What makes a person?
This is the question repeatedly set before us by Israeli poet and Holocaust survivor Dan Pagis, who died on this day in 1986 at age 56. Born in Romania, Pagis lost his mother at four and his remaining family during the Holocaust when he was imprisoned in a concentration camp in Ukraine. He escaped in 1944 and immigrated to Israel in 1946. He earned his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. By the 1960s, in what seems an unimaginable feat, Pagis had become one of the leading Hebrew poets of his generation and a preeminent scholar of medieval Hebrew poetry.
Though most readers know Pagis from his universally lauded “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car,” or his other Holocaust poems, Pagis’ library of poems contained a vast array of settings all attuned to an endless search for self through relationship to the other, perhaps best illustrated in “A Funny Question,” where he asks, “I am Dan. Who am I supposed to be?”
This search pervades even his Holocaust poems, which illustrate the countless ways in which the Holocaust stripped away the identity of its victims, rendering them something less than people, as suggested by “Testimony”:
No no: they definitely were
human beings: uniforms, boots.
How to explain? They were created
in the image.
I was a shade.
A different creator made me.
A consequence of Pagis’ poetry is the fragility of the self and the realization that we, as individuals and as a collective, possess considerable power over the selfhood of others. Denying that selfhood—through violence, legislation, oppression, or hateful speech—risks jeopardizing that selfhood entirely, giving new power to the rabbinic platitude “One who saves a life has saved a whole world.”
— Rabbi Josh Knobel