Fidelity to a nation state is a form of betrayal of the ­universalistic vision at the core of Jewish faith.

We met in his favourite haunt, just off the Jaffa Road, a few days after the May 2003 suicide bombing on the number six bus. Outside there was dust and hustle and fear. But inside the Anna Ticho House it was cool and quiet, with only the sirens intermittently piercing the cafe’s calm reminder of an older Jerusalem. As we sat in the semi-gloom, it reminded me of one of those mittel-European coffee houses I’d grown up reading about, where writers and artists would gather to sit and smoke and schmooze, and maybe write a witty, mordant feuilleton for the papers when nothing else was happening. Though something else is, as we know, always happening.
I already knew Aharon Appelfeld’s story: the deportation to a camp when he was eight, his mother’s murder, his escape from the Germans, his three years in hiding in the forests of Ukraine, joining the partisans, and after the war the journey through Italy to Palestine. I knew that although he was one of Israel’s most important writers, he’d never written about the Holocaust directly, but always elliptically.

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