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 deaths—Ka-Tzetnik of old age and Levi by his own hand—offering new explanations of Levi’s suicide, little understood to this day.

Holocaust History and the Readings of Ka-Tzetnik provides the first extensive exploration of the reception of Ka-Tzetnik's work and the role that his books have played in the larger discussion of the Holocaust and its memorialization around the world. Including contributions from an international and interdisciplinary group of experienced scholars, the book examines the literary merits, historical context and public resonance of Ka-Tzetnik's stories. It also places his novels in the context of post-WWII debates about how the memories and testimonies of the victims of the Holocaust can be represented and made publicly accessible through literature. There is also detailed coverage of key topics, like Holocaust memory and sexual violence in the concentration camps, and thorough historical analysis of key works like House of Dolls included throughout. This is an important study for all scholars and students with an interest in the Holocaust and Holocaust literature.

The legacy of antifascist partisan, Auschwitz survivor, and author Primo Levi continues to drive exciting interdisciplinary scholarship. The contributions to this intellectually rich, tightly organized volume - from many of the world's foremost Levi scholars - show a remarkable breadth across fields as varied as ethics, memory, and media studies.

Rethinking the concepts of "witnessing" and "witness" is highly relevant to the study of war crimes, mass murder and genocide. Through multiple readings, the volume shows the meanings and functions of witnessing in a political and historical context marked by the emergence of multiculturalism. The ultimate goal is the exploration of divergent and intersectional positions of the witness and witnessing as both concrete and hermeneutical categories. As a result, the mechanisms of social, political, and psychological oppression, murder and genocide will become tangible and understandable with greater precision and finesse.

The Zionist pedagogical narrative reproduced in schoolbooks views the migration of Jews to Israel as the felicitous conclusion of the journey from the Holocaust to the Resurrection. It negates all forms of diasporic Jewish life and culture and ignores the history of Palestine during the 2000-year-long Jewish “exile.” This narrative otherizes three main groups vis-à-vis whom Israeliness is constituted: Holocaust victims, who are presented in a traumatizing manner as the stateless and therefore persecuted Jews “we” refuse but might become again if “we” lose control over Palestinian Arabs, who constitute the second group of “others.” Palestinians are racialized, demonized, and portrayed as “our” potential exterminators. The third group of “others” comprises non-European (Mizrahi and Ethiopian) Jews. They are described as backward people who lack history or culture and must undergo constant acculturation to fit into Israel’s “Western” society. Thus, a rhetoric of victimhood and power evolves, and a nationalistic interpretation of the “never again” imperative is inculcated, justifying the Occupation and oppression of Palestinians and the marginalization of non-European Jews. This rhetoric is conveyed multimodally through discourse, genres, and visual elements. The present study, which advocates a multidirectional memory, proposes an alternative Hebrew-Arabic, multi-voiced and poly-centered curriculum that would relate the accounts of the people whom the pedagogic narrative seeks to conceal and exclude. This joint curriculum will differ from the present one not only in content but also ideologically and semiotically. Instead of traumatizing and urging vengeance, it will encourage discussion and celebrate diversity and hybridity.

Now available in paperback for the first time, Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century is both a comprehensive reference resource and a springboard for further study. This volume: examines canonical Jewish writers, less well-known authors of Yiddish and Hebrew, and emerging Israeli writers includes entries on figures as diverse as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, and Woody Allen contains introductory essays on Jewish-American writing, Holocaust literature and memoirs, Yiddish writing, and Anglo-Jewish literature provides a chronology of twentieth-century Jewish writers. Compiled by expert contributors, this book contains over 330 entries on individual authors, each consisting of a biography, a list of selected publications, a scholarly essay on their work and suggestions for further reading.

Presents the life of the Italian Jewish author, examining his dual intellectual role as a scientist and writer and the legacy of his works in which he details his life as a survivor of Auschwitz.

The turn of the twenty-first century saw the rise of a brand of fiction that centres the experience and perspective of the perpetrator, thereby humanizing this character and granting it the capability to evoke our empathy. The vast scholarship published on this phenomenon, however, fails to consider Israeli writing, and with it some of the most complex characterizations of Holocaust perpetrators, imagined from the unparalleled position of a nation that was shaped from its very birth by the legacy of Holocaust victimhood and survival. In Created in the Image? Or Rogovin situates Israeli literary responses to the Holocaust in the canon of perpetrator fiction for the first time. Since the state’s establishment in 1948, perpetrator characterization in Israeli fiction has demonstrated a remarkable development that corresponds to changing circumstances, from the Eichmann trial to the First Intifada. While early examples depicted perpetrators stereotypically and minimally - as seen in Ka-Tzetnik’s demonic and bestial Nazis in Salamandra and in the amorphous persecutor figures in Aharon Appelfeld’s stories - since the mid-1980s these characters have been created in the human image, as nuanced and multidimensional individuals. The turning point came with Herr Neigel, the sensitive and self-contradictory commandant in David Grossman’s See Under: Love (1986), followed by likewise multifaceted and humanized perpetrators in fiction by A.B. Yehoshua, Savyon Liebrecht, and Amir Gutfreund. Anchored in theoretical and comparative perspectives, Created in the Image? presents a groundbreaking analysis of the poetic mechanisms, moral implications, and historical contexts of this paradigm shift in the Israeli literary response to the Shoah.

This book presents a baker's dozen of interpretative keys to Levi's output and thought. It deepens our understanding of common themes in Levi studies (memory and witness) while exploring unusual and revealing byways (Levi and Calvino, or Levi and theater, for example).

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post and Library Journal A Holiday Gift Guide Selection in the San Francisco Chronicle and Newsday A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection The Complete Works of Primo Levi, which includes seminal works like If This Is a Man and The Periodic Table, finally gathers all fourteen of Levi’s books—memoirs, essays, poetry, commentary, and fiction—into three slipcased volumes. Primo Levi, the Italian-born chemist once described by Philip Roth as that “quicksilver little woodland creature enlivened by the forest’s most astute intelligence,” has largely been considered a heroic figure in the annals of twentieth-century literature for If This Is a Man, his haunting account of Auschwitz. Yet Levi’s body of work extends considerably beyond his experience as a survivor. Now, the transformation of Levi from Holocaust memoirist to one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers culminates in this publication of The Complete Works of Primo Levi. This magisterial collection finally gathers all of Levi’s fourteen books—memoirs, essays, poetry, and fiction—into three slip-cased volumes. Thirteen of the books feature new translations, and the other is newly revised by the original translator. Nobel laureate Toni Morrison introduces Levi’s writing as a “triumph of human identity and worth over the pathology of human destruction.” The appearance of this historic publication will occasion a major reappraisal of “one of the most valuable writers of our time” (Alfred Kazin). The Complete Works of Primo Levi features all new translations of: The Periodic Table, The Drowned and the Saved, The Truce, Natural Histories, Flaw of Form, The Wrench, Lilith, Other People’s Trades, and If Not Now, When?—as well as all of Levi’s poems, essays, and other nonfiction work, some of which have never appeared before in English.