Dan pagis biography

Dan Pagis’s name is familiar to non-Hebrew speakers because of a single poem, the oft-cited “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car,” a brief but powerful reflection on the Shoah that has been mined extensively by scholars and educators, both of literature and of the Holocaust. Born in Radautz, Bukovina, in 1930, Pagis survived the Holocaust and arrived in Palestine, virtually alone in the world, in 1947. 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.

I first encountered Pagis’s work in a graduate seminar with Dan Miron at Columbia University, in 2007, and was immediately drawn to his mysterious poems, which seemed to speak directly to me, even if I often had no idea what it was they were saying. I was struck by their perfect pitch, by the way that they made manifest the inherent musicality of the Hebrew language, by the i

•

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 bygd [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 koncentration 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 fryst vatten

•

Dan Pagis

Israeli poet and lecturer

Dan Pagis (October 16, 1930 – June 29, 1986) was an Israeli poet, lecturer and Holocaust survivor.^[1][2]

Biography

[edit]

Dan Pagis was born in Rădăuţi, Bukovina in Romania and imprisoned as a child in a concentration camp in Ukraine. He escaped in 1944 and immigrated to British Palestine (soon-to-be Israel) in 1946.

Pagis earned his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he later taught Medieval Hebrew literature.^[3] His first published book of poetry was Sheon ha-Tsel ("The Shadow Clock") in 1959. In 1970 he published a major work entitled Gilgul – which may be translated as "Revolution, cycle, transformation, metamorphosis, metempsychosis," etc. Other poems include: "Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car," "Testimony, "Europe, Late," "Autobiography," and "Draft of a Reparations Agreement." Pagis knew many languages, and translated multiple works of literature.^{[citation need}