Graham Greene called autobiography “a sort of life.” It begins late and ends prematurely. But the autobiographer is less prone to error than the biographer, Greene added. “Who could know a life better than the one who lived it?” – that’s what I suppose he had in mind. For anyone who accepts Greene’s view, every biographer – no matter how diligent, perceptive, and fair-minded – is an interloper.

Students of autobiography – let alone biographers – should dissent from Greene’s distinctions. As Norman Sherry, Greene’s biographer, points out, his subject’s autobiography can hardly be trusted. For one thing, Greene invented a scene placing himself beside his mother’s deathbed. In fact, he was nowhere near it.

Autobiography is closer to fiction than to fact, Aharon Appelfeld suggests in the preface to the aptly titled “The Story of a Life: A Memoir.” Autobiography, he observes, creates a tension between memory and imagination. Memories divide life into pieces that the writer shapes into sentences. Mr. Appelfeld cannot render the raw immediacy of his experience, even though his exquisite scene-shaping is as vivid as any account of the Holocaust and its aftermath can be.

Separated at 7 from his parents (both died in the Holocaust), Mr. Appelfeld miraculously survived a life on the run through the forests of Central Europe and in refugee camps on the Italian and Yugoslavian coasts. In stark prose he recounts his desperate adventures, how he found life worth living even when a peasant whore worked him ragged and beat him. He became a hunted animal who lost the ability to speak in the four languages he grew up with in his native Romania. Indeed, his very survival depended on learning from the animals how to hide himself and live off the forest floor.

Mr. Appelfeld’s years of recovery in Israel were hardly less painful. Holocaust survivors, unwilling to talk about their degrading experiences, made him feel isolated. How dare he write about the suffering that his fellow sufferers said could not be put into words? How could he adjust to a new society whose children had parents that wished to forget the past? How could he master a new language, Hebrew, when his formal schooling had ended at 7?

Mr. Appelfeld found comfort in hard physical and communal labor on the kibbutz. But service in the army distressed him. He was not physically fit to fight, and he felt at a decided disadvantage among soldiers who saw him only as a subordinate.

Mr. Appelfeld was fortunate to make contact early on with writers, especially S.Y. Agnon, who encouraged him to view writing literature as a form of redemption. The usually self-centered Agnon questioned Mr. Appelfeld about his life, making him feel that he must make the effort to reclaim his past through writing. Later Mr. Appelfeld concluded: “Everything that had happened to me or that was about to happen to me was connected to the world from which I had sprung. The moment I realized this, I ceased being an orphan dragging his orphanhood behind him and became someone who was able to confront the world.”

Mr. Appelfeld’s extraordinary memoir raises profound questions about the role of literature in modern life. His own view is that it “gathers within it all the elements of faith: the seriousness, the internality, the melody, and the connection with the hidden aspects of the soul.”

Here I must demur. Although I have devoted much of my life to the study and teaching of literature, Mr. Appelfeld’s consecration of it troubles me. Literature has inspired his life and the lives of others. Yet my work as a biographer cautions me not to equate even the greatest literature with religion. The Modernist devotion to literature has resulted in, among other things, a priesthood of professors and coteries of writers that have alienated the audience for literature. Everywhere I see literary life evaporating, and the causes are much more serious than the facile blame put on television and other contemporary distractions.

Mr. Appelfeld does not himself succumb to the kind of preciousness that turns readers away from literature. On the contrary, his work is itself a moving example of what autobiography at its best can achieve.

The most searing moment in this self-knowing book is the author’s encounter with a man who accuses him of an injustice done to him after the war. A startled Mr. Appelfeld asks the man for details, clearly disbelieving he has done him any harm. “This time the wrongdoer should speak, not the victim,” the accuser replies. From then on this attacker, who refuses to supply an indictment, hectors the exasperated writer.

Has Mr. Appelfeld failed to remember his accuser? Is the accuser mistaken or demented? “The Story of a Life” is filled with images of oblivion, conveying the writer’s desire to forget painful experiences and to melt into the falling snow of the scene that opens this memoir, or, alternatively, to sink into the sand that appears at the end of this beautifully wrought, if disturbing, episode:

One night I remembered that in Italy, in one of the transit huts on our way to Israel, I had seen a wristwatch on the floor. Without thinking, I picked it up and put it into my pocket. When the owner of the watch realized that he had lost it, he cried like a child and pleaded with everyone to return it to him, for it was the only thing left from his home. People around him tried to calm him down and console him. When their words proved ineffective, they said to him, “After living through the Holocaust, how can you cry over a watch?”

But he wouldn’t stop wailing. By nightfall, totally fed up. Everyone began to snap at him: “You’re selfish. You’re bad.” Upon hearing their words, he covered his face with both hands, like a tired and confused child, and began to drum his legs on the ground. People turned their backs on him and when they saw this tantrum, it seemed as if he’d lost his mind.

And I, completely terrified, buried the watch in the sand.