Two Travelogues: Bialik's "In the City of Slaughter" and Levi's If This Is a Man

Abstract

Reading Bialik's "Be'ir hahareigah" in 2004 involves confronting the reader's experience of Holocaust literature. To deal with this problem, I compare Bialik's great poem with Primo Levi's If This Is a Man (Survival in Auschwitz), since each work represents significant features in the literary articulation of traumatic events. While both are generically travelogues, Bialik leads us through a knowable scene of destruction, and Levi must guide us through a hitherto unknown locale of dehumanization, the Lager. The specific modality of each work determines its emplotment and its language.