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Primo Levi and Ka-Tzetnik

The Map and the Territory

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  • © 2021

Overview

Authors:
  1. Yochai Ataria

    1. Tel Hai Academic College, Upper Galilee, Israel

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  • 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

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Table of contents (12 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xxix
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  2. Ka-Tzetnik

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1
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    2. Shivitti (Hatsofen: The Code)

      • Yochai Ataria
      Pages 3-18

    3. The Secret of Ka-Tzetnik’s Nightmare

      • Yochai Ataria
      Pages 19-40

    4. Losing the Source of Memory

      • Yochai Ataria
      Pages 41-49

    5. The Voiceless Voice of the Muselmann

      • Yochai Ataria
      Pages 51-73

    6. ‘Writing or Life’: Ka-Tzetnik Through the Prism of Semprún

      • Yochai Ataria
      Pages 75-84

    7. Hitler, Ka-Tzetnik, and Kitsch

      • Yochai Ataria
      Pages 85-90

  3. Primo Levi

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 91-91
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    2. Levi’s Suicide as a Scandal

      • Yochai Ataria
      Pages 93-102

    3. Améry and Levi: Hostility Disguised as Admiration

      • Yochai Ataria
      Pages 103-112

    4. Levi’s Suicide: Between Leaping and Falling

      • Yochai Ataria
      Pages 113-132

    5. The Grey Zone

      • Yochai Ataria
      Pages 133-164

    6. Kafka and Levi: Description of a Struggle

      • Yochai Ataria
      Pages 165-188

    7. The Price of Logic (or, Lorenzo)

      • Yochai Ataria
      Pages 189-194

  4. Back Matter

    Pages 195-224
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Keywords

About this book

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.

Authors and Affiliations

  • Tel Hai Academic College, Upper Galilee, Israel

    Yochai Ataria

About the author

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).

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Primo Levi and Ka-Tzetnik

  • Book Subtitle: The Map and the Territory

  • Authors: Yochai Ataria

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76743-3

  • Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham

  • eBook Packages: Behavioral Science and Psychology, Behavioral Science and Psychology (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-76742-6Published: 15 July 2021

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-76745-7Published: 15 July 2022

  • eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-76743-3Published: 14 July 2021

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XXIX, 224

  • Number of Illustrations: 5 b/w illustrations

  • Topics: History of Psychology, Psychotherapy and Counseling, Philosophy of Mind

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