This website uses cookies to help us give you the best experience when you visit our website. By continuing to use this website, you consent to our use of these cookies.
Yechiel Fajner (also known as Karl Tsetinski, Yechiel De-Nur, and Ka-Tzetnik 135633), author of six books on the Holocaust, wrote his first book (Salamandra) in Naples 1945. This article deals with the organic connection between the title “Salamandra” and the content of the novel against the background of the author’s Holocaust experience in Nazi ghettos and concentration camps (Auschwitz and Günthergrube). While considering himself a chronicler of the Holocaust, Ka-Tzetnik created a literary style making use of cultural and literary symbols found in world literature and Jewish literature (from the Talmud to modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature). One of his central symbols is rooted in the myth of the Salamander, which in this article is analyzed in detail via a discussion of Ka-Tzetnik’s different sources.
January 2005: Professor Yechiel Szeintuch teaches in the Department of Yiddish Language and Literature, Institute for Jewish Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His main fields of research are Yiddish literature in Poland in the twentieth century, the cultural history of the Jews during the Holocaust; the bilingual (Yiddish and Hebrew) work of Yechiel Fajner (Katzetnik) and Mordechai Strigler; East European Yiddish humor; and the Jewish underworld as reflected in Yiddish and Hebrew literature.
