Pagis’s Use of Silence and Biblical Allusion
The fact that the Shoah remains implicit, and that the speakers make
only indirect reference to it reveals the theme of silence in Pagis's work that
deals with the Shoah. It is something that the speakers prefer to keep silent
about and even, as in the case of “Europe,
Late,” attempt to deny existence. Although these are cases that we might argue
the text subverts (because the Shoah is referenced in the text), there
are other cases where the silence is depicted in a more positive light. We see the theme of silence, for example, in the poems, “עדות" (“Testimony”) and “עדות אחרת" (“Another Testimony”).
Given their titles (and the topic of the piece as a whole), one would expect
these poems to include speech as a testimonial about the Shoah. Yet, neither of
them functions as such a testimony. The former does not, at first, appear to be
a testimony at all, but instead a description of two different created/creator
binaries. The first binary begins the poem,
No no: they definitely
לא לא: הם בהחלט
were human beings: uniforms, boots. היו בני-אדם: מדים, מגפים.
How to explain. They were created in the image איך להסביר. הם נבראו בצלם
(ll. 1-3)
The binary here is between “They” (who are
definitely human beings) and the creator who “created them in the image.” Yet,
the “they” are more slippery than they seem. As Tamar Yacobi notes, the first
two words give the impression that the speaker is in conversation, disagreeing
with someone who has just claimed that “they” are not human beings
(Yacobi 228). Thus, even as the speaker is (arguably) convinced that “they” are
humans, the text suggests that they might not be. The question of their
humanity is made more apparent by the evidence the speaker uses to show their
humanity: uniforms and boots. These items are not only articles of clothing
that an SS officer would wear and a prisoner would not, but also items that are
non-individual (uniforms make us uniform) and surface-oriented, with a
connotation of shallowness. Yet, “they” are “created in the image,” a reference
to the human beings created by God in Genesis 1:26, which suggests that,
although these may not be human beings in some sense, they are part of
the species that we call “human.”
The other binary, on the
other hand, contains (at least) the speaker and a different creator:
I was a shade אני
הייתי צל.
I had a different creator לי
היה בורא אחר
(ll. 4-5)
The term “צל" (“shade”) here is interesting, partly because
it refers back to a line in the previous poem in the series in the speaker
narrates a form of death with, “מכבה מהר את עיני, מוחק את צלי"
(“he turns my eyes off quickly, erases my shade” [“The Organization” l. 9]).
Thus, being a shade is an integral part of living. Yet, if we think of a shade
itself, it is not any part of a human being, only something attached to
a human being. Thus, to be a shade, means to be alive, yet not corporeal.
Furthermore, the term “צל"
(“Shade”) in Hebrew is almost identical to the word “צלם" (“image”), but without the
plural possessive (“ם-”),[1]
such that a “shade” differs from the image in that it is more individual yet
unable to act as a possessor. If we then re-examine “them” from the first
binary, we see an image that resembles an SS officer without even appealing to
the boots and uniform: a human being who is arguably inhuman, is not an individual,
and is implicated in the act or attempt of possession. Thus, one would expect
this testimony to be one against “them.” But, the last stanza ignores “them”
entirely, concentrating instead on the speaker's relationship with his creator
as he ascends to him (ll. 6-10). Thus, if it is a testimony, it is likely a
testimony against the speaker, his creator, or both, which takes the blame – no
matter who the speaker is – away from the SS officers.
In “Another Testimony,”
there is no direct mention of anyone involved in the Shoah. The testimony is
addressed to God – “הראשון...[וה]אחרון" (“the first...and the last
remaining” [l. 1]) – and puts him on
trial:
Your collaborators, Michael,
Gabriel, משתפי-הפעלה שלך, מיכאל, גבריאל,
stand and confess עומדים
ומודים
that you said: we will make Man, שאמרת: נעשה אדם,
and they said Amen והם
אמרו אמן
(ll. 5-8)
The testimony, thus, is not the speaker's at all, but
the angels' testimony against God, and it is not directly about the Shoah, but
about the creation of humanity as an act warranting confession.[2] Thus, even in these two poems, which are
specifically about testimony, the speakers do not speak directly about the
Shoah.
Furthermore,
the specific form that this refusal to speak takes, in both of these cases and
several others in the series, is a concentration on biblical allusion. Both
testimonies at some level implicate God in the testimonial, though we see this
theme most clearly in “Another Testimony,” in which God is directly on trial,
with his angels “confess[ing]” (l. 6). In “Written in Pencil in the Marked
Car,” as we saw above [p. 64], the characters in the train are Eve and Abel,
where Eve is the speaker, and Adam and Cain are both mentioned but absent. Eve’s
and Abel's positions in this poem are significant because, in Genesis,
they both come second (Eve from Adam's rib, Abel as the younger child), which
is significant not only because in a text called Genesis (or in the
Hebrew source, בראשית
[In the Beginning]) what comes first is given more
emphasis than what comes second, but because both Eve and Abel are depicted as
the weaker characters: Eve as a woman who is never mentioned unless acting
alone (i.e.: God banishes Adam, not Eve and Adam, from Eden [3:23], and
we learn of Adam's line and of how long Adam lived [5:1-5:5]) and
Abel as the victim of his brother's anger who does not speak at all in Genesis.
Thus, putting the oppressed in the train car (debatably) on its way to a
concentration camp suggests that the poem is linking the oppressed and
voiceless in The Bible with the oppressed and voiceless of the Shoah.
This reading makes even
more sense given the recurrence of Eve's family (and Abel specifically) in
Pagis's poetry. Abel, for example, is the speaker in “אותוביוגרפיה" (“Autobiography”). Thus,
one might argue that Abel represents a textual version of the writer himself.[3] Furthermore, in “Autobiography,” when the
narrator lists the uniqueness of his family, he claims that,
My family is revered, not a little משפחתי מכבדת, לא מעט בזכותי.
because of
me.
My brother invented killing
אחי
המציא את ההרג,
My parents crying הורי
את הבכי,
I invented forgetting אני
את השתיקה
(ll. 5-8)
One might at first read the last line of this claim as
the speaker having been the first to forget because his brother (Cain) was the
first to kill and it would be unsurprising if his parents were the first to cry
(having been first thrown out of Eden and then had their younger son killed by
their elder son), though it is not in the text of Genesis. Yet, later,
we see that the speaker does remember what happened, relating a few
events – “אחר כך נפלו הדברים
הזכורים היטב" (“Afterwards things
happened that are remembered well” [l. 9], see also ll. 9-12) – but refuses to
relate too much out of concern for the reader:
I won't remind names לא
אזכיר שמות
out of consideration
for the reader מתוך התחשבות
בקורא
(ll. 13-4)
Here, we see that the narrator is not one who forgets, but one who
instigates forgetting. Returning to Genesis, we see that it is in fact Abel
who is forgotten. After it is revealed that Cain killed him, Abel is ignored.
The narrator moves to Cain's punishment and then the continuation of Adam's
line. Adam and Eve are memorable as those who fell from Eden, Cain for killing
his brother and for becoming an endless wanderer. Abel is only memorable
because of what Cain did, not for his own action. Thus, by putting Abel in a
poem entitled “Autobiography,” the speaker is linking his experience as a
victim of the Shoah, who was forgotten during the Shoah and is remembered
afterwards only in terms of being a victim (whether living or dead), with the
experience of Abel, who is forgotten except in terms of his brother's killing.
In short, the silence about the Shoah in Pagis's poetry is filled with speech
that contains biblical allusions with links to the Shoah. Pagis's poetry is, in
other words, indirectly about the Shoah, where its indirection is through
biblical allusion.
[1] In fact, out of context, the word “צלם" could be read as either, “image” or “their shades.”
[2] Yacobi reads this poem similarly, but in far
more detail than I do (Yacobi 250).
[3] This argument might be made in the following
way: if we follow Philippe Lejeune's claim that an autobiography creates a pact
between author and reader that the narrator (and protagonist) exists/existed in
the real world (11), then a poem entitled “autobiography” creates a similar
pact. In the case of the poem, though, because it is not a traditional
autobiography (for Lejeune an autobiography must be a narrative in prose), the
pact is not between the narrator and traditional author, but between the
speaker and a textual author, that is, a figure in the text behind the speaker
that fulfills the function of an author, but only in the textual world. One
aspect of this author that differentiates her from the speaker is that she has
written the other poems in the text. In other words, like we attribute to Levi
both ITM and DS, even if the narrator is different in the two, we
attribute Pagis's poems to the textual author who, in his autobiography,
identifies himself as Abel.
