Killing the Second Dog
1985 novel by Marek Hłasko
Killing the Second Dog (Polish: Drugie zabicie psa) is a novel by Polish writer Marek Hłasko. The novel, published in 1965, is the first in his so-called "Israeli trilogy", a series of novels following the exploits of Jacob and Robert, con-artists who prey on women.
Background
Hłasko, who had left communist Poland in 1958, landed in Israel in 1959. Unable to find work or fit into Israeli society, he lived as a vagrant, though his income from previous publications staved off destitution. By 1960 he had moved again, to West Germany. The semi-autobiographical Killing the Second Dog was published in 1965, followed the next year by Nawrócony w Jaffie ("Converted in Jaffa"). The third part of the trilogy is the novella Opowiem wam o Esther ("I want to tell you about Esther").
Content
Jacob (in whom we should see the author, according to Arnon Grunberg) and Robert are con men in Tel Aviv who prey on single women who visit Israel. The con starts with Jacob, posing as a sensitive and helpless man, gaining the women's trust and manipulating them into "saving" him. He then pretends, racked by guilt over an event in his past, to want to commit suicide; he doesn't, but instead kills his dog to indicate how emotionally destitute he is.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 16, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q17155320. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1965, 1958, 1959 and 1960.
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This entry incorporates text from “Killing the Second Dog” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.