Thus, the same forces in
Pagis's poetry that contribute to the themes of silence and biblical allusion at
the same time present a way of looking at the Shoah that is neither silent
nor only about The Bible. Yacobi argues that this fantastical push from
the Holocaust to biblical conflict solves the paradox presented by Levi of the
necessity to give testimony despite the constant fading and stylizing of memory
(see the section on Levi above [p. 49]) by lifting the conflict to a higher
stage (Yacobi 210). Moreover, if we accept that one of Levi's goals is to do
justice to the dead by representing them (though he necessarily fails to meet
his standards of representation), then Pagis can represent those that were
silenced by appealing to fantasy and silence (Yacobi 252). Yet, we can take
this argument a step further. Just as Abel is both a biblical character and a
metaphor for the writer in “Written in Pencil in the Marked Car,” in “Another
Testimony,” the trial is both against God and through God. In the text, the
word “משפט"
(“trial”) appears only once, in lines 2-3:
because it would be surprising
from you כי יפלא ממך משפט בין דין לדין
[if you gave] a trial between judgment
and judgment
between blood and blood
בין
דם לדם
It is because of God's
failure to distinguish between judgments and between bloods that the speaker
puts him to trial. The speaker commands God to listen to his heart “hard by
judgment” (l. 4), which suggests that because God has failed to distinguish
between good judgments and bad judgments (and good people and bad people), the
speaker's heart has suffered. In the context of the Shoah, then, God is on
trial for failing to put the perpetrators and their laws on trial.
In this sense, though the poem is necessarily biblical (since it involves a
trial of God in which two angels confess), it is nevertheless immersed in
contemporary fact. Even as Pagis's text moves away from literal representations
of the Shoah, it is still working in direct (if not obvious) response to the
Shoah, such that Yacobi is too strong when she claims that the conflict between
perpetrator and victim has ascended to the conflict between earth and heaven (Yacobi
210). It has ascended, yet always at the same time remains grounded in the
original conflict. In other words, if direct representation of the Shoah is
problematical (as we will see Levi and Gubar claiming below), Pagis still
manages to make claims that are relevant to the Shoah by first linking it to The
Bible (which suggests that it is an event of great important) and then
making claims directly about biblical conflicts, thus indirectly suggesting
that these claims apply – at least in part – to the Shoah. This indirection is
less problematical than direct reference to the Shoah because it does more to
open up questions than to draw final, definite conclusions.
