is revealing of the personality of this writer.

In Israel, Appelfeld was able to complete his studies and learned Hebrew, the language he has used in his publications. He studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has lived in Mevaseret Sion, where he taught literature at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.