Authors

Hadas Shabat Nadir¹;  ¹ Kibbutzim College of Education,, Israel

Discussion

In the article published in “Davar”, author Amos Oz sought to explore poet Dan Pagis’ personal biography (1930-1986), especially the disclosure of his birth name: “He hesitated after hearing my question, apologized but still refused to reveal to me what his birth name was. He smiled in anguish, albeit almost coquettishly – a somewhat childish smile and said, ‘It’s a secret,’ and became silent. He added, ‘You must excuse me.’ (Oz, Davar, 1986). ”In “Sudden Heart”, his wife Ada Pagis’ autobiography, she describes the attempt to investigate Dan’s biography during the Holocaust in Ghetto Transnistria: “Dan refused to speak of the expulsion. ״What he went through during that transport caused irrevocable damage to his life, and with all is might he tried to hide this from himself and from others. After his death, I was unable to follow his tracks there. None of the people I spoke to who had been part of the expulsion had ever seen him, nor had they heard of his family״ (Pagis, 1995, 38). The “enigma” of Dan Pagis’ biography shrouds his poetry until today: Events and experiences from the Holocaust were told to no one. In his poetry, Pagis revisits the conundrum of his birth name, accords hints and intimations, but ultimately removes them. The child, whose name he erased, symbolizes the impossibility to bear witness to the Holocaust and his affiliation with it. Pagis’ later writings of the Holocaust is circumlocutive, circling around and around the subject, but cautious of touching it head on. It is as though Pagis refused to grant words to the deadly experience of the Holocaust – similarly, excluding himself - as a survivor, but not a witness. The Pagistic subject ostensibly was split into two: The child who experienced the Holocaust and did not survive, and therefore cannot relate its story, and the other, who survived the Holocaust but writes of it from a distance, as someone who cannot testify absolutely - as someone who was extracted from the irreconcilable event. I chose to delve into this complicated relationship between the absolute witness who cannot bear witness to “Pagis’ birth name” and the survivor “Dan Pagis” who removed himself entirely from the experience – and I took the place of a witness of what occurred before me. Agamben claims that the implication of the word “witness” is lack of intervention of a third party as a mediator of a conflict between two subjects. (Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, 2002) During my research, I accessed Pagis’ biography and became part of the “Author’s Name.”  I sought to mediate between Pagis’ rejected and refuted “Birth Name” and “Dan.” In my lecture I will seek to investigate Dan Pagis’ biographical conundrum and his history in the Holocaust. In an investigative trek, I will explore young Pagis’ journey from Rădăuți in Romania, to Ghetto Transnistria, back home and his subsequent Aliya to Israel. The lecture will be complemented with testimonies and documents