Fayner’s Fire: The Making of a Destructivist

• In Event: The Spaces and Specters of Holocaust Memorialization

Abstract

The writer Yehiel Dinur, otherwise known as Ka-Tzetnik 135633, is best known no longer for his literary corpus, but for two memorable events: his fainting while giving testimony at the 1961 Eichmann trial, and his infamous book burning of 1993. In both cases, prominent figures took issue with Dinur’s actions and made their condemnation public and authoritative. In the former, Hannah Arendt painted Dinur as the prototypical unsuitable witness, a feeble thespian, and a distraction if not a destructive force in the proceedings of a most historical trial. And when Dinur stole a rare copy of his prewar book of poetry from the National Library of Israel, purportedly burnt it, and sent back the remains together with instructions to reduce the rest to ashes like all that was dear to him had burned in the Auschwitz crematoria, the renowned scholar Dan Miron established Dinur’s actions to be symptoms of mental instability, egomania, and a proclivity for the melodramatic.

I propose to reconceptualize Ka-Tzetnik as not just a poet and novelist, but as event artist, and as what we will come to call a destructivist. This proposed mode of reading will help take Ka-Tzetnik out from his secluded cell somewhere between Israeli and Holocaust literature, put him in conversation with the Yiddish literature from which he sprang and with which he persisted, and expose him to a world of likeminded contemporaries that though working in a variety of countries and in a variety of mediums, they are all dealing with the same trauma and speaking the same language: the language of destruction. These are artists like Gustav Metzger and Otto Muehl who respond to their wartime trauma—although not Auschwitz survivors—with destruction. I argue that Ka-Tzetnik’s evolution can be traced from his prewar years as a Yiddish expressionist poet of stark destructive visuals, to polished postwar destructivist-realist writer of both prose and verse, to his most realized and fulfilled role as destructivist performance artist.

Author

• Raphael Halff, Tel Aviv University, Goldreich Family Institute for Yiddish Language