Tzili: The Story of a Life Book

Tzili is a stand-alone among the majority of WWII fiction books I've read so far. Unlike many other novels devoted to this frightening, dark period of time which focus usually on a happy, loving family being washed away by cruelty and ruthlessness of time, Tzili tells the story of an abandoned girl, left behind by her always dissatisfied with her family. There's no love, no understanding, not even a glimpse of hope for some sort of happy ending and this, I ought to admit, hurts me more than many happy-then-broken family stories.

And yet this novel, depicting godforsaken lives, does not truly belong to the real world to me. It's told in a way of a surreal nightmare or a grim, hopeless fairytale. Aharon Appelfeld deliberately uses very plain, undecorated language and short, simple sentences, creating his story matter-of-factly and never going overboard. He always states facts, merely observing the world and his characters, as if doing nothing to properly, actually create them and yet doing everything to make his story hurt its readers almost physically. However, to reduce this novel to its plot (and plot alone) would be to oversimplify it and the author's intentions.

The most terrifying thing about this story lies in its opening lines: "Perhaps it would be better to leave the story of Tzili Kraus's life untold". How miserable and pointless Tzili's life must be! How little value it possesses in the world and how many stories, similar to this, were actually left untold because there were no one interested in them or simply because no one cared. Tzili reminded me of another girl, Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder, who evoked the same feeling in me - as if by reading this book, even though it's partly a product of writer's imagination, I pay a little tribute to all those whose stories were too quiet, too private or not heroic enough to be told. Appelfeld, it seems, pays his own tribute too, as he strips away all fancy decorations of the prose, rejects every tool he might have used to make a reader sympathetic. What is left in his story is the core, the story itself left to be judged.