The Life of a Story: Aharon Appelfeld’s Double as a Mode of Holocaust Representation

In a 2000 interview, Aharon Appelfeld, a Holocaust survivor and prominent Israeli writer, was reminded of what he had not mentioned in his memoir. This article focuses on two of Appelfeld’s novels following the memoir, Suddenly, Love (2004) and The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping (2010), by exploring the figure of the “double” (Doppelgänger). My claim is that the literary double demonstrates Appelfeld’s attempts to work through his trauma by transgressing the lines between experience and reflection, imagination and reality, hegemonic and diasporic cultures, the living and the dead, within a story that embeds the self without ignoring the other.