Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death

Reflections on Memory and Imagination

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Winner of the JEWISH QUARTERLY WINGATE PRIZE 2014

Sent as a child first to the ghetto of Theresienstadt then on to Auschwitz, survivor Otto Dov Kulka spent a lifetime studying the Holocaust. In these illustrated deeply personal reflections he brings to shocking and moving life moments and fragments of memory he cannot forget.

'Fewer still will know that for a decade I made tape-recordings which allowed me to describe the images that well up in my memory and explore the remembrance of what in my private mythology is called "The Metropolis of Death", or in deceptive simplicity: 'Childhood Landscapes of Auschwitz".'

Translated by Ralph Mandel.

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

Panel of Judges, Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize

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

Ian Thomson, Telegraph

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

Sir Ian Kershaw

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

Thomas Laqueur, 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

Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times

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

Simon Schama, Financial Times

About Otto Dov Kulka

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.

Details

Imprint: Penguin
Published: 24/09/2020
ISBN: 9780718197025
Length: 144 pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 8mm x 129mm
Weight: 112g
Price: £10.99

All editions

Paperback 2020
Ebook 2013

Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death

Reflections on Memory and Imagination

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