Yitskhok Katsenelson’s "Dos lid fun oysgehargetn yidishn folk" : the poet’s path to Sheol

Yitskhok Katsenelson was born on July 1st, 1886 in Karelichy and was murdered in Auschwitz on May 1st, 1944. He was a poet and playwright creating in Hebrew and Yiddish, as well as a teacher and translator. The world knows him only from one single poetic text, Dos lid fun oysgehargetn yidishn folk [The Song of the Murdered Jewish People], written from October 1943 to January 1944 during the poet’s imprisonment in a German internment camp in Vittel. In order to ensure the publication of his work after the war he made several copies of the text. One of the manuscripts was smuggled out to Palestine in a handle of a suitcase. In our paper we off er a discussion of the poem in the context of memory and trauma studies.