#3 / Editorial

K.’s third edition presents us with a chance for a respite from political reportage and historical chronicle, as we take a bracing detour into the world of literature. Fiction, in a more subtle manner, makes demands on the reader, as much as it documents and examines social questions. Fiction and poetry can penetrate to the truth of a situation, and sometimes the literary perspective has the greatest clarity of view. For Avrom Sutzkever, the great Yiddish poet and one of the Nuremberg Trials’ rare survivor-witnesses, the view is clearest in a liminal space, “the limit of the dream when a dream is possible, the limit of a nightmare when it occurs,” as scholar and French-language translator Rachel Ertel explains. Ertel, a friend of the late poet, a companion to him during his visits to Paris, illuminates the experiences that were most formative for him, such as when he asked himself in the Vilnius Ghetto in 1943 whether he was “the last poet of Europe.” In a later time, in a less dire hour, Nathalie Azoulai publishes in K. this week a searching short story on the weakening of Holocaust memory, tied to the inexorable passing of survivors and the loss of their living testimony. K. will regularly print original short stories and translations. But next week, for our fourth edition, we will return to the hurly-burly of politics and the clash over a contemporary definition of antisemitism. The resurgence of violent acts of antisemitism since the start of the twenty-first century has made such a definition a pressing task. Becoming more aware of this renaissance of Jew-hatred, long considered as a relic, international bodies (notably the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance), sought to aid the fight against antisemitism in articulating a definition of antisemitism. Nonetheless, as we will see, the reality of a resurgence in antisemitism has been liable to produce a debate over how to define this phenomenon.