Aharon Appelfeld, the acclaimed Israeli novelist who wrote disturbing, obliquely told stories of self-deluded Jews slowly awakening to the reality of the Holocaust, died on Thursday in Petah Tikva, near Tel Aviv. He was 85.

His death was confirmed by Beilinson Hospital, where he died.

As someone whose mother was killed at the beginning of World War II, and who escaped a labor camp to hide among hostile peasants, Mr. Appelfeld made the Holocaust his great subject. Yet he told his stories from a seemingly naïve eye, a baffled child’s eye, working by indirection and intimation. The horrors, as critics pointed out, happened offstage; his novels rarely identified the threat explicitly as storm troopers with whips or concentration camps with poison-gas showers.

Rather, people wrestled with the banalities of daily life as ominous events were apprehended like distant thunder, lending his narrative the absurdist quality of a Beckett play or the chill of a Kafka story.

In “Badenheim 1939,” perhaps his most famous novel, which the critic Irving Howe called “a small masterpiece,” cultivated, petit bourgeois Jews blithely sunbathe, flirt and nosh on strudel and ice cream at a resort outside Vienna, deluding themselves about ominous developments like the shadowy Sanitation Committee’s requiring all Jews to register. Soon they are figuring out how to help the committee relocate them to Poland, where the implication is that they will soon end up in concentration camps.