Ervin (Aharon) Appelfeld was born in Jadova Commune, Storojineț County, in the Bukovina region of the Kingdom of Romania, now Ukraine.

In an interview with the literary scholar, Nili Gold, in 2011, he remembered his home town in this district, Czernowitz, as "a very beautiful" place, full of schools and with two Latin gymnasiums, where fifty to sixty percent of the population was Jewish.

After World War II, Appelfeld spent several months in a displaced persons camp in Italy before immigrating to Palestine in 1946, two years before Israel's independence.

[5] In Israel, Appelfeld made up for his lack of formal schooling and learned Hebrew, the language in which he began to write.

[citation needed] In 2007, Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939 was adapted for the stage by Arnold Wesker and performed at the Gerard Behar Center in Jerusalem.

[citation needed] Appelfeld was one of Israel's foremost living Hebrew-language authors, despite the fact that he did not learn the language until he was a teenager.

[citation needed] Appelfeld purchased his first Hebrew book at the age of 25: King of Flesh and Blood by Moshe Shamir.

"[11] Appelfeld's work was greatly admired by his friend, fellow Jewish novelist Philip Roth, who made the Israeli writer a character in his own novel Operation Shylock.