Holocaust survivor story of Dan Pagis
Iâve long felt that one of the most immediate of the numerous challenges confronting me as a relatively new teacher in the Holocaust Studies classroom is the question of the studentsâ role.[1] Perhaps excepting the few students who will be initially attracted to this grim subject for the voyeuristic journey into human suffering, most students will want to immediately consider some form of moral situatedness in relation to the grim narratives of atrocity that are intrinsic to such courses. And, even in the event of the former, I have often been deeply moved to see that students can be startledâin the courseâs very first dayâinto glimpsing a new paradigm of readership, gaining insight into participating in an ethical role that can be described as ethical witnessing for the witness, or readerly agency, particularly after a close encounter with the lyrics of Dan Pagis.
First, a little background. Often considered alongside Aharon Appelfeld and Paul Celan, Dan Pagis (1930-1986) is representative of a unique generation of post-Holocaust writers who were born in the polyglot and culturally rich environment of the Bukovina area of Romania (formerly Austria, now the Ukraine). Born in 1930, Pagis had already experienced severe disorientation and loss even before the Holocaust, first with the emigration of his father to Palestine in 1934, then the early death of his mother not long after, culminating in his deportation at the age of eleven. Years later it emerged that, after his motherâs death, the family in Bukovina were convinced that the widower in Palestine would be unable to support the child. Unable to find foreign havenâunlike Appelfeld and Celan who were fortunate enough to escape the campsâPagis was incarcerated by the Nazis for three years. He never learned the fate of his grandparents. After spending his early adolescence in concentration camps in Transnistria, Pagis reached Palestine in 1946 where he was reunited with his father (though reportedly years of estrangement followed into adult life) and taught school on a kibbutz. Eventually, Pagis began to write and publish poems in Hebrew, closely mentored by the poet Leah Goldberg (1911-70). Whereas it has often been argued that Paul Celan remained committed to an enigmatic language of his own making, perhaps unsure until his eventual suicide of its destination or audience, Pagis had to cope with the challenge of addressing a clearly defined audience of Israelis who, though engaged in a collective act of repatriation, were perhaps somewhat ambivalent in their response to the presence of Holocaust survivors. And yet by the end of his life, he enjoyed literary celebrity as one of Israelâs most popular poets, whose radical skepticism reconnected the Israeli imagination to the ever-disruptive past. Pagis died in Jerusalem in 1986. Precisely because he avoided both conventional forms of commemoration as well as the archetypal role of witness embodied by Elie Wiesel (and never spoke for Israel in the widely popular and officially recognized ways that Yehudah Amichai did), Pagisâs poetry, as Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, one of PagisÂŽs most attentive and eloquent readers, argues, âblast[s] a hole in the culture so large that it exposes and undermines its deepest structures [to] claim a radical public presenceâ(âVariable Directions Book Review,â37). Like Ezrahi, my students and I have gradually awakened to the disturbing awareness that his poetry denies the consolations of conventional narratives of finding security after catastrophe, not least in its radical unease over any safe definition of homeland. As I will explain shortly, in this and other ways, Pagis utterly disrupts the readerâs own world.
           I like to teach with Lawrence Langerâs Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology (Oxford), particularly for its scope and attention to the various ways that genre contributes to the studentsâ encounter with narratives of trauma. Langerâs anthology encompasses excerpts from ghetto diaries, essays by Levi and Wiesel, short fiction by Ida Fink and many others, novels and novellas by Sobol and Appelfeld, and even haunting reproductions of art created in Terezin. But I am most impressed by the space alloted to the often neglected testimony of poetry, especially the judicious gleanings from Abraham Sutzkever, Paul Celan, MiklĂłs RadnĂłti, and Nelly Sachs. An additional strength of the anthology is Langerâs sober-minded attention to the demands that each genre makes on its grim subject matter. Teachers who may be somewhat ill at ease in approaching this material for the first time couldnât hope for a better guide, particularly in Langerâs cautionary approach to the relation between poetry and trauma: âHolocaust poetry should not be mistaken for a renewal of the spirit or used as a reason for redressing the cruelty of the doom it reflects. Its true legacy is a tribute to the resilience of language and the ability of the artistic imagination to meet a chaoric challenge and with sheer inventive skill change it into durable, if often difficult and unfamiliar poetic formsâ(Art From the Ashes 559). In this regard I should add here that I am especially drawn to the collection because it happens to contain the best representation of Pagisâs shorter lyrics currently available in any Holocaust anthology and Langerâs illuminating introductions to each poet provide students with engaging and informative contexts. Though the Pagis selection appears toward the latter half of the weighty volume, it is here that my class always begins.
I have been thinking about the profound pedagogical potential that Dan Pagisâs lines can offer the literature classroom ever since first encountering Sara Harowitzâs explication of the poem in a Holocaust Educational Foundation workshop where we wrestled with much the same existential questions that the poem continues to raise for my students. I remain inspired by her rigorous questioning on that ocassion, and so, almost invariably, I like to begin the first or second day of class with Dan Pagisâs famous poem of incomplete witnessing, âWritten in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Carâ (âKatuv bâiparon bakaron hehatumâ) where humanityâs sense of progress is undermined as the ominous beginnings of human community glares through present history like a murderous palimpsest:[2]
                                               here in this carload
                                               i am eve
                                               with abel my son
                                               if you see my other son
                                               cain son of man
                                               tell him that i
There are few works of art that so successfully crystallize the problem of testimony, commemoration, and conscience; no reader escapes its call for their involvement. Since at times, the only concrete connections in Pagisâ work are those that the individual reader creates, I like to begin by allowing students to approach it from the grounds of their own unfamiliarity, in meditative isolation. Then, following that quiet first reading, I provide classroom time for collaborating on an explication in small groups (to encourage those who are inhibited); finally I draw from those responses in the framework of a large class discussion. Not only does this strategy encourage students to provide a direct, interpretive role (certainly an empowering paradigm for any lower-division literature classroom to embrace), but the experience, so powerfully divested of formulaic resolutionâinsures that as a community of readers we have a powerful touchstone for experiencing the shocks of subsequent texts without anticipating consolatory conventions.
Students are naturally confused about what they are supposed to âgetâ out of the bad news that the Holocaust poem, memoir, witness account, or fictional narrative invariably delivers. Certainly I have occupied their position (and continue to do so at troubling moments). Often nearly traumatized by the bleak material they confront, they reasonably assume that they are expected to somehow wrest meaning from atrocity. Some students (particularly those students influenced by Christian traditions) expect some form of spiritual consolation from the textâthat the witness, especially the victim, will offer them a redemptive message that otherwise soothes, strengthens or redeems their own moment in history.
           In contrast to such expectations, PagisÂŽs poem, blending the formal Hebrew of antiquity with the colloquial moment of the poemâs composition, rightly puts the burden of meaning on the reader who is not merely liberated to make her or his own sense of the textâs message, but compelled to do so by the way the poet situates his unknown audience. Recently I have come to realize that one of my more difficult goals in the Holocaust literature course is that my students will grapple with creating their own version of Kaja Silvermanâs unsettling insistence that âIf to remember is to provide the disembodied âwoundâ with a psychic residence, than to remember other peopleâs memories is to be wounded by their woundsâ(Threshold 189). To begin a process that might lead to such a revelation about the unexpected forms of such commemoration, I ask my students to discuss three simple questions that the poem raises (and it is always gratifying to learn from their responses): who is the speaker in this poem?; who is being addressed?; and most challenging, what is the message? And as mentioned above, it seems to me important that, rather than immediately address this as a class, students work on these questions in small groups, where their ignorance of the poemâs context, or my intentions, will not inhibit discussion.
Students immediately have to contend with the disturbing notion that someone elseâs utterance (often long dead) has made a distinct claim on them as otherwise autonomous beings. In this regard my pedagogy embraces the uses that Emily Miller Budick makes of Stanley Cavellâs unique invocation of acknowledgment, a trope that addresses âthe doubt of skepticism that argues we cannot ÂŽknowÂŽ the world and other people in it. Rather than dismiss the skepticâs worry as either perverse or not fully intendedâŠCavell [grants] the skepticâs insight that we cannot attain knowledge as certaintyâŠAccording to Cavell, when we say, for example, that we âknowâ another personâs pain we do not mean that we âknowâ it as a certainty. Instead we mean that we understand and respond to a claim made on us by that individualâs expression of that pain.â In this interpretive mode, teachers of indeterminate works like âWritten in Pencilââwill appreciate Budickâs striking assertion that denial of âthis kind would be to refuse to acknowledge that pain...not the legitimate expression of oneâs skepticism but what Cavell calls âdisowningâ knowledgeâ (âAcknowledging the Holocaustâ 329). In my experience teaching the âLiterature of the Holocaust,â primarily to non-Jewish undergraduate students, no other text so readily rewards their perception that the true work that awaits them is to respond to the course as if implicated. Not at all of course, in the sense of a counterproductive âguilt,â but rather as bearing the moral burden of the broken transmission of millions, of striving to form an ethical relation to fragmented texts and broken lives. And the titleâs discomfiting reference to a âsealed railway-carâ often stirs students to raise appropriate questions about the culpability of âonlookersâ and âbystandersâ who experienced the quotidian phenomenon of trains carrying men, women, and children to their deaths in the European countryside.
Pagisâs poem is also a useful introduction to a genre often neglected in Holocaust courses. More than prose narratives, particularly Holocaust memoirs, the lyrics of numerous survivor poets discourages the reader from dismissing the Holocaust as âpast,â but instead underscores the present, both temporally and spatially. Thinking about Pagisâs searing lyric, I have found Amir Eshelâs reading of Benjaminâs angel, bearing on the particular challenge of Holocaust poetics, to be a most instructive paradigm for students as they continue to evaluate their own orientation toward the Holocaust as âpastâ event:
Just as Walter Benjaminâs angel is âpropelledâ into the future while his present sight is focused on the âpile of debris,â the past portrayed in this poetry is evoked from the perspective of poetic presence. Analogous to Benjaminâs notion that the angelâs spatial and temporal viewpoint (âHis face is turned toward the pastâ) reflects the core of Jewish remembrance (Eingedenken), the temporal dimension inscribed in this poetry can best be described as facing the Shoah...these particular âpiles of debrisâ that can never be eradicated. (âEternal Presentâ 143)
Â
Hence, as students come to realize, in its sheer fragmentariness it is difficult to think of this poem as a âworkâ or a âtext.â Instead, invoking âhere,â it is a place they are urgently summoned to. In their own terms and language, students confront a âscriptâ that dissolves âthe temporal and spatial distinction between âinsideâ and âoutside,â between those who are part of the events and those who âjustâ read about them from the safe distance and comfort usually associated with reading poetry and indulging in aesthetic pleasureâ (Eshel 148). Or in other words, the burden of âfreedomâ in this post-Auschwitz universe means being exposed to this closed space of exile. In my own experience, by the time they return to reexamine the text at the end of the course, students often discover that they have grown to appreciate PagisÂŽs incomparable genius for conveying horror through sheer allusion, without shrillness or hysteria.
           Over years of reading this poem, I have also acquired a respect for Pagisâs stoic refusal to succumb to conventional constructions of the child as the quintessential emblem of vulnerability and innocence, a trope that has often generated trivialization and oversaturation of the Holocaust, in ways that, as Geoffrey Hartman warns, can gradually etherize our responses. The lost children of the poem certainly do not invite the easy empathy with Anne Frank or other manifestly familiar images of vulnerability such as the well-known photograph of the Warsaw ghetto child in a peaked cap and upraised hands joining other Jews herded by German soldiers with automatic pistols. Instead, the missing child invoked here is Cain; both âson of Adamâ and ben adam, a 20th century human being fully capable of unleashing atrocity. Some point after the studentsâ first raw foray into the text, teachers will find it useful to draw their attention to the fact that, besides being the son of Adam, the Hebrew phrase denotes a human- or more literally âearth-being.â Though the immediacy of that powerful syntactical feature is lost a bit in translation, few students will miss the way that, in its symbolic reference to the first family of humanity (which chillingly collapses the distance between the first human murder and the worst atrocities of our own age), the poem eloquently refutes our desire to take comfort in a linear notion of civilizationâs progress. Though poignantly calling out to resolve the exigency of their ephemerality (âWritten in Pencilâ), these lines etch themselves indelibly on the studentsâ conscience.
           Readers invariably awaken to the poemâs moral challenge to them, as a text that presupposes a community of readers who will struggle to complete its âfailureâ of transmission. After they have become acquainted with the English version in their own terms, it is worth alerting students to a critical translation problem. John Felstiner is representative of a number of critics who have cogently noted that in English âthe plural addressee of Pagisâs tagidulo gets lost: âtell [ye] him.ââ Students need to be made to understand that a crucial translation problem arises here since, unlike translators and poets like Felstiner, most will not be immediately aware that our English âyouâ was originally used nominatively as the plural of âThou.â Under the rules of contemporary usage, the translatorâs English can no longer inflect the verb to show that âEve has something to tell a great many people, even unto the present generation, about her sonâs murder.â Felstiner and other readers of the Hebrew original are well aware that, in Pagisâs intertextual imagination, the âyouâ addressed is the second person plural, âim tiruâŠtagiduâ forming an imperative which demands the moral participation of both male and female witnesses. Felstiner is observantly discomfited by the translation of the poemâs silence: âDoes the silence cutting short her last words tagidulo shâani, do our questions suspended in that silence after âtell him that I,â resound the same in English as in Hebrew?â (âJews Translating Jewsâ 344).
           Still, whether read in English or the original Hebrew, this profoundly incomplete poem requires the intervention of a reader, who has been ethically summoned to respond linguistically. As Ezrahi memorably remarks, â lack of closure here is the absolute refusal of art as triumph over mortalityâ (Booking Passage 162). The poem disrupts too easy a resolution of the absences it commemorates. In this regard, it may be useful to raise issues of public memory and commemorative space for the studentsâ consideration. For example, some students may find it is fitting that PagisÂŽs lines, composing one of the shortest lyrics in the modern Hebrew language, were carved onto an actual transport car of a train that has been made a part of the Transport Memorial at Yad Vashem (1995), Israelâs national memorial to the Holocaust, to serve as a textual meditation on the foreboding surface on which they are inscribed. But for others (particularly in the wake of the Israeli response to Palestinian aspirations) it will be clear, as it is to me, that PagisÂŽs disturbing paean to deathly silence can not be easily confined within the monological thrust of national or officially-sanctioned commemorative narratives, and indeed transcend any efforts to contain them. For all readers, it may be worth pondering Ezrahiâs sense of the manifest capacity of these lines to remain âdisruptive, unassimiliable, even after being âsafelyâ embedded in commemorative public space reflects the poemâs resistance to the sanctities and proprieties of ritualized speechâ (Booking Passage 162).
           Here I should only add that not only is Pagisâs poem a powerful work to begin a course with; it can perform a very special role at the very end, as a sort of textual touchstone, at least for some approaches. Invariably most syllabi I have seen ensure that students will encounter all sorts of narratives; prose, poetry, memoir, and fiction. Often, the cumulative effect of encountering these various forms of the testimonial and witnessing process that is intrinsic to such courses, is to make students more aware of the roles of resilience and adaptation in the writerâs act of self-representation. As Shoshana Felman has rightly noted, survivor narratives often stir the Holocaust classroom with the liberating ârebirth to speech...the very eloquence of life, with âstriking, vividâ examples âof the liberating vital function of testimonyâ(Testimony 416). For at the very least, Pagisâs six lines deprive us of such consolation, returning us to the shadowy silences of the dead, for whom no one can speak. Rather than a triumphal sense of having worked through and overcome loss, the poem paradoxically insists on its own atrocity as an event still to be communicated, still trapped in speechlessness. As a reminder of unspeakability, Pagis haunts us with a Holocaust that remains an event without a witness or narrator, which depends on each subsequent readerâs struggleâto witness and narrate. Students who may have confronted their own loss of language, their startling discovery of the inadequacy of the university-trained intellect, while confronting the wounding texts of Holocaust courses will understand that the polarities of both paradigms are intrinsic to the narratives of atrocity and endurance they have witnessed.