Exact Fit

By Patricia Blake

TZILI: THE STORY OF A LIFE by Aharon Appelfeld Translated by Dalya Bilu Dutton; 185 pages; $12.95

In 1941, when Aharon Appelfeld was nine years old, he managed to escape from a labor camp in the Rumanian-occupied Ukraine. He was in effect already an orphan; his mother had been killed by the Nazis, and his father failed to escape with him. For two years the boy wandered the inhospitable countryside, working as a shepherd, fleeing human contact. "I knew that if the peasants discovered I was Jewish, they would kill me," he later recalled.

Out of the 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."

As 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 as one of the devil's brood. "The peasants drove her mercilessly. She cleaned the cow shed ... brought firewood from the forest. At night the peasant's wife would mutter: 'You know who your mother is. You must pay for your sins. Your mother has corrupted whole villages.' " Wherever Tzili goes the peasants beat her with sticks and ropes.

Inevitably, Tzili invites comparison with the little boy hideously brutalized by 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.

Running from her peasant persecutors, the adolescent finds refuge in a hole in the ground, together with a crazed escapee from a Nazi camp. Love, pregnancy and abandonment follow in rapid succession. Then, as the war and Tzili's wanderings come to a close, she joins a group of other survivors.

The terminally weary Jews doze for days on end, then awaken to a semblance of life. Messiahs approach them, preaching repentance and a return to the faith, and from Palestine come the Zionists, calling for a new dedication, but the survivors pay no attention.

It is an 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.

--By Patricia Blake This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.