A Table for One: Under the Light of Jerusalem

A Table for One is a memoir of Aharon Appelfelds city, Jerusalem. It brings forth an unknown side of Appelfelds 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 inspirationthe 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 cafeonly in a Jerusalem cafethat he could write his novels, shaping meaning and wholeness out of the fragments of his painful past.