Tzili

by Aharon Appelfeld

Paperback

Status

Available

Genres

All Topics

General Fiction

Fiction

Collections

* Gemeinde-Bibliothek, BE Belletristik

Description

The youngest, least-favored member of an Eastern European Jewish family, Tzili is considered an embarrassment by her parents and older siblings. Her schooling has been a failure, she is simple and meek, and she seems more at home with the animals in the field than with people. And so when her panic-stricken family flees the encroaching Nazi armies, Tzili is left behind to fend for herself. At first seeking refuge with the local peasants, she is eventually forced to escape from them as well, and she takes to the forest, living a solitary existence until she is discovered by another Jewish refugee, a man who is as alone in the world as she is. As she matures into womanhood, they fall in love. And though their time together is tragically brief, their love for each other imbues Tzili with the strength to survive the war and begin a new life, together with other survivors, in Palestine. Aharon Appelfeld imbues Tzili's story with a harrowing beauty that is emblematic of the fate of an entire people.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member V.V.Harding

On the first pages of Tzili: The Story of a Live the storyteller says that Tzili's life is hard and sad and possibly not worth telling -- a beginning that made me put the book aside for a few days after reading the first chapter while I decided whether I could get past this grim beginning and read

on. But despite the unarguably difficult time Tzili has, a slow, dreamy early adolescent child in a family of examination-taking siblings, each of whom intends to raise their merchant family into a better social class, she nevertheless is so appealing that we want to find out what happens to her. When she is left behind, ostensibly to guard the family's possessions and protected by her dimness, when the family flees the approaching army and being sent to the camps, she seems ill-equipped to survive on her own, and thus doomed.

But she proves instinctively more clever than anyone imagined, and the book chronicles her wanderings and the various ploys that keep her going in a very dangerous world.

We aren't told when or where the story takes place -- there's very little background information about Tzili's world, in which the Jews are in constant distress, from struggling with the other residents, but also from their own precarious existence and fear of failure. For a wonderfully indeterminate view of this world alone, the novel is a bitter pleasure. The Dalya Bilu translation is both lovely and invisible.

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LibraryThing member SqueakyChu

This is such a tragic story. It's fiction, I know, but the author is Aharon Appelfeld, a Jew who was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II as a child, but who escaped and survived the war. I have read other novels by this author. He doesn't write about concentration camps, but

in his novels he writes about what happened to Jews who suffered other tragedies.

This story is about a young teenager who is totally abandoned by her family so she must do whatever she needs to do to survive. Sometimes she is alone; sometimes she is with others. The story is heartbreaking, but a necessary read. Readers do need to know what it felt like for Jews to endure the war years in Europe, even if they were not murdered.

A jarring part of this story for me was near the end when I discovered that Tzili ended up in Zagreb. Zagreb is a city in Croatia, part of the former Republic of Yugoslvaia. My maternal grandparents lived there, but they died in Auschwitz at the hands of the Nazis.

I generally don't like to read novels about this period in history, but I hesitatingly do read novels by authors who themselves experienced deep trauma at the hands of the Nazis. They have stories to tell.

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