“Nearly all of his novels, stories and essays concerned the Holocaust, although Mr. Appelfeld preferred to say that his focus was far broader: Jewish loneliness, immigration and – as he once joked to the New York Times – ‘trivialities,’ the depiction of ‘small, ordinary, unheroic people.’ Unlike Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel, fellow chroniclers of the Holocaust, Mr. Appelfeld rarely ventured into historical analysis or first-person anecdote.”