Engaging the Holocaust Through the Poetry of Dan Pagis by Shellie Gordon McCullough (review)

Dan Pagis was born in 1930 at Radutz in Rumanian Bukovina. Raised in Vienna, he was later picked up and shipped to a Nazi concentration camp in the Ukraine. After escaping in 1944, he made his way to what was then Mandatory Palestine in 1946 and joined a kibbutz. Pagis's father had gone to Palestine in 1934 to arrange for the family's emigration. When the mother died, Pagis stayed with his grandparents. The father returned to Vienna in 1939, but felt his son would be safer there than in Palestine. Like most Jews at the time, he did not see the disaster looming on the European horizon.

Pagis was born into a German-speaking family but he was determined to break completely with his native tongue in the wake of the Holocaust. Remarkably, he began writing poems in Hebrew within only a few years, a language he had not known until arriving in Palestine. His first books came out in 1959 and 1964, but it was not until his third book, Gigul (Transformation), published in 1970, that he was able to write poems about the Holocaust. Eight poems under a separate heading were explicit Holocaust poems, among them his signature piece "Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car," and the long, difficult poem "Footprints." Both of these are among the texts McCullough selects for detailed analysis in her carefully titled Engaging the Holocaust Through the Poetry of Dan Pagis.

The title suggests that she wants to use Pagis's poems on the topic to address the fundamental character of the Holocaust itself, but that is an aim entirely in harmony with Pagis's own poetics. Despite the deceptively conversational style of some of his Holocaust poems, they are unforgiving in their dark view of how the Holocaust has shaped Jewish identity and more broadly human identity ever since. Pagis would earn a PhD at Hebrew University and go on to become a major scholar in addition to a poet, publishing important books on Medieval and Renaissance Hebrew poetry, but in his poetry it often seems there is no Jewish past that does not lead to the Shoah and no escaping its shadow now.

She quotes Elie Wiesel to signal the consequences of the Holocaust as they bear on human culture and identity: "at Auschwitz not only man died, but the idea of man." (46) The massacre of European Jewry is at the center of that larger human story, a story that marks all of us in the human community as survivors. It is not a story whose lesson most of us are able to retain in active consciousness for very long, if at all. But in McCullogh's apt readings the lesson receives repeated verification and variation. If Jews have special warrant to tell this story, they do so not only because it is at the center of a peoples' history but also because the Holocaust was the moment when that history acquired a double meaning, one specific to Jewish history and one that burdened human history and identity as well.

Her reading of "The Portrait" offers a good example of the way the Holocaust erodes even the possibility "of identity in general" (71):

The boydoes not sit stillit's hard for me to grasp the lines of his cheeks,I draw one lineand his face wrinkles multiplyI dip the brushand his lips twist, andhis hair whitens, his skin turns blue and peels off his bones.He has ceased to be.The old man is not there, and as for meWhat am I to do?

(or where shall I go?)

Presented here (and in her book) in Stephen Mitchell's translation, the poem's speaker is ostensibly trying to paint a boy's portrait, but the picture "dis-integrates into nothingness" (67) as he works. The process combines an...