Dan pagis siblings

Dan pagis parents
Dan pagis written in pencil
Dan pagis education

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Autobiography

I died with the first blow and was buried

among the rocks of the field.

The raven taught my parents

what to do with me.

If my family is famous,

not a little of the credit goes to me.

My brother invented murder,

my parents invented grief,

I invented silence.

Afterward the well-known events took place.

Our inventions were perfected. One thing led to another,

orders were given. There were those who murdered

in their own way,

grieved in their own way.

I won’t mention names

out of consideration for the reader,

since at first the details horrify

though finally they’re a bore:

you can die once, twice, even seven times,

but you can’t die a thousand times.

I can.

My underground cells reach everywhere.

When Cain began to multiply on the face of the earth,

I began to multiply in the belly of the earth,

and my strength has long been greater than his.

His legions desert him and go over to me,

and even this is only half a revenge.

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Dan Pagis' Poetry

Grades: 11 - 12
Duration: 1 - 1.5 hours

Didactive Objectives

The suggestion to use poetry in order to engage students in the historical study of the Holocaust is based on the belief that a personal statement, as most Holocaust poetry is, will effectively trigger initial interest in the subject. Poems allow a personal inside view in contrast to the more distanced historian’s account. The human dimension, which is often the focus in poetry will more easily generate attention. The prism of attention that will emerge from the poem can then be directed in a widening arc to the historical factors connected to the poem.

Dan Pagis, an Israeli writer, was born in Bukovina, Romania in 1930. His early years were spent in a Nazi concentration camp in the Ukraine, formerly in Romania, from where he escaped. He immigrated to pre-state Israel in 1946 and taught medieval Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He became one of the most vibrant voices in modern Israeli poetry. His references to the Holocaust are sometimes oblique, filtered through

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Dan Pagis

Biography

Dan Pagis was born into a German-speaking family in Radauti, Bukovina in Romania (now the Ukraine), in what was once a multi-cultural part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, also the birthplace of poet Paul Celan and Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld, among other well-known Jewish writers. Critic Robert Alter has said that Pagis “would probably have never known Hebrew, never have had any serious connections with Israel or the Jewish cultural heritage, had he not been expelled from Europe by [Nazism’s] ghastly spasm of historical violence and cast, for lack of any other haven, into the Middle East”.

Pagis reached Mandatory Palestine in 1946, after spending part of his adolescence in a Nazi concentration camp. He was at first a teacher on a kibbutz. He received his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he later became professor of medieval Hebrew literature, the author of eight books of poetry and six volumes of scholarship.

There is a difficult family story embedded within the difficult historical one. In 1934, Pagis’ father