Those years saw the emergence of Israels preeminent Holocaust writer. Though not a survivor of the death camps, Aharon Appelfeld, a refugee from Ukrainian captivity who became a child cook in the Soviet army, nevertheless remained possessed by Holocaust themes. These included foreboding, loss, and above all the rootlessness of a displaced writer of displaced fiction, as Philip Roth described him. Appelfelds was a Holocaust of anger, and bore the mark of his determination to preserve its uniquely Jewish character. Attending a series of lectures he gave toward the end of his life, I was stunned by his bitterness toward younger Israeli authors who, he claimed, had abandoned their Jewish identity for secular Israeli culture, and whose Hebrew was shorn of Yiddish overtones.

Appelfelds rancor, his defense of Jewish heritage, and his refusal to extract universal or moralistic meaning from the Holocaust appealed to Israeli grit. Still, he would never attain Levi- or Wiesel-like stature. One reason is the immediacy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which can eclipse the horrific events of 80 years ago. Grossmans fame, like that of Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua, owed less to his treatment of the Holocaust than to his promotion of peace. Tension, meanwhile, continues to surround the lessons Israel should draw from the Holocaustwhether, as Netanyahu told gatherers at Yad Vashem, the strong survive; the weak are erased, or, as President Reuven Rivlin said at the same event, the Holocaust will forever place the Jewish people as eternal prosecutors against anti-Semitism, racism, and ultra-nationalism.

Most striking of all, though, is the absence of a broad audience for any Holocaust book, even Appelfelds. In a country where Holocaust curricula are taught in most schools, where 18-year-olds ritually visit the camps before enlisting, and where the Knesset debates incessantly about expanding survivor pensions and extending them to the victims of fascism in North Africa and Iraq, how much awareness can any one writer add? Does Israel, where normal life comes to a complete halt on Holocaust Memorial Day, need another Night or Survival in Auschwitz?

The same cannot be said for Europe and the United States, where recent polls indicate an alarming decline of even basic Holocaust knowledge, especially among young people. Amid the passing of the World War II generation and the rise of extreme right-wing parties around the world, some with fascist pasts, the voices of Wiesel, Levi, and Appelfeld need to be heard more than ever. Now, though, they must speak in a unified language understandable to all audiences, American, European, and Israeli alike. And their message must be onethat the Holocaust teaches us multiple messages, all of them complementary. It is a message of hope, of humanism, and of Jewish national rebirth.

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The Many Holocausts - The Atlantic