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.