Tzili

Name: Tzili
ISBN: 9780805212495

The Story of a Life

Aharon Appelfeld and Dalya Bilu, Translator

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.

"It is a measure of Appelfeld's uncanny skill that a narrative so deliberately shorn of familiar human relations should bear so much power." —Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review

"As always, Appelfeld's style is affectingly spare. Out of the shards of [ personal] experience, he has composed a tale of appalling symmetry. Among his many novels and stories of the Holocaust, Tzili best exemplifies Kafka's bitter aphorism, 'The arrows fit exactly in the wounds they have made.' " —Time

About the Authors

Aharon Appelfeld (1932–2018) was one of Israel's most celebrated novelists and a leading voice in Holocaust literature.

Born in Czernowitz, Bukovina (then part of Romania, now Ukraine), Appelfeld was eight when the Nazis invaded. His mother was murdered, and he was deported with his father to a labor camp in Transnistria. He escaped and spent years surviving alone in the forests and villages of Ukraine, then served with the Soviet army before making his way to Palestine in 1946. There he learned Hebrew, a language he would adopt as his literary medium, and later studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Appelfeld published more than forty books, including novels, story collections, essays, and a memoir. His spare, restrained prose rarely depicts the Holocaust directly. Instead, he explores the world on its edge: the assimilated European Jewish life that preceded catastrophe, and the dislocation of survivors afterward. Among his best-known works are Badenheim 1939, The Iron Tracks, Tzili: The Story of a Life, The Story of a Life (his memoir), and Blooms of Darkness.

His honors include the Israel Prize (2004), the Prix Médicis étranger, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Nelly Sachs Prize, among others. He taught literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and was a longtime resident of Mevaseret Zion, near Jerusalem.

Appelfeld's work has been translated into dozens of languages. He is remembered for giving quiet, humane expression to experiences that many considered beyond the reach of words.