A Table for One: Under the Light of Jerusalem by Aharon Appelfeld

A Table for One is a memoir of Aharon Appelfeld’s city, Jerusalem. It brings forth an unknown side of Appelfeld’s writing as he reveals the centrality of Jerusalem in his life and work. We discover that his “city of light” proved to be far more than a shelter and the place where Appelfeld 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 cafés of the 1950s and 1960s, where the scent of 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—only in a Jerusalem cafe—that he could write his novels, shaping meaning and wholeness out of the fragments of his painful past.

Translated by Aloma Halter from the original Hebrew Od Hayom Gadol ("It Is Yet High Day").

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, the American National Jewish Book Award, the French Prix Medicis and the German Nelly Sachs Prize.