![]() “At the first shots, our chubby, round-faced cousin David, who was always clumsy at gymnastics and sports, climbed a tree and wrapped his arms around the trunk like a child hugging his mother, and that was the way he died.” Consider this, from the book’s opening story: It’s unadorned, certainly, but with a stripped leanness of tone that sharpens, rather than muffles, its impact. I don’t know how much her style changed between then and the publication of A Scrap of Time, her first book, in 1983 (published in English in 1987, translated from Polish by Madeline Levine and Francine Prose), but subdued isn’t the word I’d use to describe it. Her entry in the Jewish Women’s Archive says that editors discouraged her from writing, finding it “too subdued and subtle”. They spent the rest of the war hiding in plain sight as foreign workers in Nazi Germany.įink immigrated to Israel in the 50s, where she began to write fiction based on her experiences of the Holocaust. After that she was confined to the Zbaraż ghetto until 1942, when she and her sister secured counterfeit papers that identified them as Aryans. She wanted to be a pianist, and was studying at the Lvov Conservatory when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. (At the end of the second world war the town fell within the Soviet Union’s expanded borders, and is now in Ukraine). Tzetnik's series of six novels that.Fink was born in 1921 in Zbaraż, in eastern Poland. With the exception of Shivitti, (9) the last of Ka. (7) Reflecting solely the perspective of the victims who were captured within its boundaries, and avoiding almost any panoramic view of historical affairs, his texts are confined to the territory enclosed by the electric fences surrounding the "concentrationary universe." (8) Tzetnik presented a realistic portrayal of the world of extermination as a closed system, detached from any surrounding context. (6) Whereas other writers of the time expressed an almost exclusive concern with how the Yishuv (the prestate Jewish settlement in Palestine) responded to the Shoah and the relations between the survivors and Israeli society, Ka. Tzetnik's works constitute a uniquely direct confrontation with those events. In the context of the relatively limited belletristic responses to the Holocaust that characterized the Israeli cultural arena during the late 1940s and 1950s, Ka. (4) It was on the witness stand at the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961 that Dinur revealed himself as the person behind the novels, which by then had attracted wide attention. More than a decade was to pass before the identity of its author, previously known only by his pseudonym, became familiar to the general public. (1) Together with his two following novels, Beit ha-bubot (House of Dolls) (2) and Piepel, (3) it was the first work to expose Israeli society to the details of Jewish suffering under the Nazi regime and to the inside of the concentration Lager (camp) in particular. His novel Salamandra was written in Yiddish in 1945 in an Italian Displaced Persons camp, where he had arrived after two years in Auschwitz, and appeared in its Hebrew translation a few months later under the pseudonym Ka. Yehiel Dinur is the author of one of the first literary representations of the Nazi concentration camps published in Israel. Tzetnik, concentrationary universe, dehumanization, gray zone, literary testimony Tzetnik's emphatic representation of existence in this "situation at the limits" is understood in relation to works by such authors as Jorge Semprun, Charlotte Delbo, Ida Fink, and Tadeusz Borowski. Tzetnik's oeuvre, this article presents it as a unique, daring, and nonjudgmental literary testimony to the "inside" of the Lager as a gray zone, a testimony that defies Levi's distinction between "the drowned" and "the saved." Ka. ![]() Tzetnik's novels Salamandra, Piepel, and House of Dolls are read in this article within the context of the polemic over the Jewish victims' alleged collaboration with the Nazi annihilation system-a polemic generated after World War II by Bruno Bettelheim, Raul Hilberg, Hannah Arendt, and others, and revived by Primo Levi in his last book, The Drowned and the Saved (1986). He became known to the public on the witness stand of the Eichmann trial in 1962. This article discusses the literary representation of the "concentrationary universe" in the works of Yehiel Dinur, the Yiddish and Hebrew author who published under the pseudonym Ka.
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