Tzili by Aharon Appelfeld

First published:Kutonet veha-Pasim, 1983 (English translation, 1983)

Type of work: Allegory

Principal characters:

• Tzili Kraus, a Jewish child abandoned by her parents when they flee to escape murdering soldiers
• Mark, a forty-year-old man who lives with Tzili for a time
• Katerina, a woman for whom Tzili works
• Linda, the woman who saves Tzili’s life

Overview

Tzili: The Story of a Life is an allegorical history of the faith and fate of the Jewish people during the Holocaust. The novel first traces the efforts of a poor family to ignore its Jewish heritage and assimilate into the Austrian culture. The father and mother demand secular academic excellence of their children while abandoning their cultural and religious Jewish heritage, including its emphasis on Jewish education and values. The focus then shifts to Tzili Kraus, the youngest child, whose anomalously innate ties to Judaism symbolize the strength of the archetypal pull to faith and the enduring nature of Judaism, traceable to its strong advancement by a selected few.

The novel opens with the narrator’s observation to the reader:

Perhaps it would be better to leave the story of Tzili Kraus’s life untold. . . . Her fate was a cruel and inglorious one, and but for the fact that it actually happened, we would never have been able to tell her story.

Tzili, symbolic of the quiet, abandoned Jewish faith, spends her first seven summers and falls on the dry, dusty soil in the small plot of earth behind the family’s shop. Ignored because she is peaceful and undemanding, Tzili spends her days alone and at dusk is brought inside the house, where she is also ignored, as conversation focuses on the academic achievements of her intellectually gifted older siblings. When Tzili is seven, she proves herself to be a poor student and is berated by her family and ridiculed by her peers, especially since her dullness is considered an unusual trait among Jews.

Failing to goad Tzili into academic superiority, her parents hire an old, unsympathetic man to tutor their “feebleminded” child in Judaism. Even in this, the child does not excel, leading the old man to despair “why it had fallen to the lot of this dull child to keep the spark [of Sabbath and prayer] alive.” Nevertheless, just as Tzili keeps the spark of Judaism alive, Judaism keeps Tzili alive:

[The old man’s visits] filled her with a kind of serenity which remained with her and protected her for many hours afterward. At night she would recite, “Hear, O Israel” aloud, as he had instructed her, covering her face.

Upon hearing news of an imminent siege, the Kraus family flees the village, leaving Tzili behind to “take care of their property for them.” Lying among barrels in the shed and covered with sacking, the child sleeps undiscovered throughout the night of slaughter and wakes to find herself alone. Guided by intuition, Tzili leaves town and wanders to a riverbank, where she meets an old, blind lecher who mistakes her for one of the many daughters of Maria, the Gentile town whore, who is popular with Jew and Gentile alike. Tzili assumes this fortuitous identity, which, along with her quiet stoic strength, allows her entry into the safe but brutal peasant community and enables her to survive the ensuing Holocaust years without being put into a camp. She learns what has happened to her town from a conversation between the blind man and his daughter:

“They chased the Jews away and they killed them too.”

“All of them?”

“Yes.”

“And their houses?”

“The peasants are looting them.”

“What do you say? Maybe you can find me a winter coat?”

After wandering for many days, Tzili works first for Katerina, a prostitute, who walked the streets with Maria and shared the same men with her. Now Katerina is sick and demanding, and when she throws a knife at Tzili because the girl is unwilling to support the two of them by prostitution, Tzili leaves the warmth and femininity of the house to wander alone in the cold and without regular food for many weeks. She then begins working for an aged peasant couple whom she finally leaves because the old man tries to compromise her, and, as a result, his wife beats Tzili continuously.

The young girl then joins a Jewish camp escapee, Mark, who abandoned his wife and two children to their unknown fate because they were afraid to climb through a narrow aperture and escape the camp with him. Because of Tzili’s Aryan features, she is able to procure food by bartering Mark’s family’s clothing, which he took with him when he escaped. Almost two years elapse, and Mark becomes increasingly morbid and guilty about his past. At fifteen, Tzili becomes pregnant, and Mark, discontent with only food, demands that Tzili procure cigarettes and liquor for him with the clothing. One day he tells Tzili that he is going to town by himself; he leaves and never returns. Tzili once again is abandoned.

Tzili resumes her wandering, bartering Mark’s clothing for food. When the clothes are gone, she works for another peasant family, who beat her until she is bruised and swollen, as if they want “to tear the fetus from her body.” Tzili leaves to wander alone again.

She is amazed to discover that her aimless path has led her in a circle, and she is again near Katerina’s house and the place where she and Mark stayed. When the war ends and dazed survivors of camps can be seen walking across the land, Tzili joins a group of liberated Jews who have hopes of reaching Italy. Ill and weak because of her pregnancy, Tzili has difficulty keeping up with the petty, quarreling people who spend their nontravel time playing cards and gambling with one another. In their despair over the past, about which no one can talk, and because they appear to have no future, several survivors commit suicide. Another man, who exhorts the group to repent and return to their Father in Heaven, is tricked into leaving the group. Yet Tzili fears, even more than her nights in the forest, the survivors—thin, speechless, and withdrawn persons upon whom a “kind of secret veiled their faces.”

Although Tzili is quiet and almost unnoticed, when she becomes too sick to continue, surprising help comes from Linda, a former cabaret dancer, who demands that the group stop for Tzili, and from a merchant, who constructs a stretcher on which Tzili is carried the rest of the way. As if ensuring her survival has been the sole purpose of their journey, they carry Tzili aloft in triumph and with the roar “We are the torch bearers.” Finally, the small band of survivors reaches Zagreb, and as soon as the “torch bearers” reach the town of security, food, and provisions supplied by American agencies, they refuse to shoulder their burden any longer and lay the stretcher in the shade. The merchant finally succeeds in summoning an ambulance to carry Tzili away, but he runs after the vehicle, begging in vain to be taken too because “the child is alone in the world.”

The fetus, a product of guilt and a reminder of years of horror, is dead, and in a makeshift barracks hospital, Tzili undergoes surgery, now totally alone. Tzili’s parents and siblings, reminders of assimilation and prewar secular and materialistic aspirations, are never seen again after they abandon Tzili, and the reader assumes that they have been victims of the slaughter.

Yet Tzili, symbol of the spark of the Sabbath and Judaism that her family had abandoned, survives the Holocaust, the dreadful years, as well as surgery and its excruciating aftermath. Again with the help of Linda, who complains to Tzili that the survivors now ignore her because they have “shiksas” (non-Jewish girls) to entertain them, Tzili and Linda board a ship that appears to be bound for Palestine to begin a new life.

Tzili, the protagonist of this novel, stands alone in her story, both literally and symbolically. Her youth is shaped by a major conflict within the Jewish culture of the time, which pits the strong attempt of many Jews to escape persecution by means of attaining intellectual superiority and, with it, assimilation into the Gentile majority against the emotional pull of the legacy of Judaism, which they have rejected. In contrast to these assimilated Jews, there is the true-to-life Tzili, who symbolizes the innocence, simplicity, and goodness of the Torah and of the Jewish faith. Because she is considered feebleminded and therefore incapable of intellectual superiority and assimilation, only she is taught the basic tenets of Judaism. When her family faces its most fearsome challenge, the murdering soldiers, they leave Tzili and her symbolic Torah and faith behind. Saved as if by a miracle when she sleeps through the slaughter, given a safe identity, and provided with help when she most needs it, Tzili, the person and the symbol, survives to build a new life in Palestine. Tzili realizes, however, that “she would remain alone, alone forever,” and if anyone would ever ask her where she was and what happened to her during the years of horror, she would not reply.

All the other characters, representations of both Jewish and non-Jewish character types, serve as vehicles to describe Tzili as a person and as a symbol. Katerina, the prostitute with pretensions to culture and femininity, gives Tzili shelter in exchange for hard work and increasingly demanding tasks. Like Maria, who is only mentioned in the text, she states that she prefers the Jews to all other lovers because they are kind, generous, and always take a woman to a fine hotel. Yet the picture of the Jew who is valued for his generosity and kindness but is despised for the legacy that has given him those attributes is as ironic as Tzili, symbol of the Torah and the faith that are abandoned except for times when there is nowhere else to turn.

Mark, the gray-faced, forty-year-old man who helps and is helped by Tzili, is also a character type, consumed with guilt after having left his wife and child behind when they refused to take the chance to escape camp. He, too, is the product of an assimilation-seeking family whose father put inordinate pressure on his wife and children to be able to speak flawless German and who corrected Mark’s mother in front of people when she made errors. The Torah is not part of Mark’s life, but Tzili gives him comfort and companionship in the darkest period between his escape from the camp and his return to almost certain death. When Mark deserts Tzili, she is devastated, and, like his mother, child, and wife, she searches for him and sees him in her dreams for months until she realizes that he is lost to her forever.

Linda, the fat cabaret dancer, is a mixture of types—the common, low-class woman exhibiting uncommon, high-principled action. She left her Gentile landowner-lover when one year of the war still remained. Although he hid her from the Germans, she regarded his brutality as worse than life in a camp, where she entertained her fellow prisoners with song and dance. In spite of her common occupation and appearance, she respects Tzili enough to stop the band of survivors and insist that Tzili be cared for and taken with them. Although the unnamed merchant performs the last favors for Tzili by caring for her during the final leg of the journey to Zagreb and by obtaining medical help for her when it appears that she may die, it is Linda who meets Tzili after she leaves the hospital and accompanies her to Palestine. Ironically, when they find more interesting diversions with the women of Zagreb, the “torch bearers” among the survivors who carried Tzili aloft abandon her in spite of the merchant’s pleas. Presumably, many of them never get the opportunity for rebirth that is accorded Tzili and Linda.

The irony of pursuing assimilation is the central theme of Tzili, as Aharon Appelfeld explores the loss of faith among Jews and their fate during the Holocaust years. Although the characters are people who surely existed, they assume even larger dimensions as character types during the Holocaust and as symbols of Jewish life. As in many of his other novels, themes of the abandoned child, the cruel and insensitive father-man, travel, and the freedom afforded by forests are important elements.

The theme of dedication to the Torah and the natural simplicity of the good Jewish life are embedded in the symbolic Tzili. Her lost baby, a mere fetus to the doctor but joy and hope to Tzili, symbolizes the death of the innocent, conceived during chaos of the soul and the world and destroyed by deprivation and neglect. The destruction of Jewish life, even from the womb, begins with the old peasant woman, who, although not aware that Tzili is Jewish, beats the girl as if to destroy the life within her. Even the liberated Jews, unable to plan for the future because of past experience, cling only to the diversions of the minute, such as card playing and gambling, and do not heed the necessity for rededication and preservation of new life. Literally and symbolically, they wander through deserted areas, like the tribes of Israel wandered with Moses, in an attempt to cleanse themselves in preparation for entry to the Promised Land.

Until Linda forces the survivors to aid Tzili and what she represents, the band stumbles forward in fear but not in hope. Only when they carry Tzili aloft on a stretcher, like the Jews carrying the Torah from the destruction of Solomon’s Temple, do they regain strength and purpose. Still, they remain blind to the regenerative power of faith and dedication to others when they abandon the stretcher at the first possible moment and again pursue empty worship of the Golden Calf.

The allegory reveals that life is empty and meaningless without the direction that the Torah provides. The pursuit of temporal goals such as secular academic superiority (for example, the case of Tzili’s siblings and also that of a former student who kills himself after liberation) or the pursuit of petty successes such as wealth or beauty is not lasting and does not help when trouble comes. Underscoring this important theme is the camp survivors’ obsession with their former diversion of playing cards and gambling; life is an empty series of card games—each played, ended, and forgotten. Although at a superficial level the novel concerns the suffering of a young girl as she matures during the Holocaust, it is actually an allegory of the meaning of life, even a parable about how life should be lived.

Appelfeld’s style in this novel is straightforward, but the work’s poetry of description and imagery reach the reader and evoke objective correlatives with great emotional appeal. For example, Appelfeld describes the day after Tzili meets the small band of camp survivors:

The sun opened out. The people unbuttoned their damp clothes and sprawled on the river bank and slept. The long, damp years of the war steamed out of their moldy bodies. Even at night the smell did not disappear. Only Tzili did not sleep. The way the people slept filled her with wonder. Are they happy? Tzili asked herself. They slept in a heap, defenseless bodies suddenly abandoned by danger.

Appelfeld’s choice of words and sentence structure expand this brief novel into an epic because of the multitude of images and meanings the reader is impelled to envision and pursue.

Tzili, Appelfeld’s third novel to appear in English translation, shares some characteristics with his first two novels, Badenheim, hamzah ir nofesh (1975; Badenheim 1939, 1980) and Tor-ha-pela’ot (1978; The Age of Wonders, 1981), but adds a dimension that makes it possibly the most rewarding of any of Appelfeld’s novels. Like Badenheim 1939, Tzili focuses on a description of Jewish society in prewar Europe and the immersion of that society into a Holocaust for which it was not prepared and which it failed to acknowledge, even in the face of reality. Like The Age of Wonders, Tzili introduces a strong autobiographical element, pre-and post-Holocaust segments, and the tempering of pessimism by the survival of youth. Appelfeld’s use of dreamlike hallucinatory allegory in Tzili, however, sets it apart from his other novels, and the minimalist approach places an even greater responsibility on the reader to interpret meaning while multiple levels of interpretation are added to each word and scene.

Tzili includes some of the images that Appelfeld established in his earlier novels and that he later carried into his other novels, but some images are conspicuously absent. The prewar assimilated Jewish society remains a major focus, as do the abandoned child and the ugly father. Yet Tzili finds refuge in homes and among non-Jews as well as in the forest, and although travel is omnipresent, there are no trains to remind the reader of the approach of the Holocaust. Further differentiating this novel from Appelfeld’s other works is his use of words (“Germans,” “murdering soldiers,” “screams and shots,” “camp survivors”) that evoke the images of the Holocaust without its mention. In previous works, he avoided such words, instead implying the Holocaust in various other ways.

Tzili belongs to the category of Appelfeld’s work that includes pre-and post-Holocaust segments and indicates that youth returning to Judaism can survive. Yet where the focus on youth has been secondary in other novels, here it is the major focus in a symbolic mode that links that youth (Tzili) with the spirit of Judaism itself. Appelfeld has said that Tzili is a form of autobiographical memory. Perhaps that would best explain its haunting effect, for the author is recounting a personal experience rather than an observed one.

Sources for Further Study

Appelfeld, Aharon. The Story of a Life: A Memoir. Translated by Aloma Halter. New York: Schocken Books, 2004.

Brown, Michael, and Sara R. Horowitz, eds. Encounter with Aharon Appelfeld. Oakville, Ont.: Mosaic Press, 2003.

Budick, Emily Miller. Aharon Appelfeld’s Fiction: Acknowledging the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.

Coffin, Edna Amir. “Appelfeld’s Exceptional Universe: Harmony out of Chaos.” Hebrew Studies 24 (1983): 85-89.

Ramras-Rauch, Gila. Aharon Appelfeld: The Holocaust and Beyond. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Schwartz, Yigal. Aharon Appelfeld: From Individual Lament to Tribal Eternity. Translated by Jeffrey M. Green. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for Brandeis University, 2001.

Wisse, Ruth R. “Aharon Appelfeld, Survivor.” Commentary 76 (August, 1983): 73-76.