(Posted on 9/22/01 )

Tzili by Aharon Appelfeld²⁵

Aharon Appelfeld was born in 1932 near Czernowitz, (then Romania, now the Ukraine). When Appelfeld was eight years old the Germans invaded his village and his mother was murdered. Expelled with most of the Jews in the area to Transnistria, be was separated from his father during a forced march, and spent the remainder of the war on his own. He immigrated to pre-state Israel in 1946. His first collection of stories, Smoke, was published in 1962; since then, be has written more than 20 books, including short stories, novellas and full-length novels, which have been translated into many languages. Abaron Appelfeld is one of the great Hebrew writers of our time.

A Woman Comes of Age

This short novel tells the story of Tzili Kraus, a Jewish girl abandoned by her family, who spends the course of the war wandering among peasant villages. It is a coming-of-age story taking place in the shadow of the Holocaust, and marked by events that shape a woman's identity as an individual and a woman: the onset of menstruation, first love and sexual relations, pregnancy and miscarriage. The story ends with Tzili joining a convoy of refugees, and boarding a ship bound for Palestine. It is one of many Appelfeld stories focusing on characters who survive the war.

This discussion of the novella²⁶ does not analyze formalistic and thematic elements, but rather approaches the work from one point of view, the fact that its heroine is a woman. It describes the special character of women's survival as portrayed in the story of Tzili. The opening sentence both apologizes for the unheroic nature of the heroine, and hints at the narrator's function as a witness to the Holocaust: "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." (1)²⁷

The first generalization that may be made about Tzili is that as a child-woman she is an innocent victim, weak and unaware of what is taking place around her. She has a simple and even primitive consciousness, and her emotional world, which absorbs and experiences the reality she meets, lacks the shaping dimension of "civilization." It is completely internalized. Tzili's profound and basic sense of orphanhood determines her loneliness, and encloses her in a bubble through which she experiences reality. Paradoxically, this private and isolated experience sometimes gives her a sharp understanding of reality.

The gap between the innocence of the child-woman and the reality she faces destines her to a cruel fate. In mythological terms, Tzili is Adam as a girl, expelled from Paradise (not in its idyllic sense but as a state of consciousness in which there is a difference between good and evil) into a world which is wholly bad.

According to Yigael Schwartz,²⁸ during the course of the book Tzili comes of age, leaving girlhood and becoming a woman. This process involves physical change and sexual development, and exposure to the emotional world and consciousness of women.

The first significant event in this journey to womanhood is the onset of menstruation, which begins after Tzili meets up with the darker side of sexual relations, in the form of a non-Jew who attempts to rape her. The appearance of menstruation, signifying fertility, is accompanied in Tzili's case by a heavy sense of death:

In the absence of a mother this weighty event achieves catastrophic proportions. Tzili's cry expresses not only the telling fact of her orphanhood, but also the significance of the mother's absence. Tzili's mother has not handed down any women's traditions, not even in the most elementary sense of knowledge of one's body, and the ability to recognize menstrual blood. Tzili's orphanhood is emphasized in the way she is described. Her cry is like that of an animal, and she directs her own fall according to the image she has of death. TziIi is like Eve, ignorant, and she is not part of any real or conscious continuum, within which the bodily senses, and life and death, are built.

Tzili experiences her first love with Mark, a Jewish refugee from the concentration camps. Still, she remains distant and passive:

Tzili approaches the experience of love slowly and cautiously, learning about it as it happens.
The encounter with Mark occurs at the same time as she experiences puberty — "Her femininity blossomed within her, blind and sweet." — although before she reaches emotional maturity. She experiences their happiness mutely: "Tell me about yourself. Why don't you tell me? he would press her." It is only after Mark leaves that Tzili truly learns about intimate relations and becomes susceptible to them. She develops a dialogue of love out of her extremely innocent conceptions of the world:

The next event in the development of female identity is pregnancy:

Now she becomes one with Mark:

This stage of Tzili's development is characterized by emotional maturity. She is not only a pregnant woman but also an adopting mother:

There is an additional expression of her emotional maturity. For the first time in her life she defends herself aggressively and does not allow her employer to beat her: "One night she snatched the rope from the woman and said: 'No you won't. I'm not an animal. I'm a woman.'" (116) Tzili defends her humanity and her existence as a woman at the same time. The advancing pregnancy saves her for a time from her great loneliness, and strengthens her.³⁰ However, this significant stage in Tzili's maturation ends in a loss. The removal of the dead fetus from her womb cuts off the feeling of life and the human connection that had developed inside her practically from nothing. As Schwartz points out, the miscarriage returns her to her childhood, where she had been just another forsaken object in her parents' yard. "Even her body was no longer hers." (175)³¹ [Index Return]

Women in the Novel: Role Models

Most of the significant characters whom Tzili meets are women. These meetings comprise her education as a woman. To some extent the women fill the vacuum left in the absence of a mother. The gentile prostitutes, Maria and Katerina; Mark's wife; the foreign nurse in the field hospital; and Linda, the Jewish cabaret singer accompany Tzili, in imagination or in reality, in the decisive moments of her coming-of-age. Each woman's unique character and story lend the isolated Tzili a broader view of women, handing down a kind of women's "tradition".

Tzili's instinctively presents herself as the daughter of the prostitute Maria, which grants her a powerful woman's tool for survival. As Maria's daughter Tzili enters, unaware, a marginal social area where Jews and non-Jews, and the sacred and the profane, mix together. In this marginal area Tzili is protected from antisemitism. She is rejected, but at the same time she "belongs": "'Who do you belong to?' 'Maria.' 'Which Maria?' And when she did not reply the peasant woman understood which Maria she meant, snickered aloud, and said: 'Be off with you, wretch! Get out of my sight.'" (111). At the beginning Tzili uses this connection in order to hide her identity as a Jew with the blind man who tries to rape her. But later she chooses to be identified with Maria:

Tzili essentially creates the character of Maria from memory, adopting her as a mother and using her as a role model of womanliness as she sees it — a combination of beauty, abandonment and assertiveness. In addition to an imaginary mother Tzili adopts another mother and actually lives with her for a time. This is Katerina, who, like Maria, is also a gentile prostitute. According to Yigael Schwartz:

Katerina is the most developed role model of a woman that Tzili adopts. Her home, stories and belongings — "Gilt powder boxes, bottles of eau de cologne, crumpled silk petticoats and dozens of lipsticks" (46) — are connected in Tzili's consciousness to a sense of secret charm. More than any other character she happens to meet, Katerina teaches Tzili women's place in the world:

Katerina's violence, exploitation and plotting, along with her noticeable poverty, do not spoil Tzili's special feeling for her. On the contrary, Tzili would prefer to return to Katerina rather than to the humiliations of her parents' home. (47-48)

A seemingly fated alliance is formed between Tzili, the Jewish girl survivor, and these marginal figures of women.³³ The alliance crosses the normative boundaries of gentile society both with respect to lifestyle and in relationship to another marginal group, the Jews. Tzili and the women survive in the gentile man's world as a weak minority characterized by two points: sex characteristics, the fact that they are women, and ethnic characteristics, their existence as Jews and non-Jews who mix together. These women, whether Jews or not, are victims of a reality ruled by men. For this reason, they do not internalize the dominant culture, nor do they disappear within it. They create a subculture which is borne within them, expressed in their bodies and in their experiences.

At the end of the novella Tzili is adopted by yet another marginal figure, fat Linda, the Jewish singer who stops the convoy in order to pick up Tzili (165). Linda combines integrity with a natural sense of justice and blunt womanly vulgarity. Like Tzili she is a girl-woman, a fact which is noticeable when she speaks about herself in the third person, and in the way she speaks about her situation: "I too have nobody left in the world. At first I didn't understand, now I understand. There's the world, and there's Linda." (181) The childish directness with which Linda defines this positive stage in becoming a mature human being becomes cruel and bitter in light of historical reality. This awareness is not psychological but simply describes the actual situation.

A common fate places Linda and Tzili together on a refugee ship to Palestine. Unlike the passive and introverted Tzili, Linda is brash and extroverted. She protects Tzili from the ruthless crush of refugees at the same time that she exposes the misery of their fate in her blunt talk. The end of the novella sheds a grotesque light on potential life in Palestine for the child-women. Linda, who is drunk, sings Hungarian lullabies to a bottle of cognac (instead of a baby), indicating the terrible way war distorts women's roles. [Index Return]

The Biblical Story of Joseph:
Mythic Framework

Just how radical it is to choose a woman as the center of this novella may be seen in the way the book relates to its mythical framework, the biblical story of Joseph referred to in the book's original, Hebrew title, HaKutonet VeHaPasim, (literally, The Coat and the Stripes).³⁴ In contrast to Joseph, the male culture hero, Tzili is an anti-heroine, described more like an animal than a human being:

The analogy drawn between the story of Tzili and the story of Joseph highlights the tension between the biblical story, demonstrating the existence of a divine plan, and the modern one, in which there are questions of religious doubt, and which is far removed from the insights to which the Joseph stories leads.³⁵ This ironic distance also creates the feeling that the ancient order which controlled the culture of the Jewish people for thousands of years has been thoroughly churned up during the Holocaust.

The biblical story of Joseph begins:

The robe³⁶ is a sign of his father's love and the source of his brothers' envy. Appelfeld splits the term in two, the coat and the stripes rather than the striped coat, to show the destruction of concepts of love and honor symbolized by the archetypal robe.³⁷

The story of Tzili also begins with a description of her family and her place in it: "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." (1) Unlike the relationship between Jacob and Joseph, Tzili's relationship with her father is one in which she is rejected by him: "The father's illness was fatal, but the dull presence of his youngest daughter hurt him more than his wound. Again and again he blamed her laziness, her unwillingness...(3)

Joseph, the son of his father's old age, remains in his father's home until sent to look for one of his brothers and inquire after his well being. Joseph leaves home for the world on a mission. In contrast, Tzili is abandoned at home by her family: "When the war broke out they all ran away, leaving Tzili to look after the house. They thought nobody would harm a feeble-minded little girl, and until the storm had spent itself, she could take care of their property for them." (7) The hatred of the brothers who cast Joseph into the pit is replaced with self-protecting exploitation in Tzili; the weak creature is disowned: "They left in a panic, without time for second thoughts. 'We'll come back for you later,' said her brothers as they lifted their father onto the stretcher." (7)

Fear provides the starting point for Tzili's aimless trek:

If someone had encountered Tzili and asked her what she was looking for, her answer would have been that, like Joseph, she was looking for her brothers:

When Tzili joins the convoy of Jewish refugees, her unconscious search for her brothers and lost family is answered.

When Tzili stays with Mark, he digs a hidden bunker for her "in case of trouble." (86) Yigael Schwartz describes their stay in the bunker as a coming-of-age ceremony, a crossing of the threshold between childhood and maturity:

The doubleness of the bunker is familiar from the story of Joseph. The pit is a grave as well as a saving place that provides relief.

Tzili's meeting with the refugees, her distant "brothers," is different from Joseph's emotional meeting with his brothers. First of all, Tzili does not meet the members of her original family, who apparently die in the war. Secondly, the difference in social status between Joseph and his brothers does not exist in Tzili's case:

Unlike Joseph, who reunites with and makes peace with his family, Tzili remains alone in the end:

In contrast with Joseph's heroic fate, intended in the divine plan to save Israel from a terrible famine, Tzili remains in a position of great weakness. Even the pregnancy that might be seen as
a small contribution to the survival of the tribe is interrupted before it comes to term.

Comparison between the biblical story and the modern one reveals the tragic fate of the tribe, and the great weakness that seizes its heroes in time of war. The fact that the writer chooses a woman as hero is part of the attempt to emphasize the defenseless and abused state of the Jews during the Holocaust. [Index Return]

---

²⁵ Published in Hebrew as HaKutonet Vehapasim (The Coat and the Stripes) (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1992). [RETURN]
²⁶ For other approaches (in Hebrew) see, for example, Hillel Barzel, "Historisophia and Poetica," Alay Siach 23 (1985): 139-155; Dana Kleinov, "Aharon Appelfeld's The Coat and the Stripes," Meebefneem 46 (1984): 402-404; Sarah Halperin, "Innocence and the Power of Suffering in The Coast and the Stripes," Hadoar (12.27.86); Halperin, "Displaced by the Side of the Road," Hadoar (1984); Halperin, "Mutual Relations between Humiliation and Self-Respect in The Coat and the Stripes," Hadoar (1985); Yigael Schwartz, The Lament of the Individual and the Eternal Tribe (Jerusalem: Keter & Magnes, 1996), 163-178. [RETURN]
²⁷ All page numbers refer to Tzili trans. Dalya Bilu (Middlesex: Penguin, 1984). On the significance of this sentence see Schwartz, 163, 177- 178. [RETURN]
²⁸ See above note. [RETURN]
²⁹ Schwartz discusses this event as part of his description of Tzili as a coming-of-age story which relates to the folk legend genre and its ritual stages, 170. [RETURN]
³⁰ Schwartz, 175. [RETURN]
³¹ Schwartz, 177. [RETURN]
³² Schwartz, 177. [RETURN]
³³ Katerina and Maria know each other from the good times they once shared in the big city. Since she thinks that Tzili is Maria's daughter, Katerina takes Tzili under her wing, educates her according to the values of her world, and exploits her as well. [RETURN]
³⁴ See Genesis: 37-50 [RETURN]
³⁵ About the expression of religious despair in Appelfeld's works in general and this story in particular, see Schwartz 143-194. [RETURN]
³⁶ The biblical striped coat (more commonly referred to in English as "the coat of many colors") is a cotton jacket embroidered with alternating, colored stripes. This type of jacket was considered prestigious, granted to loved ones to call attention to the respect in which they were held. Also Tamar wears a striped coat, a custom of the virgin daughters of the king. (Samuel II, 13:18). See Halperin, "Displaced by the Side of the Road," Hadoar 63, (1984), 506. [RETURN]
³⁷ "This symbol has once again become a real item of clothing, but with negative connotations, as the coat of the 'lost' La play on the Hebrew word for stripes-translator]: the striped pajamas of prisoners, worn by the victims of the Nazis in the concentration camps. The image of refugees in 'the striped coats they had been given by the Joint [Distribution] Committee' (184) on the ship making its way from Naples to Palestine, may be seen as a meta-realistic picture. On the realistic level, it simply represents the kind of new clothing the Jewish refugees received at the end the war, on their way to a new life. On the abstract symbolic level, it hints at idea that despite their liberation from the German murderers at the end of the war, the refugees have not been completely liberated from the imprisonment and enslavement that made their mark upon them, the uprooting from home, and the torture in the camps." Halperin, "Displaced". [RETURN]
³⁸ Schwartz, 174. [RETURN]

---