A table for one
Jerusalem Post

By TALYA HALKIN

Producer-director Adi Japhet-Fuchs's documentary Appelfeld's Table explores the personal world and life story of Aharon Appelfeld, one of Israel's most prominent novelists.

The film, which won first prize for Best Documentary Film in the Jewish Experience category at the International Jerusalem Film Festival, revolves around the Appelfeld's daily pilgrimages to the Anna Ticho House in Jerusalem, whose cafe he uses as a study and as a meeting place with friends and colleagues. ]aphet-Fuchs, who spent three years filming him there, first became captivated by Appetfeld several years ago, while reading his memoir The Story of a Life.
Apperfeld writes about the experience of being a child during the Holocaust, and about having to forget who he was and where he came from in order to reinvent himself as a Ukrainian boy. What Japhet-Fuchs was most taken with, however, was the second half of Appelfeld's biography, which begins with his arrival in Israel as an adolescent

Having emerged from where he did, this transition compelled Appetfeld to reinvent himself.

The scenes filmed at Appelfeld's cafe table convey the ways in which Appelfeld's writing made memory and imagination, experience and fiction inseparable. At the same time, the film transmits something of the intangible process by which a writer transforms the world around him into writing - the way he puts things together by observing people, a their gestures, and the effect they have on him.

In addition to spending years at his cafe table, Japhet-Fuchs travelled to Moldova and the Carpathian Mountains, where Appelfeld spent his early childhood years before the war. There, she captured a world where time all but froze in Appetfeld's memory.

Excerpts form Appelfeld's writing are narrated by actor Alon Aboutboul, who successfully captures Appelfeld's simple, laconic tone - a tone whose very lack of drama is the key to its great emotional impact.

Appelfeld's Table beautifully transmits the humanity, optimism, and joy of living with which Appetfeld, both the writer and the ordinary person, managed to emerge from the horrors he endured as a youngster. At the same time, it is a film about the making of the Israeli collective, and of the creative struggle that awaits those who refuse to automatically assimilate into.

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