This essay examines the moral dimension of Jewish survival during the Holocaust as portrayed in the Salamandra sextet by Yehiel Dinur, known as “Ka-Tzetnik 135633.” Critics such as Omer Bartov and Iris Milner observe a collective process of social and moral disintegration among Ka-Tzetnik’s characters — reflecting factual occurrences familiar from the work of survivors and scholars, such as Primo Levi, Eugen Kogon, or Wolfgang Sofsky. My close reading of Ka-Tzetnik’s novels, in contrast, suggests that Salamandra (1946), House of Dolls (1953) and Piepel (1961) abound in acts that demonstrate how solidarity and humanity were retained among Jews in the camps and ghettos. Furthermore, following James Phelan’s recent work on literary ethics, I show that this type of acts is in fact accentuated in the novels’ rhetorical design, which constructs the author’s moral viewpoint as the upholding of spiritual and moral values in resistance to the Nazi genocide.

June 2016: Or Rogovin (Ph.D. 2012, University of Washington) is the Silbermann Family Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern Hebrew at the Department of Languages, Cultures, and Linguistics at Bucknell University. His areas of research and teaching include Modern Jewish Literatures, Holocaust Studies, and narrative theory, especially responses to the Holocaust in Hebrew and Israeli literature. Recent publications:

“‘Count him a human being’: David Grossman’s See Under: Love and Holocaust Perpetrators in Israeli Fiction” (forthcoming in Prooftexts).

“The Limits of Holocaust Representation in the Fiction of the 1948 Generation.” Iyunim Be-Tekumat Israel 23(2013):176–203 (in Hebrew).

“Chelm as Shtetl: Y. Y. Trunk’s Khelemer khakhomim.” Prooftexts, 29:2 (2010): 242–272.