Word: appelfeld
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Ancient Evenings, Norman Mailer ∙ Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia Márquez Heartburn, Nora Ephron Ironweed, William Kennedy ∙ The Little Drummer Girl, John le Carré Tzili: The Story of a Life, Aharon Appelfeld...
...shards of this experience, Appelfeld, now a renowned Israeli novelist, has composed a tale of appalling symmetry. Among Appelfeld's many novels and stories of the Holocaust (Badenheim 1939, The Age of Wonders), Tzili best exemplifies Kafka's bitter aphorism, "The arrows fit exactly in the wounds they have made...
...always, Appelfeld's style is affectingly spare. His fictional victim is a little East European girl, born to be despised. Ugly and slow to learn, Tzili is neglected and abused by her large, impoverished Jewish family. In infancy she is left alone to play in the dirt outdoors. In childhood she becomes the butt of her Christian schoolmates. As the Nazis approach, Tzili is abandoned by her parents. She seeks shelter among the peasants in the district, claiming to be the daughter of the local Gentile whore. But if she is spared deportation as a Jew, she is execrated...
...peasants in Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird. But Kosinski's martyred child survives with nothing but rage and revenge; Tzili is strangely passive, accepting the insults and the blows as her destiny, if not her due. Kosinski's novel is a series of surreal images; Appelfeld's is a shadow play whose characters move mutely behind a scrim of inexpressible sadness...
...indifference few readers will share. One seeks in vain for some faint sign of hope in Appelfeld's enigmatic parable. Redemption through suffering? Renewal or rebirth? Tzili's baby dies in her womb. The only human being who reaches out a hand to her is a prostitute. As the two women stand side by side on a ship headed for Palestine, the injured adolescent suddenly says to the fallen woman, "What I'd like now is a pear." That is all that is left of desire in Tzili, and even the pear is not forthcoming...