Aharon Appelfeld, 85, Acclaimed Israeli Novelist

"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."