Tzili: The Story of a Life

By Aharon Appelfeld

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jun 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9780805212532

Reviews for Tzili

[squeakychu · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.