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A Table For One is an interchange between one artist and another, father and son, about their city, Jerusalem. It brings together an unknown side of Aharon Appelfeld's writing, with the subtle, haunting paintings of his son, Meir Appelfeld, who studied fine art at the Royal Academy of Art, London, and exhibits widely.
In this treasure of a book, Appelfeld reveals the centrality of Jerusalem in his life and work. However, his "city of light" proved far more than a shelter and the place where he came of age and spent his adult life: it became his inspiration - the quarry of his imagination.
A Table For One is set in the intimate Jerusalem cafes of the 1950s and 1960s, where the scent of the fresh roasted coffee and cigarette smoke wafted in with the elan of a lost European culture. Appelfeld found that it was only in a cafe and only in a Jerusalem cafe that he could write his novels, shaping meaning and wholeness out of the fragments of his painful past.
The writer's son, Meir Appelfeld, paints the cityscapes, vistas of the city, where he himself lives. The result is neither the monumental nor historical Jerusalem that one finds in a guidebook, but a precious, low-key place which fuses with time in an everyday, tangible intimacy.
Translated by Aloma Halter from the original Hebrew Od Hayom Gadol ("It Is Yet High Day").
About the Author
 AHARON APPELFELD is considered one of Israel's finest writers. A Holocaust
survivor and post-war refugee, he made his way to Italy and immigrated to Israel in 1946. Born in 1932 in Czernovitz, Bukovina (now part of the Ukraine), Appelfeld's work is recognized worldwide as among the most profound literary explorations of the Holocaust, and has met with international critical
and popular acclaim. Appelfeld has received the Israel Prize, and he is a winner of the National Jewish Book Award.
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