Zizi

Inspired by actual accounts.
“The story is told through the eyes of Zizi Novak, whose testament to the pain and suffering in communism is reminiscent of the “Diary of Anna Frank” and “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.”
Louis Garfinkle, the original writer of the Deer Hunter
Zizi chronicles the account of a noble family whose desperate struggle for survival attests to the boundlessness of the human spirit to rise triumphantly. During the violent years of World War Two, Zizi Novak is born prematurely in the Hungarian countryside to a noble family. While the Germans attack and the Soviets terrorize the countryside raping and pillaging the villages, the Novak’s escape to Austria, leaving the weak baby Zizi behind in the care of Grandmother Isabella. She carries the child back home from the Hungarian/Austrian border when she stumbles upon Paul, an eight-year-old Yiddish boy buried alive on a frozen lake under his parents’ dead bodies. Isabella saves the boy, and the three become a makeshift family. When the Novak’s return for Zizi, the Iron Curtain traps them for the next twelve years.

After the 1956 Hungarian uprising is crushed, Zizi, her two sisters, and mother make a harrowing escape into the Austrian Alps. They arrive in an Austrian refugee camp where a twist of fate brings Zizi to the attention of the distraught wife of Vienna’s mayor. She resembles their deceased daughter, and the mayor’s wife wants to make Zizi her own. At the mayor’s home, Zizi encounters the deceased girl’s spirit, and the two girls ultimately produce miraculous results.

The Novak’s begin anew in America. Five years later, Zizi’s rise to International stardom as a highly sought-after supermodel brings her to the Cannes Film Festival, where she is introduced to an up-and-coming Hungarian film director who is none other than Paul, the boy her grandmother saved.ABOUT THE AUTHOR