by Ka-Tzetnik 135633
First edition of the House of Dolls
author's rare first book in Hebrew
Tel Aviv, Palestine: The Dvir Co. Ltd, 1946. 287 pp. Publisher's paper-covered boards with brown cloth backstrip, lettered in gilt. In Hebrew. First edition. Very Good with bumped corners and edge wear, edges foxed. The very first book by Yehiel Dinur, the Holocaust survivor who wrote House of Dolls and his other works under the pen name of the number tattooed on his arm, Ka-Tzetnik 135633. This autobiographical novel was written in Yiddish in a hospital in Italy in a matter of two weeks, and printed in 1946, long before the horrors of the concentration camps were common knowledge in the West. It would be translated into English and published in 1977 as Sunrise Over Hell. Rare.