Tzili - The Story of a Life

Zusatztext “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 Informationen zum Autor AHARON APPELFELD  is the author of more than forty works of fiction and nonfiction, including  The Iron Tracks, Until the Dawn's Light  (both winners of the National Jewish Book Award),  The Story of a Life  (winner of the Prix Médicis Étranger), and  Badenheim 1939 . Other honors he has received include the Giovanni Boccaccio Literary Prize, the Nelly Sachs Prize, the Israel Prize, the Bialik Prize, and the MLA Commonwealth Award.  Blooms of Darkness  won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2012 and was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013. Born in Czernowitz, Bukovina (now part of Ukraine), in 1932, he died in Israel in 2018. Klappentext 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. 1   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. We will tell it in all simplicity, and begin right away by saying: Tzili was not an only child; she had older brothers and sisters. The family was large, poor, and harassed, and Tzili grew up neglected among the abandoned objects in the yard.   Her father was an invalid and her mother busy all day long in their little shop. In the evening, sometimes without even thinking, one of her brothers or sisters would pick her out of the dirt and take her into the house. She was a quiet creature, devoid of charm and almost mute. Tzili would get up early in the morning and go to bed at night like a squirrel, without complaints or tears.   And thus she grew. Most of the summer and autumn she spent out of doors. In winter she snuggled into her pillows. Since she was small and skinny and didn’t get in anyone’s way, they ignored her existence. Every now and then her mother would remember her and cry: “Tzili, where are you?” “Here.” The answer would not be long in coming, and the mother’s sudden panic would pass.   When she was seven years old they sewed her a satchel, bought her two copybooks, and sent her to school. It was a country school, built of gray stone and covered with a tiled roof. In this building she studied for five years. Unlike other members of her race, Tzili did not shine at school. She was clumsy and somewhat withdrawn. The big letters on the blackboard made her head spin. At the end of the first...

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"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

Product details

• Authors: Aharon Appelfeld, Aharon/ Bilu Appelfeld, Aron Appelfeld, Dalya Bilu
• Assisted by: Dalya Bilu (Translation)
• Publisher: Schocken Books
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 05.06.2012
• EAN: 9780805212495
• ISBN: 978-0-8052-1249-5
• No. of pages: 192
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 203 mm x 14 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies