Main description:

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.

Contents:

Part I Ka-Tzetnik1. Shivitti (Hatsofen: The Code)2. The Secret of Ka-Tzetnik's Nightmare3. Losing the Source of Memory4. The Voiceless Voice of the Muselmann5. 'Writing or Life': Ka-Tzetnik Through the Prism of Semprun6. Hitler, Ka-Tzetnik, and KitschPart II Primo Levi7. Levi's Suicide as a Scandal8. Amery and Levi: Hostility Disguised as Admiration9. Levi's Suicide: Between Leaping and Falling10. The Grey Zone11. Kafka and Levi: Description of a Struggle12. The Price of Logic (or, Lorenzo)