‘House of Dolls,’ I continued, ‘made Ka-Tzetnik famous, right? In the sixties and seventies, House of Dolls was taught in every Israeli school as fact. House of Dolls sold over five million copies. It was studied and read as the worst-case scenario, i.e., the ultimate degradation: the sexual exploitation of the teenaged, blond Euro Jew.’
‘You know that that book has been discounted as pornography,’ Sugarman said.
‘Yes, and I also know that we have enough brains to understand the polymorphous ways people process suffering!’ I screamed.
‘You look skinny, you look tired. Are you sure that you’re eating? Taking your meds?’ Sugarman stared at me,
unmoved.
‘Look,’ I said, shaking, trying to compose myself, convince her. ‘According to the Holocaust scholars, you are right, yes, Ka-Tzetnik 135633’s House of Dolls is not “true” – and it definitely is not based on any teen prostitute’s diary. House of Dolls, according to the Holocaust scholars, is nothing more than overwritten kitsch. Holocaust scholars, you’re right, are all in agreement: there were no Jewish whores at Auschwitz. Holocaust scholars remind us that, according to the law at that time, German men weren’t even allowed to have sex with Jewish women. The Joy Division at Ravensbrück, for example, was staffed with former Communists and Polish sex workers.’
‘Okay, good, so we’re sort of on the same page,’ Sugarman said.
‘But what I will put forth in The Goat Humper and the Schizophrenic is that it does not really matter if there were literal Jewish whores at Auschwitz because traumatized people like Ka-Tzetnik tell the truth. In order to confess, one has to lie, Kafka said.’
‘Can’t you feel you’re stepping into quicksand?’
‘No.’
Sugarman pounded her fist on her desk. ‘This should not be your focus. Why is this your focus? Focus on the text. Leave and don’t come back until you can focus on the proper meaning of the narrative.’
In Ka-Tzetnik’s House of Dolls, survival meant trickery and sexual pain. Daniela was sterilized. Barbra flashed through my head.
‘You can’t just breeze over the most formative experience of the man’s life,’ Sugarman said. ‘You have to tell us how Ka-Tzetnik’s suffering at Auschwitz made him a writer. He wrote all those books about Auschwitz, right? He wrote about female suffering and sexual subjugation. What did this do to his language? What does this all mean?’
It means that, yes, female sexual subjugation was real but sometimes it was also a mirage – like in pornography! Come on, doctor, look at some porn!
I took a deep breath. I felt like I was losing this thing.
‘Ka-Tzetnik 135633 is actually more like a pornographer than any kind of documentarian,’ I said to Sugarman, doing my best imitation of a rising academic star. I had to forcefully clip Barbra’s spread-open cunt lips and cunt bell out of my head.
Sugarman bristled.
‘And so, uh, his pornographic slant is what makes his work coded and feminist, meaning important to explore. Coded and feminist transgression,’ I insisted, ‘is not a lie. It should not be rejected. I don’t care if we’re talking about Auschwitz, all right?’
‘Ka-Tzetnik is a survivor,’ Sugarman said. ‘That’s fact. And if you’re going to focus on his work, you have to understand that the texts of Ka-Tzetnik 135633 are essentially texts of witness and survival. Non-fiction, auto-fiction, science fiction – call it what you want, I don’t care. But if you don’t show me that you have understood multivalent critical theories on Holocaust literature, then I cannot be convinced that you understand your own starting point.’
‘House of Dolls is my starting point! Pulp, porn, lies: the fist of art. It’s phantasm. She-wolves. This woman inside my basement. There were no Jewish whores in Auschwitz, fine, but there was racism, sexism, buckets of jism…’
Sugarman spilled bright yellow Gatorade all over her papers.
Ka-Tzetnik wrote books to try to release his suffering. Barbra drank wine to release her suffering. She followed me around our house with a knife.
‘I think you should leave now,’ Sugarman said.
‘Trauma’s a branch of pornography, doctor! It’s the release of suffering from the lab of suffering!’
I heard Barbra’s dithering moans. I smelled her vomit again. I wanted to tell the whole world that I was not like Joel and all those other numbskull porn fans: in porn is latent joy, full-blown suffering.
‘Sugarman, human beings need pornography to work out their trauma,’ I kept going. ‘This aspect of Ka-Tzetnik’s work was not supposed to be misunderstood!’
‘I think we’ve talked enough about your project for today,’ Sugarman said, standing up behind her desk with her phone.
Sugarman’s husband emerged in my mind as some taxman-type cog squirming around at his desk. Dude shot her up with multiple sperm.
I stood my ground and forced Sugarman to keep listening to me. ‘When the ragged survivor who renamed himself Karl Tzetnisky arrived in Palestine armed with his first novel,’ I said, ‘he changed his name to Yehiel Dinur. Dinur was sprayed with DDT at a holding camp. His head was measured. He was fingerprinted.’
‘DDT? Where are you getting this? Stop.’