Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death

The greatest book on Auschwitz since Primo Levi … Kulka has achieved the impossible: a mythological and strangely beautiful new language for living with Auschwitz … a book as mighty as it is modest
Of the many accounts of survival in the Nazi concentration camps - Jewish and non-Jewish - few approach Otto Dov Kulka’s for the quality of its writing and attempt to understand the nature of contemporary barbarism … one of the essential books of our age; not since Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table has there been such a powerful holocaust memoir … the writing, at times trance-like, creates an extraordinary sense of communion and intimacy with the reader … in pained but lucid prose Kulka seeks to understand how his memory processed the trauma of Auschwitz * Telegraph *
‘A poetic masterpiece unlike anything else written on the subject’ * Telegraph BOOKS OF THE YEAR *
This is one of the most remarkable testimonies to inhumanity that I know. The deeply moving recollections of Dov Kulka’s boyhood years in Auschwitz, interwoven with reflections of elegiac, poetic quality, vividly convey the horror of the death-camp, the trauma of family and friends, and the indelible imprint left on the memory of a young boy who became a distinguished historian of the Holocaust. An extraordinarily important work which needs to be read
Astonishing … [Landscapes] is, quite simply, extraordinary … a sort of Modernist precipitate of a historical work, something strange and powerful formed from, but separate to, the solution of history … I can’t see how this book could be bettered * Times Higher Education *
Almost unclassifiable … Nothing else I have read comes close to this profound examination of what the Holocaust means … [Kulka’s] journey strikes me as a quest similar to the attempt to describe the face of God or the structure of the universe. They are too vast and too mysterious. Not that this stops us, or this author, from trying * New Statesman *
Primo Levi’s testimony, it is often said, is that of a chemist: clear, cool, precise, distant. So with Kulka’s work: this is the product of a master historian - ironic, probing, present in the past, able to connect the particular with the cosmic. His memory is in the service of deep historical understanding, rendered in evocative prose that is here eloquently translated from Hebrew * Guardian *
Beautiful, startling … This is a great book: read it. And be grateful - its publication is, in every possible sense, a miracle … It is the strange and shocking paradox, this child’s world constructed in such proximity to death, that makes the book so startling and so beautiful. Every incident is, in effect, seen twice: through the eyes of the historian and the eyes of a boy … This is not history, it is something else… his words enter the wider sphere of literature * Sunday Times *
Kulka’s reflections have an unsettling rawness … yet even in Auschwitz, there are moments of protest, black humour and beauty … This is a grave, poetic and horrifying account of the Holocaust which does not so much revisit the Auschwitz of the past, but the Auschwitz of Kulka’s inner world * Independent *
This is not so much a book about Auschwitz as one about coming to terms with the shock of survival … Amid fragmentary, digressive impressions are images of terrible poetic concreteness … What, ultimately, makes Kulka’s book unlike any other first-hand account written about the camps is the authenticity of its vision of an 11-year-old boy… He has done the rest of us - and the world - so great a kindness by writing his book … offer[ing] the barest glint of sunlight amid a thunderous darkness * Financial Times *

Otto Dov Kulka was born in Czechoslovakia in 1933, and died in Israel in 2021. He was Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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