Tzili: The Story of a Life

"[A] slender, elegiac and resolutely unemotional account of a dullwitted Jewish girl who almost inadvertently survives the Holocaust....[I]t is a highly original work, as much for the purity and austerity of its language as for the character of Tzili....This distant, impersonal, achromatic tone is never violated throughout the novel's brief chapters; the author retains his omniscient point of view, so that Tzili's experience day by day and season by season is rendered with the uninflected authority of history as fairy tale. The author has elsewhere extolled Kafka's art, and it is not difficult to sense his brooding presence in these pages....It is a measure of Aharon Appelfeld's uncanny skill that a narrative so deliberately shorn of familiar human relations and emotions should bear so much power. This is fiction in the service of a stern and highly moral vision, in which details yield to a larger design and individuals participate in a historical tapestry they cannot comprehend."Aharon Appelfeld is the author of 'Tzili: The Story of a Life', published 1996 under ISBN 9780802134554 and ISBN 0802134556.