The symbolic image of the ‘heap’ of corpses in Itsik Kipnis: writing the pogrom in Yiddish literature

Faced with the pogroms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Jewish writers in the Russian Empire felt an urgent need to bear witness. Two major developments led to heaps of corpses becoming an established image in Yiddish literature: the imperative to testify becoming more secular and more intense within the Jewish world at the end of the nineteenth century, and the aesthetic transformations of the early twentieth century, with the introduction of modernist currents into Yiddish writing. Testimonies of mass violence are hybrid: they take us beyond fixed categories and collapse the distinction between realism and modernist fantasy – a tension vividly exemplified by the motif of the heap of corpses. Taking Khadoshim un teg: A khronik ( Months and Days: A Chronicle ) by Itsik Kipnis (1926) as a case study, this article shows that this image has referential, symbolic, aesthetic, and critical dimensions that seek to foster remembrance.