Dan Pagis was born into a Jewish family in Bukovina, Rumania in 1930, and died in Jerusalem
in 1986.
He was first confronted with the Holocaust as a boy of eleven, on a German transport
train, with his grandparents.
Pagis survived the Holocaust and arrived in Palestine as a sixteen-year-old.
He married, had children and besides being a popular teacher of Literature at the Hebrew
University, he also became one of Israel's leading poets.
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
For me it's one of the ultimate poems on the Holocaust.
This poem has to be taught together with the four verses in the book of genesis, because
he invokes the name Cain and Abel and Eve and Adam in the poem itself.
So what Pagis is doing is making a direct connection between that first universal family,
the first murderer on earth - there are only four people on earth and one brother murders
the other, Cain murders Abel - and it's an uninterrupted history of murder for Dan Pagis,
because history for Dan Pagis is cyclical, and if you look carefully at the poem, the
poem is not concluded.
So you can read the poem from the end of the poem, it's cyclical, from the end of the poem
to the beginning of the poem ad infinitum, and I think that one of the themes to be extracted
from this particular fact is that for Dan Pagis history is cyclical in terms of murder,
from that single murder to mass murder.
Other things that emanate from the dialog between the verses and the poem: Woman in
the two tragedies: the tragedy of the murder of her one son, her youngest son, and the
place of woman in the tragedy of the Holocaust.
You could touch on the theme of Holocaust denial because Cain, in the story in the Bible,
in one of the verses, denies - he doesn't know where his brother is, "Am I my brother's
keeper?"
So you have here a denial that is a prototype of Holocaust denial three thousand years down
the line.
The subject of the mark of Cain, that is something that could be discussed as a theme.
The need to leave testimony: If you look at the poem, the last line of the poem is "tell
him that i", and Dan Pagis doesn't put any words into Eve's mouth.
He's unable to actually formulate the testimony that she wants to leave.
So one of the things that we suggest you can do with the students in your class, is to
have them write out this testimony that Dan Pagis didn't formulate.
And then you have of course wonderful material for class discussion afterwards.