This book is about Primo Levi and Ka-Tzetnik, both Auschwitz survivors and central figures in the shaping of Holocaust memory, who dedicated their lives to bearing witness and writing about the concentration camps, seeking, in particular, to give voice to those who did not return. The two writers are generally treated as complete opposites: Levi level-headed and self-aware, Ka-Tzetnik caught up in repeating the traumatic past. In this book I show how fundamentally mistaken this approach is, and how the similarity between them is, in fact, far greater than it may seem. While Levi draws the map, Ka-Tzetnik reveals the territory itself, and, taken together, they offer a better understanding of the human experience of the camps. This book explores their writing and their lives up to their deathsKa-Tzetnik of old age and Levi by his own handoffering new explanations of Levi's suicide, little understood to this day.

Offers the first study of Primo Levi and Yehiel Dinur (pen name Ka-Tzetnik) together Reveals how the two writers have much in common, questioning the established view that they embody different approaches to trauma Shows how the integration of their testimonial work enables us to understand in-depth their experiences as Auschwitz survivors, and the price of testimony

Autorentext

Yochai Ataria is an associate professor at Tel-Hai College, Israel. He is the author of Body Disownership in Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (2018) and The Structural Trauma of Western Culture (2017). He has also co-edited the Body Schema and Body Image (2021), Jean Améry: Beyond the Mind's Limits (2019), and Interdisciplinary Handbook of Culture and Trauma (2016).

Inhalt
Part I Ka-Tzetnik.- 1. Shivitti ( Hatsofen : The Code).- 2. The Secret of Ka-Tzetnik's Nightmare.- 3. Losing the Source of Memory.- 4. The Voiceless Voice of the Muselmann.- 5. 'Writing or Life': Ka-Tzetnik Through the Prism of Semprún.- 6. Hitler, Ka-Tzetnik, and Kitsch.- Part II Primo Levi.- 7. Levi's Suicide as a Scandal.- 8. Améry and Levi: Hostility Disguised as Admiration.- 9. Levi's Suicide: Between Leaping and Falling.- 10. The Grey Zone.- 11. Kafka and Levi: Description of a Struggle.- 12. The Price of Logic (or, Lorenzo). <b