M.A. Thesis: Final Draft

BEN-GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV

THE FACULTY OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

ABRAHAMS-CURIEL DEPARTMENT OF FOREIGN LITERATURES AND LINGUISTICS

IRONY AFTER AUSCHWITZ?: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE HOLOCAUST POETRY OF DAN PAGIS AND A.M. KLEIN

THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

MARK ELLIOTT SHAPIRO

UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF: PROFESSOR EFRAIM SICHER

Signature of student: ______Date: ______Signature of supervisor: ______Date: ______Signature of chairperson of the committee for graduate studies: ______Date: ______

AUGUST 2013

Table of Contents

English abstract iv

Acknowledgments v

Foreword 1

1. Introduction 2

2. Parody and sacred parody 36

3. Irony and black humor 62

4. Satire 79

Conclusion 99

Works Cited 102

Hebrew abstract 106

English abstract

This is a study of the use of parody (including sacred parody), irony and black humor, and satire in selected Holocaust poems by Israeli poet Dan Pagis and Canadian-Jewish poet A.M. Klein.

Despite differences of biography (Pagis lived in Israel and Klein in

Canada) and cultural milieu (Hebrew-speaking versus English-speaking

environment), there are many similarities in their use of the above devices.

In the discussion, considerable use will be made of two major

theoretical texts: Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of

Twentieth-Century Art Forms and David G. Roskies’ Against the

Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture,

particularly his theory of sacred parody.

This study demonstrates that, in the employment of the device of

sacred parody in their Holocaust poems, Pagis and Klein are operating

within the context of the traditional Jewish response to catastrophe.

iii

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences for the summer grant it so kindly bestowed upon me and I also wish to thank

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev’s Sidney R. and Esther Raab Center for Redemption and Holocaust Studies for an Award for Holocaust

Research, 2011, which significantly helped me in completing this M.A. thesis.

I am grateful to Galia Duchin-Ariel for her comments and suggestions.

Most of all, I want to thank my children and grandchildren for their continuous moral support after my return to the academic world.

Foreword

Before engaging in the topic of this thesis, I feel that a prefatory

note is needed, although it is not customary to place a caveat before the

main proposition. Nonetheless, some people might consider that the very

use of the word satire in connection with the Holocaust verges on

sacrilege; moreover, I personally approach the Holocaust and Holocaust

literature with a mixture of awe and caution. Thus, I consider it necessary

to preface my analysis with the statement that my application of a term

like satire or irony should not be interpreted as any expression of disrespect for such a weighty topic as the Holocaust. Although my parents were living in Canada while the annihilation of European Jewry was carried out, the Holocaust plays a major role in my outlook and in my poetry.

A discussion of irony and parody in connection with the

Holocaust should not be construed in any way as an irreverent view of the

Holocaust; to talk about irony and parody in Holocaust literature – or

Holocaust poetry, which is the pivot of my thesis – is not to diminish the Holocaust’s horror.

Chapter 1: Introduction

Before engaging in the topic of this thesis, I feel that a prefatory note is needed, although it is not customary to place a caveat before the main proposition. Nonetheless, some people might consider that the very

use of the word satire in connection with the Holocaust verges on

sacrilege; moreover, I personally approach the Holocaust and Holocaust

literature with a mixture of awe and caution. Thus, I consider it necessary

to preface my analysis with the statement that my application of a term

like satire or irony should not be interpreted as any expression of

disrespect for such a weighty topic as the Holocaust. Although my parents

were living in Canada while the annihilation of European Jewry was

carried out, the Holocaust plays a major role in my outlook and in my

poetry.

A discussion of irony and parody in connection with the

Holocaust should not be construed in any way as an irreverent view of the

Holocaust; to talk about irony and parody in Holocaust literature – or

Holocaust poetry, which is the pivot of my thesis – is not to diminish the Holocaust’s horror. There are three central arguments supporting an analysis of irony

and parody in the Holocaust poems of the two poets I have chosen. Since

2 my thesis is in the realm of literature, not history or philosophy, I will only briefly present these three arguments. The first centers on the irony of the

Holocaust, which has resulted in epistemological paradoxes for historians and literary scholars. It is, of course, ironic that Germany – the very country whose Jewish citizens considered themselves an integral part of its society and culture and which had made such a profound contribution to culture, philosophy, literature and music – created an entire system that murdered most of the German Jewish population as well as millions of

Jews from other countries. The very character of this system refuted the underlying humanistic principles of culture, philosophy, literature and the arts.

I have referred to the Holocaust as an ironic event. An alternative term perhaps would be “paradoxical” (e.g., George Steiner’s observation that the reading of Rilke’s poetry did not prevent the Nazis from gassing human beings). This paradox can be associated with the post-Holocaust crisis of the humanities in general and the reading of poetry in particular; however, such a discussion is beyond the limited parameters of this thesis.

The second argument centers on the cruel irony that is represented by the Holocaust. The German nation, which had been identified as the cradle of Western civilization, used the end results of Enlightenment rationality – the tools of mass production and modern technology – not to

3 create products but rather to efficiently murder six million European Jews.

Both irony and black humor depend on an unexpected distance between signifier and signified. That distance becomes horrifyingly colossal when culture and civilized behavior seem incompatible with a monstrous reality, as George Steiner points out:

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the

evening, that he can play Bach or Schubert, and go to his day’s

work at Auschwitz in the morning. To say that he has read them

without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant (Steiner,

Language and Silence, ix).

The dissonance that Steiner refers to is also expressed in the fact that the

death camps constituted a complete, coherent world. They had

their own measure of time, which is pain. The unbearable was

parceled out with pedantic nicety. The obscenities and abjections

practiced in them were accompanied by prescribed rituals of

derision and false promise. There were regulated gradations of

horror within the total, concentric sphere. L’univers

concentrationnaire has no true counterpart in the secular mode. Its

analogue is Hell (Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle, 53).

That dissonance was also expressed in phenomena associated with

the Holocaust that seem grotesque. There are many examples that could be

cited, among them, the Auschwitz women’s orchestra, the use of code

words (such as special treatment, Final Solution, deportation) to hide what

really transpired in the Holocaust, and the very existence of Terezin as a

model community to conceal the Nazis’ true intentions toward the Jews.

As I have noted above, I have referred to the Holocaust as an ironic event. An alternative term perhaps would be “paradoxical” (e.g., George

Steiner’s observation that the reading of Rilke’s poetry did not prevent the

Nazis from gassing human beings). This paradox can be associated with the post-Holocaust crisis of the humanities in general and the reading of poetry in particular; however, such a discussion is beyond the limited parameters of this thesis.

The third central argument is the presence of the literary tools of irony and parody in the Holocaust poems of Dan Pagis and A.M. Klein. I will be defining irony in this thesis as a distancing between signifier and signified that places emphasis on the submerged rather than the visible

signified. The literary tools of irony effectively mirror the irony of the

Holocaust to which I have just referred.

Although Dan Pagis’ and A.M. Klein’s respective backgrounds,

linguistic ambience (Hebrew versus English) and literary/cultural

influences are so markedly different, these differences are, as I will try to demonstrate, overridden by a major similarity – the prominent use of irony

and parody in their Holocaust poetry.

Not only do Pagis and Klein employ parody, they also utilize sacred parody; I will discuss these two terms – parody and sacred parody – in the next chapter. As I will show, Pagis and Klein are working within a tradition in Hebrew and Yiddish literature of catastrophe (although Klein is known for his poetry in English). Three scholars whose works will be important in my thesis are Linda Hutcheon, Alan Mintz and David

Roskies. Hutcheon discusses the complex theory of parody as reflected in

20th-century art forms and I will be making frequent references to her A

Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. In his

Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature, Mintz surveys the response of Hebrew literature in Jewish catastrophe, such as the destruction of the first and second temples in Jerusalem, the massacre of

Jews in Europe during the Crusades, the pogroms in Czarist Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the Holocaust. David Roskies

engages in a similar study but focuses on Yiddish literature. I will

elaborate on Mintz’ and Roskies’ concept of a Jewish literary tradition in

response to national catastrophes in the next chapter, where the literary

tradition seeks to deal with catastrophe in Jewish history using a pattern

that repeats itself over the generations. Their theoretical discussion

illuminates the fact that catastrophe can be both a trigger for crisis and a

trope. In the poems of Pagis and Klein that will be discussed here,

catastrophe generates a crisis of faith not only in God but in humanity, but it is also a catalyst for the creation of ironic, parodic and satiric verse on the grim topics associated with the Holocaust.

Whereas Pagis is studied in Israeli high schools and his Holocaust poems feature prominently in discussions of contemporary Holocaust poetry, A.M. Klein seems to have been relegated to the sidelines of such discussions because sadly he has been largely forgotten in the literary world. I use the word “regrettably,” first, because Klein’s poetry has much to say about the Jewish people and Jewish identity and, second, because he was a major figure in the Canadian-Jewish community in the 1940s and

1950s as well as being prominent in the contemporary Canadian literary establishment. Klein served from 1938 to 1955 as the editor of the

Canadian Jewish Chronicle and was a well-known lecturer and publicist

(“A.M. Klein: Biography” in Canadian Poetry Online). J.M. Kertzer notes

the difficulty in “defining his complex personality, a problem which in

turn raises the even more vexed question of the relation between the poet

and his poetry.” However, one of the keys to understanding Klein surely

exists in his poetry; Kertzer cites Louis Dudek who once called Klein “the

most autobiographical poet writing in Canada” and notes that he “is also

one of the most mysterious. His work is passionate yet impersonal,

loquacious yet discreet. He had, in his own phrase, a 'many tentacled

mind'.” Perhaps one factor that can explain Klein’s disappearance from

discussion forums of Holocaust literature is the major enigma surrounding

Klein and the “mysterious silence of his last seventeen years” (Kertzer,

“Personality and Authority”).

Unlike Klein, who is scarcely mentioned in discussions of

Holocaust literature, Dan Pagis continues to be referred to by scholars in connection with Hebrew literature in general and Holocaust literature in

Hebrew and in translation in particular. For instance, Robert Alter refers to

Pagis as one of the “three leading Hebrew poets of the generation that began to publish shortly after the founding of the State of Israel.” Noting the “curious fact” that Pagis, Yehuda Amichai and Nathan Zach were all born in German-speaking Europe,” Alter states that “[of] the three, Pagis' cultural displacement was the most drastic” and that “[d]isplacement ...

remain[s] a governing concept in Pagis's poetry, from the repeated and

often flaunted effects of defamiliarization in his imagery, to the eerie

refractions of the cataclysm that swept away European Jewry, to the global

perspectives of his remarkable 'evolutionary' and science-fiction poems,

where time is accelerated, distorted, even reversed, and earthly existence

in seen characteristically from an immense telescopic distance” (Alter).

Most of the critical discussions on Holocaust literature in English

have focused on fiction, rather than drama or poetry. Notable exceptions

include Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone: The Holocaust in

Literature (1980) and Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the

Modern Jewish Imagination (2000) and Susan Gubar, Poetry after

Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (2003). Furthermore, few critical studies compare Hebrew and English Holocaust literature and

no monographs have yet been produced comparing the Holocaust poetry

and prose of Dan Pagis and A.M. Klein. Considerable critical attention has

been given, however, to the poetry of Dan Pagis and it includes criticism

and scholarship by both Israeli and non-Israeli scholars.

Although in her By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature,

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi devotes only two pages to Pagis, in a later study,

Booking Passage, she discusses his poetry more extensively. Alan Mintz

in his Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature, provides a

consecutive, albeit brief (only five pages), discussion of Pagis, In a book

that appeared less than a decade ago, Poetry after Auschwitz:

Remembering What One Never Knew, Gubar mentions Pagis only briefly

in three isolated references. In contrast, Tamar Yacobi discusses Pagis

extensively: for instance, in a long article in English, “Fiction and Silence

as Testimony: The Rhetoric of Holocaust in Dan Pagis” and a very long

one in Hebrew, “Between Figuration and Reality in the Poetry of Dan

Pagis: The Ways of a Poetic Code.” Similarly, Yair Mazor and Amir

Eshel devote considerable critical attention to Pagis; Eshel compares him

to Yehuda Amichai and Tuvia Rübner. Without going into the thorny

problem of where critics place Pagis in the pantheon of Hebrew literature

(an interesting topic that certainly deserves scholarly attention), the very

abundance of references to him indicates his centrality in the world of

Hebrew letters.

As I have noted above, not too much work has been done on A.M.

Klein; for instance, in her Poetry after Auschwitz, Gubar makes only one

isolated mention of Klein's “Elegy.” A valuable introduction to Klein is

provided by the book-length monograph on him by Rachel Feldhay

Brenner, who considers Klein the father of Canadian Jewish literature,

presents his biography and considers both his poetry and his prose,

including The Second Scroll. Brenner writes that Klein’s “multifaceted

creativity has become the cornerstone of Jewish Canadian writing as well

as a landmark in the history of Canadian literature at large” (3). Two

recent studies should be mentioned here: Zailig Pollock, A.M. Klein: The

Story of the Poet (1994) and Norman Ravvin and Sherry Simon, eds.,

Failure’s Opposite: Listening to A.M. Klein (2011). In the latter study, the

authors write in their introduction that “[t]here can be no serious

discussion of Canadian literary modernism, Jewish-Canadian writing, or the Montreal imagination that does not include mention of A.M. Klein”

(Ravvin and Simon, Failure’s Opposite, 3). Ravvin also notes that

“[a]ccounts of the Canadian Jewish poetic tradition often begin with A.M.

Klein” (Ravvin, “Making It Mainstream,” 121).

Another vital resource in my study is The A.M. Klein Symposium, edited by Seymour Mayne and published in 1975; it is important because it offers in a single volume the views of several scholars speaking about different aspects of Klein's work and life. In “Marginal Keri and Textual

Chetiv: The Mystical Novel of A.M. Klein,” Leon Edel expresses high praise for Klein’s literary production:

His work remains, like some great artifact of olden times, some

truncated Sphinx with a half-told secret, unique in the corpus of

twentieth century Canadian writing (15).

In the introductory sentence in his “A.M. Klein and the Canadian

Mosaic,” M.W. Steinberg presents a significant insight, crucial for the understanding of Klein as both a Canadian and a Jewish poet: “Klein, more than most Canadian writers, was clearly a product of three distinctive components of the Canadian cultural mosaic.” The three major influences on Klein, according to Steinberg, were his Jewish upbringing,

French-Canadian society and – what is most important for understanding

Klein’s parodying of literary texts – Canada’s “English literary tradition”

(Mayne, 73).

There is an interesting common denominator in Pagis’ and Klein’s literary activities and background: medieval Spanish-Jewish poetry, which

can be considered a major influence on both Klein and Pagis, who was a

scholar of that literature, which he taught at the Hebrew University of

Jerusalem.

In her introduction to The Collected Poems of A.M. Klein, Miriam

Waddington, herself a poet, offers a succinct overview of his poetry,

noting that “anyone reading Klein's work in its entirety cannot fail to

notice what he called the twinship of his thought. There seemed to be,

throughout his writing life, two main sources from which he drew for his

language and his themes – the Jewish and the Canadian” (ix). The blend of

Jewish and Canadian elements is expressed in Klein’s biography. He

became head of the Zionist youth organization, Young Judea, in 1928,

when he was only 19, and, ten years later, was appointed editor-in-chief of the Canadian Jewish Chronicle (Zailig Pollock, “Introduction,” Klein,

Complete Poems, xi-xii). His stories were published in Canadian and

American periodicals and journals; furthermore, “a prominent and respected public figure, Klein influenced other Canadian Jewish writers and poets, such as Henry Kreisel, Irving Layton, Miriam Waddington, and

Leonard Cohen” (Brenner, 2). In fact, according to Brenner, Cohen considers himself “Klein’s disciple and spiritual heir” (ibid., 7).

Losing his mother to disease when he was only four and remaining for many years physically distant from his father, who emigrated from their native Romania to Palestine (ibid., 158), Pagis felt the solitude of orphanhood and perhaps was thereby rendered extremely sensitive to the solitude of the Holocaust victim and the Holocaust survivor. Ezrahi notes that Pagis primarily received recognition as one of Israel’s leading poets only posthumously (ibid.).

As far as personal exposure to the Holocaust is concerned, Pagis was in Nazi-held Europe during the Holocaust, incarcerated in labor camps in Transnistria, and as such can be considered a Holocaust survivor.

Although Klein was also born in Europe – in Ratno, Ukraine (Brenner, 1),

he can be regarded as a bystander, who nonetheless feels great empathy

with the victims of the Holocaust.

I will discuss selected Holocaust poems by both authors that are

directly or indirectly connected with the Holocaust.

Methodological Approach

Regarding the criterion used for the choice of texts to be analyzed,

I have limited myself to selecting poems by Pagis and Klein that explicitly deal with the Holocaust.

There are a number of major methodological problems involved in

this discussion. First, Pagis’ Holocaust poetry was published after the

Holocaust; he began to publish his major Holocaust poems in 1970, a few

years after the Eichmann Trial brought the Holocaust into the Israeli

public discourse. In contrast, as I have just noted above, much of Klein's

Holocaust poetry was written and appeared while the Holocaust was in

progress; when he wrote many of his poems, the full horror was not yet

known to the general public. For instance, when he talks of the victims of

the Holocaust in The Hitleriad, which was published in 1944 but was

written in 1942/1943, he thinks in terms of thousands, rather than millions:

Let them in all their thousands speak the shame

Visited on them, and the ignoble death,

The nameless ones, and those of a great fame:

With wounded whisper and with broken breath

Speaking the things unspeakable, and the unspeakable name!

(Klein, Complete Poems, 207)

Like most Jews of his generation, he could not know the full extent of the Nazi’s annihilation of the Jews. Second, there is the issue of the immediacy of contact with the Holocaust. Pagis was a survivor of the

Holocaust and its direct impact on his work and life is very evident in his work. Ezrahi argues that, “[f]or most of Pagis’ career, the world of his childhood in Radautz, near Czernowitz, and the war years in Transnistria remain the missing or nearly effaced texts that haunt his writing” (Ezrahi,

Booking Passage, 157). In contrast, Klein, while a sensitive and committed Jew, is writing about an event that took place “out there” and not in his Canadian surroundings – that is, in his immediate circle of experience.

Third, both poets draw on different literary traditions and, as such, the comparison of their works must take these distinct traditions into consideration.

It should be mentioned here that, in their poems, both Pagis and

Klein use puns, which are effective tools for the creation of irony. On

Klein’s love of puns, Robert Melançon notes that “Klein likes to play with words, blending their sounds and their meanings in virtuoso performances” (Melançon, “A Writer for Our Age,” 70). Dissonance, which is a key element in irony and parody, is a major element in Klein’s poetry, argues Melançon: “Klein often mixes many voices, placing them side by side so they are heard together in euphoric cacophony” (ibid., 72).

The thesis will consider different categories of irony – (a) black humor and satire, (b) parody, and (c) “sacred parody.” My methodological approach will combine a close reading of individual poems and prose passages and will consider how the three categories of irony are employed in them. Pagis and Klein are remarkably similar in their employment of the tools of irony, black humor/satire, and parody/sacred parody in their depiction of the Holocaust. It might therefore be argued that the biographical and cultural differences between the two do not impinge on a common viewing of the Holocaust; however, this is a point that goes beyond the narrow parameters of this thesis.

In this study, I will be referring to two important theoretical approaches that are presented in Linda Hutcheon's A Theory of Parody and

David G. Roskies' Against the Apocalypse respectively, as I explain

below.

In terms of methodology, my analysis of Pagis and Klein will

incorporate two approaches: textual analysis of individual poems and an

overview treatment that will seek to identify formats and frameworks used

in similar ways by these two poets, focusing on parodic, ironic and satiric

elements. In chapter two, I will define my use of the terms parody and

sacred parody and then demonstrate their presence in selected poems of

Pagis and Klein. Chapter three will focus on irony and black humor, and chapter four on satire. The concluding chapter will sum up Pagis’ and

Klein’s employment of tools of parody (including sacred parody), irony, black humor and satire.

A basic question associated with the use of irony in poetry written after the Holocaust is the more general problem of writing poetry after the

Holocaust. In her Poetry after Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never

Knew, Susan Gubar refers to “Adorno's injunction” (7) against poetry after the Holocaust, noting that, in Jacqueline Osherow's Holocaust poems, “the pollution of words, the interruption of parenthetical questions, the repeated snippet of quotations, the ellipses, and the inconclusive conclusion with its halted, fragmentary sentences: All raise the specter of Theodor W.

Adorno’s query about the possibility of poetry after the Holocaust.”

An interesting question that would have to be discussed in another context is whether Adorno’s often-cited and dramatic declaration, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (Adorno, The Adorno Reader,

210), could still leave room for satiric and ironic poetry. Lawrence L.

Langer notes the cryptic nature of that declaration in the introduction to his anthology of Holocaust literature, The Holocaust and the Literary

Imagination:

If the famous proposition expressed some years ago by the late

T.W. Adorno – to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric – were

to be taken literally, it might undermine the validity of many of the

ensuing pages of this study. But Adorno never intended it to be

taken literally, as his own elaborations of the principle

demonstrate; it does, however, represent an irritant to the aesthetic

and moral sensibilities of the student of literature…. Adorno

quotes the question of a character in Sartre’s Mort sans sepulture –

“Does it still make sense to go on living, while there are people

who beat others till the bones in their bodies are broken” – and

then applies the question to art in the post-Nazi, post-Holocaust

era.

Langer himself asks:

How should art – how can [italicized in the original] art? – represent the inexpressibly inhuman suffering of the victims, without doing an injustice to that suffering? If art, as Adorno concedes, is perhaps the last remaining sanctuary where that

suffering can be paid honest homage, enshrining it permanently in

the imagination of the living as the essential horror it was, the

danger also exists of this noble intention sliding into the abyss of

its opposite (1).

Langer elaborates on this point, noting

There is something disagreeable, if not dishonorable, in the

conversion of the suffering of the victims into works of art, which

are then, to use Adorno’s pungent metaphor, thrown as fodder to

the world (“der Welt zum Frass vorgeworfen”) that murdered

them…. Adorno appeals here not to latent sadistic impulses, but to

the pleasures inherent in artistic response…. The prospect of art

denying what it seeks to affirm (the hideous chaos of

dehumanization during the Holocaust) raises a spectre of paradox

for the critic, the reader, and the artist himself,, that is not easily

circumvented (1-2).

It should be recalled here that much of Klein’s Holocaust poetry was written during the period of the Holocaust; however, those poems were written in reaction to developments in Nazi-held Europe and, as such, can be considered as belonging to the category of poetry written after the Holocaust.

As noted above, unlike Pagis, Klein is a bystander. However, that distinction must be used with caution. One could argue that even so-called bystanders can feel the pain of the Holocaust perhaps as deeply as a survivor. Another great Hebrew poet who writes about the Holocaust and who can be regarded as a particularly prominent example of Jewish solidarity, Uri Zvi Greenberg, was not a Holocaust survivor. Although he had immigrated to Palestine, he felt a bond, notes Mintz, with those who remained behind in Europe and who perished under the Nazis. For example, in Greenberg’s poem, cited in Mintz’ book, “A Crown of

Lament for All Israel,” the “faces of father and mother and sister cannot be suppressed; consciousness of their father insinuates itself into every present moment. The poet cannot see the rain of the Palestinian winter

without thinking of the Polish snows that blanket the open-trench graves.

Life becomes haunted” (Mintz, 176).

Moreover, Jewish tradition blurs the distinction between victim

and bystander. In that tradition, every Jew is an actual or potential victim;

for instance, the Passover Seder, which is so much a part of Jewish life even for many of those who consider themselves secular Jews, drives home this point. Although seated in the comfort of their homes, Jews are

required to eat the bitter herbs and to feel as if they themselves were part

of the suffering of the Israelites in Egypt and part of the Exodus from that

land of bondage. And Jews read in the Passover Haggadah that, in each

generation, their enemies rise up and seek to destroy them but that God

always saves the Jewish people.

The labeling of Pagis and Klein as survivor and bystander

respectively does not necessarily mean a sharp contrast in their response to

the Holocaust. However, this is an issue that requires a quantitative

analysis of many of their poems and is therefore beyond the parameters of

this thesis. Notwithstanding that distinction, the similarity in their use of

the tools of parody and irony in their Holocaust poems should not be

surprising.

For the purpose of this thesis, I am defining “Holocaust poetry” as

any poetry that directly relates to any aspect of the Holocaust. This does

not mean that some ostensibly non-Holocaust poems by either Pagis or

Klein can be read as allusions to the Holocaust. To maintain a sharp focus on my topic, I am dealing here only with what I would term poems that

explicitly refer to this or that aspect of the Holocaust. That caveat allows

me, however, to include Pagis’ “Draft of a Reparations Agreement,”

which is actually about the post-Holocaust period. Its subject is an event that takes place after the Holocaust but which is directly related to the

Holocaust and its consequences: the reparations agreement between West

Germany and Israel.

There are a number of important general questions within which

any discussion of Holocaust poetry inevitably takes place.

Writing Holocaust poetry is highly problematic from the ethical

and aesthetic standpoints. First, I shall briefly touch on the ethical issue of

Holocaust poetry. The number of Holocaust survivors diminishes each

year; at a certain point of time, there will be no living Holocaust survivors

and then the burden of writing Holocaust poetry will fall on the shoulders

of those who did not directly experience the Holocaust. This, of course,

raises many ethical questions. What right do I, as someone who is not a

survivor, have to produce poetry about something that I have not directly

experienced? Even assuming that I do have the right to do so, who gives

me that right? The survivors, the Jewish people, the State of Israel, God?

If I write Holocaust poems, how do I know what details should be included and what details should be given special emphasis? As someone who is not a survivor, can I truly convey the experience of the Holocaust?

Regarding the aesthetic question in connection with Holocaust poetry, is a Holocaust poem that is well constructed and which makes effective use of metaphors an affront to the monstrous nature of the

Holocaust.

Adorno addresses both the ethical and the aesthetic issue in a few terse statements: “The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today”

(Adorno, The Adorno Reader, 210).

The Holocaust has, argues Adorno, made a mockery of human progress (one could argue that this point opens the door to the use of irony and parody in connection with the Holocaust) or human reason for that matter: “After Auschwitz, our feelings resist any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging the victims; they balk at

squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims’ fate”

(Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 361). According to Adorno, “the eternity of

horror nevertheless manifests itself in the fact that each of its new forms

outdoes the old. What is constant is not an invariable quantity of suffering,

but its progress toward hell” (Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz? 89).

Adorno’s declaration, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is

barbaric” can be related to a fundamental crisis in Western civilization that

has been created by the Holocaust. Jean-François Lyotard addresses this concept of a crisis, this breakdown in communication: “One would have to imagine … that the cleavage introduced into Western thought by

‘Auschwitz’ … would breach speculative logic itself” (Lyotard,

“Discussions, or Phrasing “after Auschwitz,” 366). Noting that “Adorno pointed out that Auschwitz is an abyss in which the philosophical genre of

Hegelian speculative discourse seems to disappear,” Lyotard disputes

Adorno’s view that the Holocaust alone has produced a rift in Western thought and argues that there are other abysses: “Budapest ’56 … in which the genre of (Marxist) historical materialist discourse seems to disappear”,

“[n]ineteen sixty-eight … in which the genre of democratic liberal discourse (republican dialogue) seems to disappear” and the “crisis of over-capitalisation that the world economy has been suffering since 1974”

(Lyotard, “The Sign of History,” 393). Lyotard argues that “[e]ach one of

24 these abysses, and others, asks to be explored with precision in its specificity” (409). Unlike Adorno, Lyotard does not believe that

Auschwitz refutes the notion of human progress: “But however negative the signs to which most of the proper names of our political history give rise [Auschwitz, Budapest 1956, May 1968, etc.], we should nevertheless have to judge them as if [emphasized in original] they proved that history has moved on a step in its progress; i.e. in the culture of skill and of will”

(ibid.).

Two other substantive and general issues must be mentioned here.

First, can poetry – including Holocaust poetry, be considered testimony?

Obviously, not all poetry fits into the category of testimony; nonetheless, many poems – especially Holocaust poems – do attempt to document the events and consequences of the Holocaust. One might be tempted to say that Pagis, who lived in Europe during the Second World War and thus can be considered a Holocaust survivor, is more of an expert witness than

Klein, who lived in Canada during the Holocaust. However, Pagis was a child at the time and his experience of the Holocaust was therefore limited. Moreover, it could be argued that even a poet who experienced the Holocaust directly can provide eyewitness testimony only of what he or she actually saw; naturally, such testimony is limited. No one can truly provide testimony on the Holocaust because it was a mega event beyond

25 human comprehension. All testimony about the Holocaust – in written affidavits, memoirs and poems – must be limited. I can say that I was an eyewitness to a traffic accident and, if I write a poem about it, that poem can be considered testimony concerning the accident; no one can claim to be an eyewitness to the Holocaust because the events of the Holocaust occurred in so many different places and over a period of 12 years – from

1933 to 1945. Thus, the issue of testimony vis-à-vis the Holocaust cannot be understood literally. Only in the abstract sense can Holocaust poetry be considered testimony.

In this context, mention should be made here of four examples of poetic testimony in the Holocaust poems of Pagis and Klein – three by

Pagis and one by Klein.

In “Autobiography,” the persona of the poem declares

אתה יכול למות פעם, פעמיים, אפילו שבע פעמים,

אבל אינך יכול למות רבבות.

אני יכול.

(Pagis, 165)

You can die once, twice, even seven times,

But you cannot die tens of thousands of times.

I can.

(My translation)

Two other poems by Pagis are ostensibly testimonies. I shall discuss them

in a moment, but first I want to point out that one of the most striking

examples of a Holocaust poem that authentically serves as testimony is

Klein’s poem “In Re Solomon Warshawer,” which is ironically a formal

document of testimony: an affidavit by a German agent, informer or

soldier (the narrator’s role is not clear) presented in a Nazi court in Poland.

Here Klein is making ironic use of a German legal document against the

Germans themselves. Whether this poetic affidavit is about a real person

or a real event is irrelevant, because similar events involving different

people occurred throughout Nazi-occupied Europe.

If no one can really provide actual testimony on the Holocaust, then the difference between a survivor like Pagis and a “bystander” (or non-participant or non-survivor) like Klein is far narrower than one might

think at first glance. Nonetheless, I believe there is a difference between

the two; although this feeling is perhaps more visceral than rational, it is

nonetheless there.

There is another major problem with regard to testimony – poetic

and otherwise – about the Holocaust, where the human imagination is

defied by both the possibility of such a mega-event (when one nation

decides to exterminate another) and by the nature of the individual events

constituting the Holocaust. As Tamar Yacobi points out, the

problems of reliability-judgment multiply (in both real-life and

fictional testimony) when witnesses report events that count as

extraordinary. The improbability of these representations, by

standard ontic norms, often leads historians and other judges to

dismiss the teller as unreliable and the tale as a lie, fantasy,

misconception (Yacobi, “Fiction and Silence As Testimony, 212).

Yacobi then cites Primo Levi, who opens his last book, The

Drowned and the Saved: “The first news about the Nazi annihilation camps … delineated a massacre of such vast proportions … that the public was inclined to reject them because of their very enormity” (cited in

Yacobi, ibid.).

On Pagis’ literary testimony regarding the Holocaust, Yacobi

speaks of his “refusal all along to give a personal, factual account of what

‘really’ happened there. Instead, Pagis opted for an oblique poetic

discourse of testimony” (Yacobi, ibid., 221).

His two poems whose titles contain the word testimony,

“Testimony” and “Another Testimony,” are examples of this “oblique poetic discourse. First, I shall take a brief look at the first poem.

עדות

לא לא: הם בהחלט

היו בני אדם: מדים, מגפיים.

איך להסביר: הם נבראו בצלם.

אני הייתי צל.

לי היה בורא אחר.

והוא בחסדו לא השאיר בי מה שימות.

וברחתי אליו, עליתי קליל, כחול,

מפייס, הייתי אומר: מתנצל:

עשן אל עשן כל יכול

שאין לו גוף ודמות.

(Pagis, 137)

Testimony

No, no: They were unquestionably

Human beings: Uniforms, boots.

How can I explain this? They were created in God’s image.

I was but a shadow.

I had another Creator.

And with great compassion, he left nothing in me that could die.

And I escaped to him, I ascended light as a feather, a blue feather,

In a conciliatory – I would even say, an apologetic – manner:

Smoke ascending to omnipotent smoke

That has no body and no image.

(My translation)

The self-effacing, self-negating mechanism in this poem appears in other poems by Pagis as I attempt to show below. Despite the title and the description of physical object such as uniforms and boots, the poem rapidly transforms itself from a testimony to an ontological representation of a kind of universe where the murderers are human beings and the

30 victims only shadows and where there are two Gods, the creator of the murderers and the creator of the victims. “Testimony” emerges as something very different from testimony. Similarly, “Another Testimony”

is not a testimony at all but rather a prayer, followed by the ("עדות אחרת") presentation of a different kind of testimony (as hinted at by the title): testimony of two angels, Michael and Gabriel, regarding God’s creation of

Adam (here again, there is an allusion, which is not necessarily ironic, to

Michelangelo’s painting:

הקשב ללבי הקשה בדין, ראה את עוניי.

משתפי-הפעולה שלך, מיכאל, גבריאל

עומדים ומודים

שאמרת: נעשה אדם,

והם אמרו אמן.

(Pagis, 138)

Listen to my heart, you who are so strict in judgment, see my pain.

Your collaborators, Michael, Gabriel

Stand and testify

That you said, “Let us make a human being,”

And they said, “Amen.”

(My translation)

A related general issue is the status of poetry – including

Holocaust poetry – vis-à-vis historic truth. Since no poet can be an authentic eyewitness, whatever he or she has to say about the Holocaust will be, at best, only one limited aspect of a historic truth. Here again, the concept of historic truth in relation to the Holocaust must be understood in the abstract, rather than the literal, sense. Even if I do not know everything there is to know about the Holocaust (such knowledge is obviously beyond the limits of the human brain), what I have to say about the

Holocaust can be historically true. Moreover, the historic truth of the

Holocaust goes far beyond the specific events; it is the destruction of one

group of human beings – the Jews – by another group of human beings –

the Nazis – with the help of other groups of people, including Poles,

Lithuanians, and Ukrainians, and the historic truth of such a mega-event is necessarily of an abstract nature. All Holocaust poems are expressions of two kinds of historic truth. At one level, they attest to a specific aspect of the historic truth of the Holocaust (an event or a number of events), while, on a second level, they attest to the historic truth of a mega-event in human and Jewish history.

Second, one can ask what is the status of poetry – including

Holocaust poetry – with relation to historic truth. These questions, which

concern poetry in general and require an extensive philosophical

discussion go beyond the parameters of this thesis and have not been

included.

Since I want to focus on the Holocaust poetry of a Canadian-

Jewish poet – in this case, A.M. Klein – and an Israeli poet – in this case,

Dan Pagis – I have decided not to discuss the more general, but highly

important questions that inevitably impinge on any study of Holocaust

poetry. In order to keep my thesis sharply focused, I have not gone into the

much more general question as to whether either Pagis or Klein is a

Holocaust poet. This is an important point that needs to be discussed but

which would require a far broader context in which the total poetic

production of both artists would have to be considered and analyzed.

From the discussion of selected poems by Pagis and Klein, it can

be understood that they relate to the Holocaust in different ways, although

they use similar devices such as irony and satire. Regarding the difference in the backgrounds of Pagis and Klein, I have decided to merely present them without discussing the ramifications of those differences because a discussion of those differences goes beyond the limited mandate I have assigned myself.

Some scholars argue that the Holocaust represents a rift in Western culture and prevents the continuation of writing the kind of poetry that was produced before the Holocaust. Without probing that issue, which is also beyond the narrow parameters of this study, I believe that some mention should be made here of Adorno’s celebrated quote, “No poetry after

Auschwitz” for the simple reason that any discussion of Holocaust poetry is conducted in the wake of that declaration. A discussion of the significance of Adorno’s statement would entail an overview of Holocaust poetry and a detailed analysis of various representative Holocaust poets together with a comparison of their poems with comparable poems written before the Holocaust for the purpose of identifying significant differences between pre- and post-Holocaust poetry. This kind of discussion, which belongs to the realms of both literary criticism and philosophy, goes far beyond the limited mandate that I have chosen for this thesis. Nonetheless, some reference must be made to Adorno’s thinking on this subject.

In the following chapters, I will discuss these tools, as well as black humor and satire, as they are employed in selected Holocaust poems by Pagis and Klein. My basis thesis is that, despite their biographical and cultural differences, the two poets are remarkably similar in their use of these tools.

In the next chapter, I will deal with the subject of parody and sacred parody.

Chapter 2: Parody and sacred parody

One way of responding to catastrophe is parody or its sub- category, sacred parody. Sacred parody in Jewish tradition was a literary defense mechanism in response to the various catastrophes in Jewish history prior to the Holocaust, notably the destruction of the Second

Temple, the massacres during the Crusades and the pogroms in Eastern

Europe. For instance, notes Roskies, there is the sacred parody created by

Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg in reaction to the public burning of the Talmud in Paris on June 17, 1242, a lament that satirizes Judah Halevi’s celebrated

“Ode to Zion,” using the same rhyme scheme. In Rabbi Meir’s sacred parody of Halevi’s poem, there is no wistful longing. In 1348, during the

Black Death in Western Europe and the accompanying anti-Jewish violence, Baruch ben Yehiel wrote a poem that is a sacred parody and which uses a double alphabetical acrostic modeled after the central chapter of Lamentations with its triple acrostic (Roskies, 46).

It is therefore not surprising to find the use of parody, including sacred parody, in Holocaust literature. The Holocaust poems of Dan Pagis

and A.M. Klein are modern-day illustrations of the use of parody and

sacred parody as a literary defense mechanism created in the wake of the

Holocaust.

According to Linda Hutcheon, “Parody … is a form of imitation,

but imitation characterized by ironic inversion, not always at the expense

of the parodied text. Parody is, in another formulation, repetition with

critical distance, which marks difference rather than similarity” (6).

She sees ironic inversion as an integral element of parody (6) and

argues that “… the ironic distance of modern parody might well come

from a loss of that earlier humanist faith in cultural continuity and stability

that ensured the sharing of codes necessary to the comprehension of such

doubly coded works” (10).

In my thesis, I will be using parody in the sense that Hutcheon

proposes – as irony-tinged imitation, rather than merely as a form of

mockery, although in the Holocaust poems of Pagis and Klein, the

“oblique homage" that she refers to is certainly not extended to every

entity that is parodied in their Holocaust poems.

Both Mintz and Roskies present a panoramic view of Jewish

literary responses to catastrophe and both argue that there is a paradigm of

the traditional Jewish literary treatment of the various disasters that have

befallen the Jewish people throughout its history.

According to Mintz, in Jewish tradition as expressed in Hebrew

literature over the generations, catastrophe is both a potential trigger of crisis and a trope because, in that tradition, “a destructive event becomes a

37 catastrophe when it convulses or vitiates shared assumptions about the destiny of the Jewish people in the world:

The responses to catastrophe in Hebrew literature involve attempts

first to represent the catastrophe and then to reconstruct, replace, or

redraw the threatened paradigm of meaning, and thereby make

creative survival possible (Mintz, 2).

Roskies considers sacred parody to be a traditional Jewish response to catastrophe, noting that the

technique of imitating the breach of God’s promise in the parody

of Scripture has been variously called “symbolic inversion” and

“countercommentary” by those who recognize its use only in the

modern age. In fact, it is one of two basic forms of Jewish response

to catastrophe. The first response – to locate the catastrophe on a

continuum – is an act of collective faith. But to mimic the sacrilege

allows the individual to keep the faith even as the promise is

subverted (Roskies, 20).

Both scholars regard Holocaust literature as part of the Jewish tradition of catastrophe literature. In the preface to his study of Jewish literary responses to national catastrophes written in Hebrew, Mintz explains his position on Holocaust literature and the tradition and notes that “Jewish society … has had many massive national catastrophes visited upon it and still survived: and in each case the reconstruction was undertaken in significant measure by the exertions of the Hebrew literary imagination, as expressed in prophecy, liturgy, exegesis, and poetry.” He argues that Salo W. Baron justifiably laments the “lachrymose view of

Jewish history”; this perspective considers the chronicles of the Jewish people to be “a series of persecutions, expulsions, and martyrdoms.” In

Mintz’ view, “[t]his intense interest in how Jews have died, the passion of

the Jews, as it were, is surely one of the forces behind the preoccupation with Holocaust literature” (Mintz, x).

However, in his study, Mintz places “emphasis … not on destruction but on creative survival…. The catastrophic element in events is defined as the power to shatter the existing paradigms of meaning, especially as regards the bonds between God and the people of Israel.

Crucial to creative survival was the reconstruction of these paradigms through interpretation, and in this enterprise the literary imagination was paramount” (x).

Sacred parody can thus be understood as a reinterpretation of

Jewish history; it enables a containment of disaster – even a disaster on the scale of the Holocaust – within the context of Jewish history. However, the use of parody and sacred parody in this containment also allows liberation from the lachrymose view of Jewish history.

Instead of choosing silence as their response to the Holocaust,

Pagis and Klein grapple with it. Their use of irony and parody present the

Holocaust through a distorting lens that emphasizes that the Holocaust is an aberration in human history. However, because they employ traditional

Jewish texts and motifs in a parodic manner, they are linking the

Holocaust to the flow of Jewish history while, at the same, calling attention to its cataclysmic disruption of that flow. Essentially, irony and

parody are instruments for showing that the Holocaust is both an event

that challenges the notion of the covenantal relationship between God and

the Jewish people while at the same time presenting the Holocaust as a

part of Jewish history. Because irony and parody draw attention to

dissonance – namely, the dissonance between the ostensible subject and

the hidden, alluded-to subject – they are effective tools for presenting the

Holocaust, which is dissonance on a mammoth scale. Roskies’ comments

on the “Jewish device of twisting Scripture” are relevant here. He

considers that device, which constitutes a fundamental reinterpretation of

the earlier canon, as integrally linked with the Bible as a whole. “It is,” he

argues, “but one instance of inner-biblical midrash…. After the exile

[from the native Jewish homeland], the need for such interpretive procedures was especially great” (19).

Viewed in this larger context, says Roskies, the inversion of the

Bible “can be seen as a means of keeping faith…. At that moment of crisis, individuals have the ability and the freedom to reinterpret and radicalize the tradition. They can take the supreme act of profanity and convert it to sacred use, creating their own personal ‘sacred parody’ - to borrow out of context from the English devotional poet George Herbert.”

According to Roskies, sacred parody “is parody in a double sense.”

On one hand, a sacred text is treated with irreverence; on the other hand, the disruption of the text’s holy status parallels what the enemies of the

Jewish people have done to the Jews (19-20).

Both Pagis and Klein, as I will attempt to show, invert sacred paradigms in their modern-day version of poetic sacred parody. Like

Hutcheon, Roskies perceives inversion as an essential component in parody. For Roskies, sacred parody is a double inversion. In sacred parody the sacred biblical text is challenged; it is inverted and the inverted biblical text then becomes a parodic text that contains criticism but which also serves to reinforce the faith of those who have created the sacred parody.

He does admit that there are sacred parodies that are destructive and which

undermine religious faith:

Some parody, of course, is [italicized in the text] destructive,

which raises the question of how to tell faithful mimes from their

cynical counterparts. What makes individual sufferers people of

faith is their willingness to accept the covenantal framework of

guilt, punishment and restitution; or, to put it differently, it is in the

self-imposed limitations of their parody. Theirs is an anger

deflected through the hallowed texts, a highly mediated and

ritualized form of anger. By making the text seem for a while crazy

and corrupt, the individual sufferer expands its meaning, allowing

subsequent sufferers to enter the breach. And once the shepherd’s

psalm is put through the fire of catastrophe, the lyric mode can be

used as a song of defiant confirmation (Roskies, 20).

As noted above, Roskies notes that there are

two basic forms of Jewish response to catastrophe. The first

response – to locate the catastrophe on a continuum – is an act of

collective faith. But to mimic the sacrilege allows the individual to

keep the faith even as the promise is subverted (20).

In the case of Klein, whose deep roots in Jewish tradition are

reflected in his poetry and in his frequent use of biblical paradigms, such

as the Psalms, sacred parody apparently is used to strengthen religious

faith. In the case of Pagis, it is difficult to determine whether the text’s

purpose is to reinforce religious faith or not. Certainly, some critics would

argue that, in any literary discussion, such a question is superfluous and

irrelevant. I think that this is an issue that deserves further exploration.

I will be making a distinction between sacred and non-sacred – or

general – parody, with sacred parody connoting an allusion to a sacred text

or entity and non-sacred parody connoting an allusion to a text or entity

that is not sacred. In light of Hutcheon’s and Roskies’ statements, I would

like to define parody as the rewriting of a text and thus the creation of a

new text. In this process, the original text is transmitted either in its

entirety with certain changes or only partially by means of code words.

Whereas, in Pagis, the trauma produced by the Holocaust’s

incomprehensible dimensions often expresses itself in the disintegration of grammar and syntax or in the use of sacred parody, in Klein, the trauma is

expressed not so much through grammar as through the parodic use of a

43 sacred paradigm, such as The Second Scroll, which uses the structure of the Pentateuch. The disintegration of grammar and syntax in Pagis often results in the degeneration of the continuous flow of poetic discourse into broken phrases and isolated words. One striking example is his “Written in

Pencil in the Sealed Boxcar,” which will be discussed below. Another is

“Draft of a Reparations Agreement,” where the breakdown of grammar and syntax is reflected in the breakdown of the time sequence and the bitterly parodic reversal of time. (This reversal is discussed later.)

The three poems that I will consider here are Pagis’ “Draft of a

Reparations Agreement” and “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Boxcar” and

Klein’s “In Re Solomon Warshawer,” for which there are two versions – the first one, written in 1940 and published in 1944, and the second, written between 1953 and 1955 and published in 1957. In these poems, the original, parodied text is transmitted partially by means of code words.

In these three poems, a secular (that is, non-sacred) parody is interwoven with a sacred parody, and a similar mechanism is at work: A framework of sacred parody exerts an influence on another framework of parody – of the non-sacred variety. In both cases, the outer framework is of a secular parodic nature.

In “Draft of a Reparations Agreement,” there are three parodic contexts, two secular parodies and one sacred parody. The first parodic

44 context is Pagis’ parodic and inverted version of the draft of a reparations agreement that West Germany and Israel signed in September 1952 and which was ratified in March 1953; the second is a film that is run backwards in order to demonstrate the unrealistic goals of the agreement.

The third parodic context is the vision of the dry bones in the Book of

Ezekiel (37:1-14). The relationship between the three frames is of a concentric nature: The Prophet Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones is contained within, and dismantles, the framework of the draft of the reparations agreement, turning it into a parody.

Pagis stretches the legal term “reparations agreement” to its furthermost – and absurd – limit. This is a clear example of argumentum ad absurdum. The process by which the reparations agreement will restore everything to what it was before the Holocaust is presented in the form of a film screened in reverse fashion:

הכל יחזר למקומו,

סעיף אחר סעיף.

הצעקה אל תוך הגרון.

שני הזהב אל הלסת.

הפחד.

העשן אל ארובות הפח והלאה ופנימה

אל חלל עצמות,

וכבר תקרמו עור וגידים ותחיו,

הנה עדיין תחיו לכם,

יושבים בסלון, קוראים עתון ערב.

(Pagis, 140)

Everything will return to what it was before,

Clause by clause.

The scream will go back inside the throat,

The gold teeth will return to the jaw.

The fear.

The smoke will return to the tin chimneys and from there

It will go back inside the bones,

Which will once more be covered by skin and sinews and will live.

You will all be restored to life

And you will sit in your living rooms, reading the evening

newspaper.

(My translation)

Furthermore, in this poem, Pagis is providing a parodic inversion of the German term for reparations, Wiedergutmachung, which can be

literally translated as “making well again.” Not only is Pagis parodying the reparations agreement intended to compensate the victims of the

Holocaust, he is also parodying the very idea that things can return to normal after that event. In essence, he is saying that the Holocaust is a paradigm illustrating the principle that certain actions can never be fully compensated for. Humpty Dumpty cannot be put together again in the case of the victims of the Holocaust. The power of the poem lies in the fact that this two-fold argument is not stated; instead, the very absurdity of the reverse process leads readers to recognize the validity of the argument.

Pagis uses the concealed metaphor of the cinema to illustrate the absurdity. Instead of proclaiming that the victims can never be compensated, the poet offers a poem that reverse-runs a film that depicts the intended process of the agreement. A film run backwards can turn any situation, even the most normal one, into a farce; in the case of this poem, the reversal of the Holocaust’s effects is shown to be an impossibility.

The parodic effect is reinforced by the poem’s obvious link with

Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones. In the biblical text, the prospect of the dead being restored to life is presented as apparently impossible – at least, as far as human comprehension is concerned. Even God refers to the doubts that any human being would have regarding the possibility of dry bones once more becoming living, breathing human beings. God asks

Ezekiel whether these bones can live again, and Ezekiel replies, “Only you, O Lord, have the answer.” As the biblical text shows, this is an impossible mission if responsibility for its realization is placed in human hands; however, it is possible if responsibility for its realization is placed in God’s hands.

In “Draft of a Reparations Agreement,” Pagis, who generally leans toward sparse language and understatement in his poetry, uses code words sparingly. There are three principal code words here: agreement, reparations and clause. Hannah Yaoz (“The Literature of the Holocaust and Its Poetry”) discusses Pagis’ use of code names in this poem. Her calling attention to the use of code names is an important catalyst for the exploration of code names and code words in his poems.

Since a written agreement is a precise legal document, the poem presents the purported restoration of the victims of the Holocaust as a precisely executed process, yet the very idea that any legal document can physically restore teeth or human lives is grotesquely absurd. However, because of the excessive precision and because of the unavoidably comic effect of a film run backwards, the results of this reparations agreement and the agreement itself become farcical.

There is also irony in the gap between the German term of making good and the Hebrew word shilumim, which, in the context of the

agreement, denotes “payment of compensation.” Nevertheless, it could also be argued that the word shilumim, reparations, contains not only the verb leshalem, to pay, but also the adjective shalem, complete, whole. In

English, the term heskem leshilumim is reparations agreement, where the word reparations expresses the concept of a repair, not the perfect restoration of an object, or a person, to the original state of existence.

Pagis plays on the distance between the word reparations, echoing the idea of repair or mending, and the word shalem, complete or whole, in order to create dissonance and a parodic effect.

Similarly, the line sa’if akhar sa’if, clause by clause (or, literally, clause after clause, suggesting a stage by stage process) adds to the parodic effect. The poem shows an impossible process of rebuilding the incinerated victims step by step.

It should be noted that there were many Israelis who at the time strongly protested the very idea of receiving money from the Germans for what was done to the Jews in Europe. Years before he became Prime

Minister, Menachem Begin was strongly opposed to the idea. Pagis is thus echoing the sentiments of many of his compatriots. Pagis’ well-known poem “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Boxcar” intertwines three concentric outer, overall non-sacred parodic frameworks and two inner sacred parodic frameworks.

כתוב בעיפרון בקרון החתום

כאן במשלוח הזה

אני חווה

עם הבל בני

אם תראו את בני הגדול

קין בן אדם

תגידו לו שאני

(Pagis, 135)

Here in this transport

I Eve

With Abel my son

If you see my eldest son

Cain son of Adam

Tell him that I

(My translation)

There are three outer non-sacred parodic frames in this poem. The outer frame depicts Jews being transported in a sealed boxcar to a concentration or death camp, while the inner sacred parodic frame is the story in Genesis of Adam and Eve and their two sons Cain and Abel.

The poem itself is a parody. It is a parody of the biblical story of the Creation and it is also a parody of all poems because this is graffiti that has been written in pencil on the wall of a freight car and can thus be easily erased, in contrast with the image of the immortal poem; furthermore, it is written in a sealed boxcar – in a confined and confining space, in contrast with the image of the poem that can be freely disseminated and can appear in published form available to whoever wants to read it. Finally, the poem/graffiti has an inherent irony because its call is irrelevant to the only two possible groups of readers of the poem – the

Jews being transported in the freight car and the Nazis and their collaborators; there is no third group of readers as far as the narrator, Eve, is concerned because she cannot foresee that the war will end and that other eyes might see this poem scrawled on the wall of a freightcar. The first group is helpless and obviously cannot tell Cain – the metonymic representation of the Nazis – anything because Cain will not listen. The second group – the Nazis and their collaborators – might read the poem, but they are not its intended readers; the poem is addressed to a plural you

that is distinct from Cain (the use of the second person plural in the

Hebrew is lost in the English translation where no distinction can be made

between a second person plural and a second person singular).

The interrelationship of the outer frames is complex. On the one hand, the poem is the depiction of the Jewish victims of a transport; it thus contains the transport. However, it is also written in the context of a transport; thus, it is contained by the transport. Furthermore, it is also contained by the freight car, on whose wall the poem/graffiti is written; however, the freight car in turn is a part of a transport, which in turn is part of the Nazis’ Final Solution.

The term “transport” is also a parody. The Hebrew word mishloach

– although it does connote the Nazi transports of their Jewish victims – is used in everyday Hebrew conversations in Israel to connote a delivery, and even the English translation is generally used for the transport of goods and passengers; here the word, as used by the Nazis, alludes to the transport of victims to a concentration or death camp. Additionally, mishloah is from the root shin-lamed-het, from which the imperative shlakh, send, is derived; that imperative is part of God’s command – through Moses - to Pharaoh, Shlakh et ami, Send forth my people, or Let my people go. This allusion to the Exodus, where the Jews are to be sent

to their homeland as a free nation, is augmented by a parodic reference to the Exodus narrative, which I refer to below.

The third outer parodic frame is the boxcar, or freightcar, which is normally used to transport goods or cattle; here the cargo is human and its destination is unknown.

The two inner parodic frames are rendered parodic because of their denial by the two menacing frameworks – the transport and the boxcar,

The first inner frame is the story of Adam and Eve. The grim parody is that Cain is not content with just murdering Abel; he also wants to murder his mother, Eve. Adam is absent – perhaps he has been sent on another transport or perhaps he is a silent bystander.

The second inner framework is the Exodus narrative, which is

alluded to by the verb-root shin-lamed-het, to send, and by the verb tagidu, which is the future of lehagid, to tell – the same verb that is contained in the commandment that Jews tell their children about the

Exodus tale on Passover and the same verb that is grammatically related to the Passover Haggadah. Here the telling is not something joyous; it is a cry of desperation.

The poem is a parodic reversal of the Genesis narrative of the creation of the universe. In that narrative, Adam and Eve, who are the first human beings God creates, are present, while, in Pagis’ poem, Adam is

absent (perhaps Cain has already murdered him?) and his wife, Eve,

symbol of all womanhood, is in a freight car presumably heading for a

death camp.

In Klein’s “In Re Solomon Warshawer,” which, as noted above,

appears in two versions in The Collected Poems (the first version was

written in 1940 and published in 1944, while the second was written

sometime between 1953 and 1955 and was published in 1957), a sacred

parodic framework exerts an influence on a secular parodic framework.

Here as well, the secular parodic framework is a legal document. The

poem is an affidavit presented before a Nazi court in Poland, which has

just been occupied by Germany. A German agent, informer or soldier (the

persona’s role is not clear) gives testimony in this affidavit concerning a

poor Jew in the city of Warsaw who has been apprehended three months

after Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland. The person who apprehends him

and who is giving an affidavit identifies himself as “Friedrich

Vercingetorix, attached/to the VIIth Eavesdroppers-behind-the-Lines”

(Klein, Complete Poems, 493 [1st version], 498 [2nd edition]); he is

apparently an ethnic German collaborating with the Nazis occupying

Poland and serving in some law enforcement capacity. The title of his unit

is another example of the mordant, painful satire in the poem. However,

this affidavit, this legal document, which enables the persecution of Jews,

is an aberration, a parody, of an affidavit in a system of justice functioning

in a democratic country. Since Klein’s audience is primarily North

American, he is obviously drawing a comparison between, on the one

hand, the travesty of justice in Germany and the countries it occupies and,

on the other, the genuine justice that one would expect in Klein’s country,

Canada, or in Canada’s neighbor, the United States. The parody is

emphasized inter alia by the appearance of S.S. personnel during Solomon

Warshawer’s interrogation and by the cruel character of the interrogation.

As in Pagis’ poem, the sacred parodic framework used here by

Klein is contained by a secular parodic one, which underlines the farcical,

absurd nature of the containing parodic framework. Solomon Warshawer

is a penniless Jewish refugee who presents himself as King Solomon. The

first parodic element in this sacred parodic framework is the name of the

Jewish refugee. His name is indeed Solomon, but he is Solomon

Warshawer - Solomon from Warsaw – who declares himself to be

Solomon, king of Israel. The second parodic element – Solomon

Warshawer’s signet ring, or seal – is double-edged. On the one hand, the

seal recalls another episode in the Book of Genesis and in which someone

has been arrested – Tamar who has become pregnant and who sends

Judah, her father-in-law, his seal, his bracelets and his staff with the

message that these artifacts belong to the father of her child and with the

request that he identify them. On the other hand, Solomon Warshawer’s

seal recalls the seal of King Solomon. The third element is the Talmudic

legend about King Solomon’s being deposed by Asmodeus whose regime

is depicted in this poem – especially in the later version written after the

Second World War – in terms that clearly identify it with Hitler’s regime

and its distorted systems of legislation, science, medicine and justice:

Who has not felt his statutes? … His scientists,

Mastering for him the lethal mysteries;

His surgeons of doctrine, cutting like vile cysts,

From off the heart, all pities and sympathies;

His judges, trembling over their decree….

His statecraft, and its modes and offices?

Here motive is appetite….

(Klein, Complete Poems, 504 [2nd version])

Here the sacred parodic framework is based both on the biblical

figure of King Solomon and on the Talmudic legend about King Solomon.

Regarding the central protagonist’s identity, Zailig Pollock notes,

“We never know whether the Jew is actually King Solomon, literally

‘disguised in rags,’ or merely a poor beggar driven to distraction”

(Pollock, A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet). However, the identity problem is less significant than the allusions that Klein introduces in this poem for parodic effect.

In Klein’s poem, the code words are to be found in the legal language of the affidavit and in the word “deponent” (person who testifies in the context of an affidavit) and which appears at the end of the document like a signature on an affidavit presented to a court of law. Like

Pagis, Klein plays with distance. In this case, he plays with the vast distance between an affidavit in a democratic society and an affidavit in the distorted system of justice under the Nazi regime.

Parody can be seen as a means of avoiding kitsch, clichés and emotional exaggeration. In Pagis’ poem, instead of attacking the reparations agreement between Israel and West Germany, he uses parody in order to show the absurd nature of the agreement. In Klein’s poem, instead of declaring in the voice of a prophet that the Jews in Nazi- occupied Poland live under a cruel, cynical regime with a twisted system of law enforcement, Klein turns the entire affidavit, which frames the poem, into a parody of law enforcement.

Klein’s poem “Elegy,” which may have been written after the full details of the Holocaust were becoming known (according to Zailig

Pollock, the editor of Collected Poems, the poem was probably written before, and certainly not after 1947 [according to the guidelines presented

in the “Textual Chronology,” xxxii) much more than a poem of lament. It

can be viewed as a sacred parody; its fury and passion recall Psalm 137,

which lists ancient Israel’s enemies and calls on God to punish them:

Psalms Chapter 83

1 A Song, a Psalm of Asaph.

2 O God, keep not Thou silence; hold not Thy peace, and be not

still, O God.

3 For, lo, Thine enemies are in an uproar; and they that hate Thee

have lifted up the head.

4 They hold crafty converse against Thy people, and take counsel

against Thy treasured ones.

5 They have said: 'Come, and let us cut them off from being a

nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance.'

6 For they have consulted together with one consent; against Thee

do they make a covenant;

7 The tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites; Moab, and the Hagrites;

8 Gebal, and Ammon, and Amalek; Philistia with the inhabitants of

Tyre;

9 Assyria also is joined with them; they have been an arm to the

children of Lot. Selah

10 Do Thou unto them as unto Midian; as to Sisera, as to Jabin, at the brook Kishon;

11 Who were destroyed at En-dor; they became as dung for the earth.

12 Make their nobles like Oreb and Zeeb, and like Zebah and

Zalmunna all their princes;

13 Who said: 'Let us take to ourselves in possession the habitations of God.'

14 O my God, make them like the whirling dust; as stubble before the wind.

15 As the fire that burneth the forest, and as the flame that setteth

the mountains ablaze;

16 So pursue them with Thy tempest, and affright them with Thy storm.

17 Fill their faces with shame; that they may seek Thy name, O

Lord.

18 Let them be ashamed and affrighted for ever; yea, let them be abashed and perish;

19 That they may know that it is Thou alone whose name is the

Lord,

the Most High over all the earth.

(according to the Jewish Publication Society’s 1917 translation;

downloaded from Mechon Mamre’s website: http://www.mechon-

mamre.org/e/et/et2683.htm

Similarly, Klein lists some of the nations that have been the

enemies of the Jewish people in the past and calls on God to punish the

latest enemy, Nazi Germany: “As thou didst do to Sodom, do to them!”

((Klein, Complete Poems, 675). However, unlike Psalm 83, “Elegy” also

calls on God to restore the Jewish people to its homeland. The poem was

written in 1947, only one year before the State of Israel became

independent in May 1948. Thus, Klein’s development of the poem beyond

the limits of the Psalm are understandable.

Concerning “Elegy,” Pollock refers to an “absent presence” that “is

expressed through the imagery of ashes: because a Jewish people has been

reduced to ashes in the Nazi crematoria, there is nothing identifiable left of

them; yet, in the form of ashes, they are omnipresent” (Pollock, A.M.

Klein: The Story of the Poet, 200-201).

In the above poems, with the exception of Klein’s “Elegy,” parody and sacred parody are used to convey messages that Pagis and Klein do

not state explicitly; instead they allow their readers to reach their own

conclusions on the characters and events in the poems. The employment of

parody is particularly successful in the two poems dealing with legal documents: Pagis’ “Draft of a Reparations Agreement” and Klein’s “In Re

Solomon Warshawer.” In the next chapter, I will discuss the use of irony

and black humor.

Chapter 3: Irony and Black Humor

In the previous chapter I discussed the use of parody and sacred

parody in the Holocaust poetry of Pagis and Klein; in this chapter, I wish

to focus on two literary devices that are related to parody: irony and black

humor. Hutcheon admits that the demarcation line between parody, irony

and black humor is not clear. I will therefore at this initial stage in the present chapter first consider some of the characteristics of irony and

black humor before delving into the issue of their distinction from parody.

As noted in the introduction , both irony and black humor depend on an

unexpected distance between signifier and signified; that distance, as I

said in the introduction, becomes horrifyingly colossal when culture and

civilized behavior seem incompatible with the monstrous reality of the

Holocaust.

Hutcheon’s comments on irony can also serve as a useful

introduction to irony and black humor in the Holocaust poetry of Pagis

and Klein. First of all, the demarcation lines between parody, satire and

irony are not clearcut and there is sometimes a certain amount of

overlapping between the three devices:

The ethos of all three entities – parody, irony and satire – have thus

far been discussed only in some hypothetically pure state which, in

fact, rarely exists in artistic practice. This is why the model is one

of overlapping and shifting circles. (Irony, as the trope used by

both genres, must be given the most room to move.) (Hutcheon,

61)

The distance becomes colossal when language breaks down, as

happened to the German language in, and because of, the Holocaust:

Languages are living organisms. Infinitely complex, but organisms

nevertheless. They have in them a certain life-force, and certain

powers of absorption and growth. But they can decay and they can

die (Steiner, Language and Silence, 96).

However, notes Steiner, the German language not only breaks down; it becomes a grotesque parody of itself. Words are given new and ironic meanings:

The unspeakable being said, over and over, for twelve years. The

men who poured quicklime down the openings of the sewers in

Warsaw to kill the living and stifle the stink of the dead wrote

home about it … spoke of having to “liquidate vermin.” ….

Gradually, words lost their original meaning and acquired

nightmarish definitions…. “Final solution,” endgültige Lösunng,

came to signify the death of six million human beings in gas ovens.

(Steiner, Language and Silence, 100).

When language is used, writes Steiner, “to conceive, organize and justify Belsen; … to make out specifications for gas ovens; … to dehumanize man during twelve years of calculated bestiality,”

“[s]omething will happen to it.” Gradually being destroyed from within,

“language will no longer perform, quite as well as it used to, its two principal functions: the conveyance of humane order which we call law, and the communication of the quick of human spirit which we call grace”

(Steiner, Language and Silence, 101). In such a situation, language becomes ironic, mocking itself. Pagis and Klein use this decaying of human language in the post-Auschwitz era in their employment of irony and black humor.

Bearing that caveat in mind, irony and black humor can nonetheless be isolated, even though it might not be in a perfectly isolated state. I will use Hutcheon’s definition of irony before analyzing the poems that I will present in this chapter:

On the semantic level, irony can be defined as a marking of

difference in meaning or, simply, an antiphrasis. As such,

paradoxically, it is brought about, in structural terms, by the

superimposition of semantic contexts (what is stated / what is

intended). There is one signifier and two signifieds, in other words.

… irony can be seen to operate on a microcosmic (semantic) level

in the same way that parody does on a macrocosmic (textual) level,

because parody too is a marking of difference, also by means of

superimposition (this time, of textual rather than of semantic

contexts). (Hutcheon, 54)

Although Katharina Barbe focuses on irony in discourse, her

observations are also relevant for irony in literature. She points out the

problem of defining irony: “Irony is so hard to define because it always

seems to include some type of subjective feeling” (Barbe, Irony in

Context, 11). Barbe also notes that the difference between “ironic comments” and “merely critical comments” lies in the fact that the

“intended criticism is often not obvious” (ibid.). D.C. Muecke, whom

Barbe cites ((Barbe, Irony in Context, 9), observes rather whimsically,

“Getting to grips with irony seems to have something in common with

gathering the mist; there is plenty to take hold of if only one could. To

attempt a taxonomy of a phenomenon so nebulous that it disappears as one

approaches is an even more desperate adventure” (Muecke, The Compass

of Irony, 3). He even suggests that “[i]t might be prudent not to attempt any formal definitions [of irony” (ibid., 14).

Wayne C. Booth also refers to the elusiveness of the meaning of irony, “For reasons that I cannot pretend fully to understand, irony has come to stand for so many things that we are in danger of losing it as a useful term altogether” (Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, 2).

In addition to irony, I will consider black humor. In both cases, there are a signifier and two signifieds. Whereas, in irony, the signifier can point to two distinct signifieds that might even be diametrically opposed to one another, black humor’s use of signfiers and signifieds is more subtle and perhaps more difficult to analyze.

In irony, the poet can use a word or term that suggests two very different images. It is the tension between the two signifieds that creates the irony. The greater the distance between the signifieds, the more mordant will be the signifier’s punch. However, the poet must be careful to avoid too great a distance between the signifieds because, like an elastic band stretched beyond its limits, the tension cannot be sustained and the reader will be left with two images that, in the eyes of the reader (as

opposed to the eye of the poet who is presumably convinced that there is a

strong connection between the signifier and the signifieds), the irony will

be lost and the result will be two signifieds that seem to have no common

denominator linking them.

Whereas, in irony, the tension is created by a disparity (but, not an

excessive one) between two signifieds, which can be either physical or

abstract entities, in black humor, the tension is created by the disparity between two highly abstract signifieds. The first signified is one’s initial response as a reader to the humorous signifier; the second signified is the reader’s considered response to the signifier, after one has measured the initial response as against the response one would expect to have in view of the signifier’s actual context. The disparity between the reader’s initial response to the signifier and his or her measured response – in other words, how one feels moral human beings should react to the signifier – creates a tension that causes one to label the humor black. We may initially laugh at the signifier; however, the reader’s second, delayed reaction will be to regret his or her initial laughter and to conclude that any humor generated by the signifier is not of a light nature and that any humor produced by the signifier must be tempered by a high degree of seriousness. In fact, one might even sense some degree of alarm at having laughed at all.

I ascribe a moral element to black humor, an element that does not

exist in irony. While it could be argued that morality should not be

brought into the picture where responses to literary texts are concerned, I

believe that the very term “black humor” strongly implies the use of moral strictures. It is only when the reader can judge his or her response as highly inappropriate that the term black humor can be used: The humor is

black or macabre because one realizes that, despite the initial reaction of

laughter or a gentle smile, the signifier is not something that one should

laugh at because the second signified – the response that one should have

– is the actual, and grim, meaning of the signifier.

When talking about the use of irony in connection with the

Holocaust, one should, of course, mention Paul Celan. In his poem,

“Death Fugue,” for instance, the phrase “we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped” in the second stanza acquires its full, ironic meaning only in the next stanza when the reader understands that the

Jews will become smoke, which requires no space, and that the Jews, in this ironic picture, will not be too cramped in their graves: “you'll rise then in smoke to the sky/you'll have a grave then in the clouds there you won't lie too cramped” (Celan, “Death Fugue”).

Pagis’ poem “Autobiography” (Pagis, 165) is a mixture of irony and black humor. First of all, the title is ironic. The first word in the poem

“I died” belies the title: Autobiographies are written by living human beings, not by ghosts. There is also irony in the fact that “[t]he crow taught my parents/What to do with me.” First of all, it is ironic that the narrator’s parents are being taught by a bird what to do with their son’s body. The irony is intensified by the fact that the bird is a crow, perhaps even a carrion crow. The only thing that a carrion crow can teach with regard to a corpse (the dead body of a human being) or a carcass (the dead body of an animal) is how to eat the flesh; obviously, this is not the kind of teaching that the parents need.

The black humor of the reference to the crow is conveyed by the allusion to a rabbi presumably wearing a black suit. The crow is performing the function of the rabbi who is consulted by bereaved families. Even the second consonant of orev (crow) is very similar to the

Hebrew for rabbi, rav.

After reaching the end of the poem, one realizes that, on one level, this is a poem about the First Family, that is, the first family that existed after the Creation. We then understand that the narrator is Abel, that his parents are Adam and Eve, and that the narrator’s murderer is his own brother, Cain. The dead Abel states that he comes from a “family [that] is highly respectable, in no small measure because of me.” On the one hand, the family is respectable – after all, the parents, Adam and Eve, are the

first human beings created by God. However, the source of their

respectability is, to a large measure, traceable, according to the narrator

Abel, to him. Since Abel is a victim, what does he have to do with their

respectability? The third stanza explains Abel’s importance and his claim

to being an important factor in his family’s respectability: His death

spawns an entire industry. Inventions are continually being upgraded.

Decrees are issued – death decrees. Although the narrator does not

specifically state that they are death decrees, the second part of the line

leads the reader to realize their true nature; as the narrator in this poem states, “[t]here were also those/Who had their own particular style of killing.” The word “also” indicates that the first part of the line also refers to murder, albeit in the form of official decrees.

Although ostensibly this is a poem about Adam, Eve, Cain and

Abel, its title, with its clear reference to the transports to the concentration

and death camps, renders it a Holocaust poem. “Autobiography” appeared in Moakh (Mind), which was published in 1975, five years after the publication of Gilgul (Reincarnation), which includes the poem “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Boxcar” (Pagis, 135). In that poem, Eve and Abel

are not only the members of the biblical first family; they are also Jews

who are being transported to their death in a freight train by orders of

Eve’s son and Abel’s brother, Cain. Thus, the allusion to Abel, especially as the first victim, also alludes to “Written in Pencil.”

This association increases the irony by one more notch. This is not really an autobiography; it is actually the chronicle of the Jews, particularly during the Holocaust. The “I” here is a collective “I.” This point is underlined in the fifth stanza:

אתה יכול למות פעם, פעמיים, אפילו שבע פעמים,

אבל אינך יכול למות רבבות.

אני יכול.

(Pagis, 165)

You can die once, twice, even seven times,

But you cannot die tens of thousands of times.

I can.

(My translation)

The irony in this statement is dark. Abel can boast of a unique

achievement: He has the ability to die many times, even tens of thousands

of times.

The narrator’s tone when addressing the reader is ironic. He will

not mention names – it is unclear here whether he is referring to the

murderers or the victims or perhaps to both – and adds that he is doing so

out of consideration for his reader. He then explains that, whereas initially

the details might be frightening, in the end – here the narrator twists the

ironic knife one more time – the details might prove (merely) wearisome.

The black humor of the poem also emerges in the list of inventions that

Abel attributes to his illustrious family: His brother Cain invented killing,

his parents weeping and he the narrator invented silence.

Pagis’ poem “Testimony,” to which I referred in the introduction,

contains an ironic reference to Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam.”

In the painting, Adam appears as a being created in God’s image,

represented anthropomorphically as a man with a beard and in a flowing white robe; the idea of Adam having been created in God’s image is conveyed by the representation of both figures as human beings who are

seeking to make contact. In “Testimony,” the narrator, a Jew, describes

himself first as a mere shadow and then as smoke ascending heavenward,

seeking to make contact with a God that, like the smoke-narrator, has no

body and no image.

Klein similarly employs black humor in his Holocaust poems, such

as in the mock epic, “The Hitleriad” (Klein, Complete Poems, 581-606),

72 which also derives considerable irony from its title, which alludes to The

Iliad and The Aeneid: Whereas these classical works refer to exploits of heroism, this poem refers to a dictator and murderer. Some degree of black humor is perhaps generated by the allusion as well to Alexander Pope’s

The Dunciad, which, like Klein’s poem, is a mock epic.

Before I discuss the poem, I feel that Michael Greenstein’s intriguing remarks about it should be noted here because of his adoption of a stance that does not rule out the possibility of poetry after Auschwitz:

A.M. Klein's mock-epic poem, The Hitleriad (1944), contravenes

Theodor Adorno's famous injunction, “No poetry after

Auschwitz.” It lacks the necessary historical distance for coping

with the enormity of the Holocaust: satiric, Augustan rhyming

couplets proved inadequate to this unparalleled tragedy, and by the

time Klein had grasped the historical perspective, he succumbed to

silence, as if in obeisance to Adorno's prophetic caveat

(Greenstein).

The irony is apparent from the very beginning of this long poem with its mock heroic tone and with the immediate emphasis of the disparity between the heroes of The Iliad and The Aeneid:

Heil heavenly muse, since also thou must be

Like my song’s theme, a sieg-heil’d deity,

Be with me, but not as once, for song:

Not odes do I indite, indicting Wrong!

Be with me, for I fall from grace to sin,

Spurning this day thy proferred hippocrene,

To taste the poison’d lager of Berlin!

(Klein, Complete Poems, 581)

It is obvious from the second stanza that this is a serious poem despite the ironic allusion to these two classical works. Here the poet considers his plight, his moral obligation:

Happier would I be with other themes –

(Who rallies nightmares when he could have dreams?)

With other themes, and subjects more august –

Adolf I sing but only since I must.

I must! Will I continue the sweet words

That praise the blossoming flowers, the blossoming birds,

While, afar off, I hear the stamping herds?

Will I, within my ivory tower, sit

And play the solitaire of rhyme and wit,

While indignation pounds upon the door,

And Pity sobs, until she sobs no more,

And, in the woods, there yelp the hounds of war?

(Klein, Complete Poems, 581)

The serious tone in this passage, which can make readers think of

Adorno’s declaration of the impossibility of poetry after the Holocaust, is made even heavier because the narrator has an additional moral duty; he is not simply a poet. He has a holy tradition:

I am the grandson of the prophets! I

Will not seal up lips against iniquity.

(Klein, Complete Poems, 582)

He has a moral obligation not only toward his fellow Jews but also to the world:

And let the world see that swastika-stain,

That heart, where no blood is, but high octane,

That little brain –

So that once seen the freak be known again!

(Klein, Complete Poems, 582)

The picture that Klein paints of Hitler’s face is grotesque; however, with its mixture of malevolence and ridicule, it also contains a strong element of black humor:

Why, it’s a face like any other face

Among a sea of faces in a mob, –

A peasant’s face, an agent’s face, no face

At all, no face but vegetarian blob!

The skin’s a skin on eggs and turnips fed,

The forehead villainous low, the eyes deepset –

The pervert big eyes of the thwarted bed –

And that mustache, the symbol of the clown

Made emperor, and playing imperial pranks –

(Klein, Complete Poems, 582)

Klein underscores the ridicule with his rhetoric question:

Is this the mustache that brought Europe down,

And rolled it flat beneath a thousand tanks?

(Klein, Complete Poems, 583)

Klein makes prominent use of a particularly caustic irony in “Song

of Innocence,” whose title alludes to William Blake’s “Songs of

Innocence.” Like “Elegy,” this poem may have been written after the full

details of the Holocaust were becoming known (according to Zailig

Pollock, the editor of Collected Poems, the poem was probably written before, and certainly not after 1947 [according to the guidelines presented in the “Textual Chronology,” xxxii).

Song of Innocence

About the Crematorium where the Jews

Burn, the Nations sit in their pews

Watching the heavenly Carbonic Bands

Cast shadows over the Bibles in their hands.

It shocks their Piety, this Altar, and they look

Away, and into the good Book.

Devotion done, they lift their eyes to see

The sky clear, full of Grace again, smoke-free;

And on the smoke-stack score-board – dots:

A Six and one-two-three-four-five-six Noughts.

The irony is aimed at what Klein sees as the hypocrisy of the

Christian world; there is also black humor in his description of the

“smoke- stack score-board,” which recalls the scoreboard of a Canadian hockey or football stadium. This image drives forth the message that the

Jews are not only ashes that briefly interrupt the ostensibly pious from their devotion but also mere statistics, like the results of a hockey or football game.

The irony and black humor that Pagis and Klein employ do not diminish the Holocaust’s horror; they emphasize it. In the next chapter, I want to look at a device that goes one step further than irony and black humor: satire, which goes beyond the ironic smirk and the silent recognition of the presence of black humor.

Chapter 4: Satire

In the previous chapter, I looked at irony and black humor in two

Holocaust poems by Pagis and Klein respectively. In this chapter, I wish

to focus on satire in their Holocaust poetry. In order to proceed further, I

must make a distinction between parody and satire, and between irony and

satire.

Hutcheon’s distinction between satire and parody revolves around

the issue of the target. Rejecting the distinction made by Winfried Freund

who claims that “satire aims at the restoration of positive values, while parody can only operate negatively,” Hutcheon maintains that the

“difference between the two forms lies not so much in their perspective on

human behavior … but in what is being made into a ‘target.’ In other

words, parody is not extramural in its aim; satire is” (43). She notes that

the two terms are often confused, adding that the “obvious reason for the

confusion of parody and satire, despite this major difference between

them, is the fact that the two genres are often used together” (ibid.).

I propose that the difference between irony and satire is one of

extent. Both irony and satire involve the construction of parallels and the

creation of two signifieds for a single signifier. In irony, the signifier can

be a word or phrase, or an action; the greater the distance between the two

signifieds, the greater the irony. In satire, on the other hand, the signifier is

an entire context: a book, a person, a situation.

Like irony, satire is difficult to define. Brian A. Connery and Kirk

Combe point out that “in general usage, ‘satire’ remains less an

identifiable genre than a mode, and an astonishingly wide range of vastly

varied works have been placed under its rubric” (Connery and Combe,

“Theorizing Satire,” 9). Similarly, Dustin Griffin is cautious about

defining satire: “because satire comes in so many different forms and

because satire often seems a ‘mode’ or a ‘procedure’ rather than a single

‘genre,’ I do not offer a new comprehensive and unified ‘theory’ that tries

to account for all of satire’s features” (Griffin, Satire, 4). y

I will define satire here as the creation of a second signifier for an already established signifying context, where the second signifier is vastly

different from the signifying context’s usual signifier and where the

difference between the two signifieds is often humorous.

An excellent example of satire in Pagis’ Holocaust poetry is his

“Family Tree”:

יוחסין

בני רץ אליי ואומר לי: בני.

אני אומר לאבי: שמע, בני, אני.

אבי רץ אליי ואומר לי: אבא,

שמעת? הוקם לנו זכר ושם.

אני רץ אליי ורואה: אני שוכב

כרגיל, פני אל הקיר, ורושם

בגיר על הקיר הלבן

את שמותיהם כולם, לבל אשכח

את שמי.

(Pagis, 167)

My son runs to me and says to me: “My son.”

I say to my father: “Listen, my son, I.”

My father runs to me and says to me: “Father,

Have you heard? A memorial has been erected in our memory.”

I run to myself and see: I am lying on my bed

As usual, my face to the wall, and am writing

In chalk on the white wall

All their names, so that I will not forget

My own name.

(My translation)

Pagis is satirizing the entire concept of genealogy, represented by

the symbol of the family tree. Genealogy is meaningless in the context of

the Holocaust because entire family trees were uprooted; the reader knows nothing of the place of death, date of death or even manner of death of a large percentage of the Jews who perished in the Holocaust. So many

children of Holocaust survivors in the 1950s and 1960s were forced to

grow up within very small, almost nuclear families because their own

generation and the two preceding generations had been almost totally

erased: all or nearly all of their siblings and cousins, as well as all or

nearly all of their grandparents, uncles and aunts. Thus, to construct

genealogies for the families of Holocaust survivors becomes a cruel joke,

with so many of the members marked as missing, presumed dead,

executed with question marks for the place and date of death.

Furthermore, the narrator is writing his name in chalk, which is associated

with blackboards and erasure and is thus linked to the pencil scrawling of

the poem/graffiti in “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Boxcar.”

Pagis satirizes the conventional family tree in this poem? First of

all, the poem is a denial of its own title. Whereas a family tree is a tree,

that is, a living and growing organism, the family tree in this poem is a

memorial – a stone plaque, which is as dead as the people it

commemorates. Second, when one tries to trace the family lines in this

grotesque satire of a family tree, the lines go nowhere. The roles of parents

and children are horribly interchanged and thus obliterated; again, what

happens in the poem reflects the reality of the Holocaust, where parents

were sometimes forced by the Nazis to deny their own children, where

children sometimes acted as parents in attempts to save their mothers and

fathers.

The first line contradicts itself. In both the Hebrew original and the

English translation, the first line begins “My son” and, mirror-like, ends

with “My son.” Between the son and the son’s mirror image lies the

pronoun “me,” which, like “My son,” is repeated and which, like “My

son,” reverses its meaning in its second appearance. The first “My son” is

erased by the second “My son” because, somewhere between these two

poles, the son becomes the father. The line begins with “My son” running to “me,” the father; however, the father is then addressed by the son as if the latter were, in fact, the father: “My son runs to me and says to me: ‘My son.’” The son becomes the father and the father the son; the genealogical line goes up – from son to father – and then immediately goes down again

– from the father-who-has-now-become-the-son to the-son-who-has-now-

become-the-father. However, in actuality, the genealogical line actually

does not go up or down; it simply erases itself.

With regard to both the Hebrew original and the English translation, a similar, but not an identical, process can be observed in the second line: The line begins and ends with I; however, the second “I” is vastly different from the first “I.” Whereas the first “I” is a son speaking to his father, the second “I” is a father speaking to his son. Similarly, “my father” is replaced with “my son” and is effectually erased.

In both lines, the erasure of the genealogical line is a satiric

representation of the annihilation of entire Jewish families by the Nazis.

The annihilation of the Jews is emphasized by the fact that these three

lines, each of which is uniquely phrased, carry the same message: both

fathers and sons (and, obviously, both daughters and mothers) are turned into mirror-images of each other and are effectively erased. Moreover, the

annihilation of entire generations is emphasized by the fact that each line

represents a different generation. The narrator is a father and his son is

running to him; in the second line, he is a son running to his own father.

Thus, the son in the first line is also the grandson of the narrator’s father in

the second. In two lines, Pagis, in his characteristically succinct manner,

demonstrates the erasure of three generations: grandfather, son/father and

son/grandson.

The memorial to be erected is a cruel joke because, in a Holocaust world where the father is the son and the son is the father, all identities are obliterated; a memorial to the dead of the Holocaust is meaningless because there is no one to be remembered. Furthermore, there is grim irony in the fact that the father/son speaking in the third and fourth lines is talking about a memorial that has already been erected in their memory.

These two lines can be interpreted in at least two ways. One way is to see the speaker as one of the dead who is talking from the grave about the memorial that has been erected. However, another way is to see the father/son as a living corpse talking about the cold comfort that a memorial will commemorate his memory and that of the other victims of the Nazis. The second interpretation is more tempting because of the verb ratz, he runs. First of all, the verb gives a sense of energy, of living energy, rather than a sense of dead people talking. Second, the image conjured by the verb-root larutz, to run, is that of feet touching the ground rapidly – hardly, an image of ghosts freely flying in the air. Thirdly, the idea of a living present is suggested by the fact that, on all three occasions, the verb is in the present tense. Thus, if one opts for the second interpretation, there is the grotesquely satirical picture of a living human who sees death close at hand and who already feels like a name on a memorial.

The first half of the poem, which ends immediately after the colon

in the fifth line, sums up the satiric absurdity of the entire first half: “I run

to myself” or, alternatively, “I am running to myself.” In light of the first

three lines, it can be argued that the narrator is summing up what he has

been doing up until now: He has been part of a process of erasure of

identities, where fathers melt into sons and sons into fathers, with the

result that no one remains. It could even be argued that the poem is

presenting a grimly satiric view of the erasure of individuality that was

one of the prime elements of the Holocaust, where Jews lost their identity

in the concentration camps, becoming mere numbers, and where fathers

and sons, mothers and daughters, grandparents and grandchildren became

one in the smoke emitted from the chimneys of the crematoria.

However, the concept of the memorial is both graphically

emphasized and dramatically undercut by the act of engraving on a wall

that appears in the second half of the poem. The image in this second half is that of a concentration camp inmate lying on a bed and writing on the wall. First of all, the frenetic action of the poem’s first part that is generated by the threefold repetition of the verb “to run” is brought to a standstill by another verb, which suggests non-motion and which even alludes to death and to dead persons lying in their grave: ani shokhev, I am lying [on my bed]. (In my translation of the poem, I added these three

86 words, which are not in the text, because of the problematic ambivalence of the phrase “I am lying” in English – to lie on a bed or to tell a falsehood.) The dramatic negation of movement supports the image of a memorial: the absence of movement, the transformation of a former living being into a line (a name) or into part of an abstract phrase (the fallen, the victims, and so forth). Whereas the first half of the poem was characterized by senseless, rapid movement of a son running to his father but actually running toward himself, the second half is frozen, the only movement being that of the narrator writing names on a wall.

The readers realizes why the narrator’s son and father run to him and why he can only say that he is running to himself: The narrator is a concentration camp inmate and has nowhere to run. He is lying on his cot or plank and is motionless except for his hand writing names on a wall.

Just as, in many biblical passages, the second part of a verse is a parallel of the first, here too, in “Family Tree,” the second half conveys the same message as the first, but, in a different way. As in the first half, there is satiric absurdity. As in the first part, there is statement followed by a counter-statement that essentially erases both the statement and the counter-statement. The narrator says he is writing the names of everyone on the wall. First of all, the “everyone” in the poem, as shown in the first half, is actually no one. All identities are erased. Second, he is writing

these names for one purpose – so that he will not forget his own name. In

other words, the names of everyone are equal to his name; again, all

individual identities are obliterated. Thirdly, he is telling the reader that

the memorial is not a memorial after all, because he is writing the names

in chalk (which, in the 1940s, one can assume was white) on a white wall.

In other words, whatever he writes is invisible. This image could be

applied not just to what is happening in the poem, but also to the very act

of writing Holocaust literature or Holocaust poetry. Whereas, in “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Boxcar,” there is no audience, here there is no poem.

“Family Tree” alludes, even if only indirectly, to the act of

commemoration, which is a major part of the Jewish ethos, especially

regarding Holocaust memory, and which can be regarded as an act of

correction and consolation. We could see the narrator’s writing the names

in chalk on the white wall as an attempt at commemoration, which is

graphically demonstrated to be futile. The white letters on the white wall are an effective graphic parallel to the pervasive erasure of identity in the poem; the narrator’s attempt to commemorate is perhaps as futile as what he is writing on the wall. The names are invisible because of the tools he is using (white chalk on a white wall) and thus, like the family relationships that cancel each other out, his attempt at commemoration negates itself; no

88 one will be able to read the names and his attempt at commemoration will have failed.

Satire is effectively used by Klein in his poem, “Meditation upon

Survival” (Klein, Complete Poems, 663), where he satirizes museums, the concept of survival and the institution of memory.

Unlike many of Klein’s other Holocaust poems, written either before or during that nightmarish period, this poem, written in 1946 and published in 1950, displays an awareness of the full scope of the horror wreaked upon the Jews by the Nazis and the collaborators. The narrator is fully cognisant that six million of his people were exterminated: he is tormented because he “must live/their unexpired six million circuits.”

There are two survivors in this poem, and the word survivor is used advisedly because the very nature of the survival is satiric. The survivors are the Jewish nation and the poet-narrator who, one realizes at the end of the poem, is imprisoned in a glass-cage (anachronistically

“foretelling” the “glass cage” to which the arch-murderer of Jews during the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, was confined during his trial by the State of Israel in Jerusalem). The poet-narrator is, as the reader can understand, when one reaches the final line of “Meditation upon Survival,” merely a museum piece.

Here again, as in Pagis’ “Family Tree” and “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Boxcar,” the poet-narrator is presented as a figure whose poetry is muted and thus unheard – essentially, worthless. In “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Boxcar,” the narrator, Eve, writes her poetry on the wall of a boxcar that may or may not be read by anyone else. In “Family Tree,” the list of names that the poet-narrator is writing could also be applied to his

Holocaust poems: invisible poems written in white chalk on a white wall, poems that no one can see. In “Meditation upon Survival,” the poet is in a glass cage and is uttering words that no one can hear. Even if they could hear them, who would possibly pay attention to what a museum exhibit has to say?

Survival is satirized through the presentation of the poem’s two survivors: the poet/narrator/museum piece and the Jewish people. The first stanza shows one aspect of his torment, as presented in the first six lines of the poem:

At times, sensing that the golgotha’d dead

run plasma through my veins, and that I must live

their unexpired six million circuits, giving

to each of their nightmares my body for a bed –

inspirited, dispirited –

(Klein, Complete Poems, 663)

Although “golgotha’d dead” refers to the six million Jews who

perished in the Holocaust, the word “Golgotha” conjures up an image of

Christ on the cross and even ironically suggests that the poet-narrator sees himself in a Christ-like role as bearing the suffering of the millions of

Jewish dead. Sometimes, when the burden he must bear is too much for him, he becomes embittered by the fact that he has been “lucky enough” to survive, to be the “spared one” and he almost – but not quite - joins their death-wish, almost – but not quite – longing to be one of the six million dead:

those times that I feel their death-wish bubbling the

channels of my blood –

I grow bitter at my false felicity –

the spared one – and would almost add my wish

for the centigrade furnace and the cyanide flood.

(Klein, Complete Poems, 663)

The use of “would almost” in the phrase “would almost add my

wish” is a subtle suggestion of the tension he feels. On one hand, he

strongly identifies with his murdered brothers and sisters; on the other, he

still wants to survive. However, when one considers the conditions of his

survival, his torment and his being imprisoned in a museum’s glass-cage,

one can see how the very concept of survival is satirized. The last stanza

clarifies for the reader what the poet-narrator has become. He is the representative of a race that is now extinct on the face of the earth, like the

“fletched buffalo”: “Gerundive of extinct. An original.” The employment of this word “original” is poisonously satiric. One can perhaps think of

how happy a collector would be to have a rare specimen of something that

has all but disappeared: a rare coin, a rare stamp, and so forth. Here is

what can truly be called a rare Jew.

According to J.M. Kertzer, the poet narrator “grows bitter at his

‘false felicity’ because he realizes that his survival represents nothing and

guarantees nothing.” His heritage is “a legacy of death” and it “defines

him as a guilty survivor (Kertzer, “Personality and Authority: A.M.

Klein's Self-Portrait”). The poet-narrator realizes that his only role now is

to remain forever in the glass-case of “some proud museum.” Unlike the

Holocaust victims whose bones were burned in crematoria and became

ash, he has the dubious honor – again, mordant satire – of being a rare

specimen. His fate is not to be buried in the family cemetery – to rest in

peace – but rather to be eternally on display as a museum exhibit:

What else, therefore, to do

but leave these bones that are not ash to fill –

O not my father’s vault – but the glass-case

some proud museum catalogues Last Jew.

(Klein, Complete Poems, 664)

Even the wording of the catalogue description is satirical. The label is not “The Last Jew,” which would have given the exhibit a certain amount of dignity, but rather “Last Jew” – like “last buffalo” or “last butterfly” – the last of a species of animal or insect.

The poem can be viewed as an extended oxymoron. If the poet- narrator is the last Jew to survive, what about the Jewish nation that has survived? The poem is thus a self-contradiction.

There is a subtle satiric touch in the phrase “some proud museum.”

Considering the fact that the Jewish people are presented as a grotesque monster, it is safe to assume the museum is part of the proud German nation, which, in this poem, has triumphed over the Jews.

The poem draws parallels between this survivor in the glass cage and the other survivor in the poem – the Jewish nation: they are mute and they are dehumanized. Like the poet-narrator in the glass cage who can

only watch the visitors to the museum, the Jewish people has become a

severed head that can only look on, hear and think as it bleeds.

The term “golgotha’d dead” in the first line already hints at the

dehumanized manner in which the post-Holocaust Jewish nation will be described later on in the poem. In a grimly satiric touch, Klein turns the

Jewish people into a “thing/that lives” – a cross between the Headless

Horseman of Sleepy Hollow and a Frankenstein monster,

Us they have made the monster, made that thing

that lives though cut in three: the severed head

which breathes, looks on hears, hears, thinks, weeps, and is bled

continuously with a drop by drop longing

for its members’ re-membering!

And, the torn torso, spilling heart and lights

And the cathartic dregs!

These, for the pit! Upon the roads, the flights –

– O how are you reduced, my people, cut down to a limb! –

Upon the roads the flights of the bodiless legs!

(Klein, Complete Poems, 664)

The dehumanization of the Jewish nation is reinforced by the use

of the word “lights,” which is defined by The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, (1991) as “the lungs of sheep, bullocks, pigs, etc., used as food especially for pets”: The organs of this nearly-extinct Jewish

people are not even regarded as human. There is a dark satire here: The

body parts have survived and even the legs are still functioning. However,

they are bodiless legs running off down the road in every possible

direction.

The third element that is satirized is the very institution of

remembrance. With his masterly knowledge of the English language,

Klein dismembers memory and, creating a ghastly pun, transforms the

word “remembering” into “re-membering.” Given the Jewish nation’s

dismal state after Auschwitz, memory – or remembering – is not needed.

What is needed is a re-membering – a piecing together, as was the case

with the Frankenstein monster, of the severed members of the Jewish

cadaver.

In the end, the survival that is portrayed in this poem in two

hideous forms is only a sham of survival. It is survival in the very crudest

and cruelest of senses: For what remains of the Jewish people after the

Holocaust, for “that thing/ that lives though cut in three,” it is the survival

of a severed head, a headless and legless torso, and a bodiless pair of legs.

Here, in a tragically satirical fashion, one has a classic example of a reversal of the statement that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Here, the severed head, the torso and the bodiless legs do not add up to a human being; they are merely body parts. For the poet/narrator/museum piece on display, survival is a travesty: He survives in name only and, while his body is intact, he, the “Last Jew,” is a prisoner, as immobile as the poet-narrator in Pagis’ poem “Family Tree.”

In general, despite the satire, “Meditation upon Survival” is a very pessimistic poem about the future of the Jewish people. Written only one year after the Second World War, it presents the Jewish nation as a travesty of a nation, as a carcass, as a figure of desolation.

Phyllis Gottlieb’s comments on parody in Klein’s work are relevant here. In her essay, “Hassidic Influences in the Work of A.M.

Klein,” which appears in the Mayne anthology, Gottlieb notes two elements that have the ring of parody – the use of the number 36, which has great significance in Jewish tradition, and Klein’s literal translation of his name into Hebrew

in Klein’s work [of] instances of the use of the number thirty-six

and, more important, the attributes of the Lamed-Vovnicks [the 36

hidden saints without whom, according to Jewish tradition, the

world would cease to exist]. In the Poems 1944, the first group,

called the Psalter of Avram Haktani, which is a straight

translation of Klein’s name in Hebrew, there are thirty-six poems.

Psalm X, called Lamed Vav, describes a good man, “I believe that

he was one of the Thirty-six …” The most interesting use of this

number occurs in The Second Scroll….

(50)

Another parodic element is cited by Gottlieb: Klein’s use of one of Rabbi

Nachman of Bratzlav’s most well-known stories (50-54); there is an example of Klein making parodic (but not irreverent) use of accepted

Jewish texts.

Marya Fiamengo, in her “Catholic Resonances in the Poetry of A.M.

Klein” (66), states that “Klein was a deeply religious man. The poet often speaks as a prophet or priest; the poem is a form of secular prayer”. This statement helps explain Klein’s affinity for parody of traditional Jewish texts: as a religious Jew, he is close to Jewish tradition but, as a poet who often adopts the role of the prophet, he parodies earlier Jewish texts.

It should be noted that, in “Meditation upon Survival,” the poet- narrator sees himself as a survivor – as Kertzner notes, a guilty survivor.

Thus, despite the fact that Klein was not personally a Holocaust survivor,

he sees himself as one. In these two poems, Pagis and Klein respectively

employ dark satire to tell the tale of the Holocaust. The dark satire is a

suitable tool for depicting the distortions that the Holocaust produced. As

Klein ironically points out in “Meditation upon Survival,” the victim has

somehow become a monster. Focusing on the survival motif in the title,

Pollock argues that, in the poem’s “final stanza, the poet imagines, with

bitter irony, the only way which is left to him to keep alive the memory of

his people, by becoming, in Roskies’ terms, (here he cites Roskies,

Against the Apocalypse, 133) ‘the symbolic survivor of the community

(and thus, the community in miniature)’” (Pollock, A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet, 199). Moreover, not only is the survival in the poem grotesque, even the philosophical term “meditation” is so inappropriate for the situation that it can be also considered another manifestation of dark satire.

Conclusion

In this thesis, I have conducted a comparative analysis of selected

Holocaust poems by Dan Pagis and A.M. Klein-- one an Israeli Holocaust survivor and the other a Canadian Jew who did not directly experience the

Holocaust. As I have attempted to demonstrate, there is considerable similarity between these two very different poets in their employment of parody, sacred parody, satire, irony and black humor in the depiction of the Holocaust in their poetry. Both poets invert sacred paradigms in their modern-day versions of poetic sacred parody and thus are carrying on the traditional Jewish mode of dealing with catastrophe.

There are many weighty questions that can be asked about

Holocaust poetry – its status as testimony, its relation to historic truth, the paradox between aesthetic form and the subject of the Holocaust, to name but a few. These are questions that must be considered and I hope that my thesis may have made some contribution to increasing interest in finding answers to them.

I have discussed Holocaust poems by both authors with regard to three aspects: irony, black humor and satire, and parody and sacred parody. In the discussion, I have applied and incorporated two important theoretical approaches: Linda Hutcheon's A Theory of Parody and David

G. Roskies' Against the Apocalypse.

As can be seen from my comparative analysis of the poems I have chosen, there is considerable similarity between these two very different poets in their employment of tools of irony, black humor, and satire.

My discussion has implications for a general problem, the use of irony and satire to depict Holocaust events. There are those who would say that irony, black humor and satire, and parody, even sacred parody, are totally inappropriate devices for employment in any connection with the

Holocaust. As I have tried to show in my discussion, Pagis and Klein employ these devices within the context of a traditional Jewish response to catastrophe. As Mintz and Roskies have demonstrated, parody and sacred parody are actually the only appropriate devices for dealing with catastrophes such as the Holocaust.

There is, of course, the more general problem of laughter and

Holocaust: Are jokes about the Holocaust permissible? Can the Holocaust be presented on stage or in the cinema in satiric dramatic renditions?

These are important issues that I feel should be referred to in the conclusion of my thesis although this is not the context to elaborate on them.

While both poets deserve critical attention, I hope that this thesis will also spark renewed critical interest in the important work of A.M.

Klein and perhaps encourage more monographs on his literary production

100 per se and in comparison with poets in other cultures. As I have shown in this thesis, both poets had a large following when they published their poems; however, whereas Pagis is still read and is still a familiar name in

Hebrew literature circles, Klein has been largely, and sadly, forgotten.

In summing up, my comparative analysis has hopefully shown that irony, black humor and satire, and parody, even sacred parody, are legitimate tools in Holocaust literature, including, of course, Holocaust poetry.

101

Works Cited

Primary Sources

Klein, Abraham Moses. The Collected Poems of A.M. Klein. compiled by Miriam Waddington. Toronto, Montreal, New York, London, etc.: McGraw-Hill Ryerson Limited, 1974. Klein, Abraham Moses. Complete Poems. Ed. Zailig Pollock. 2 vol. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. Pagis, Dan. Kol Hashirim [v’] Abba [Pirkei Proza] [Collected Poems (and) Father (Prose Passages)]. Jerusalem: Hakibbutz Hameuchad and the Bialik Institute, 1991. [In Hebrew]

Additional Primary Sources

Celan, Paul, “Death Fugue,” translated by John Felstiner (http://mason.gmu.edu/~lsmithg/deathfugue.html).

Secondary Sources

Adorno, Theodor W. The Adorno Reader. Ed. Brian O’Connor. Blackwell Publishers: Oxford and Malden, Massachusetts, 2000. Adorno, Theodor W. Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. New York: The Seabury Press (A Continuum Book), 1973. “A.M. Klein: Biography” in Canadian Poetry Online (http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/klein/). Alter, Robert. “Dan Pagis and the Poetry of Displacement,” Judaism 45.4 (Fall 1996): 399-402. Barbe. Katharina. Irony in Context. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1995. Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1974. Brenner, Rachel Feldhay. A.M. Klein, the Father of Canadian Jewish Literature: Essays in the Poetics of Humanistic Passion. New York: E. Mellen Press, 1983. Connery, Brian A. and Combe, Kirk. “Theorizing Satire: A Retrospective and Introduction,” in Connery, Brian A. and Combe, Kirk, Theorizing Satire: Essays in Literary Criticism. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

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Edel Leon, “Marginal Keri and Textual Chetiv: The Mystical Novel of A.M. Klein,” in Seymour Mayne, ed., The A. M. Klein Symposium. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1975. Pp. 15-29. Eshel, Amir. “Eternal Present: Poetic Figuration and Cultural Memory in the Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, Dan Pagis, and Tuvia Rübner,” Jewish Social Studies 7.1 (2000): 141-166. Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven. By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1980. Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven. Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2000. Fiamengo, Marya. “Catholic Resonances in the Poetry of A.M. Klein,” in Seymour Mayne, ed., The A. M. Klein Symposium. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1975. Pp. 65-71. Gottlieb, Phyllis.“Hassidic Influences in the Work of A.M. Klein,” in Seymour Mayne, ed., The A. M. Klein Symposium. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1975. Pp. 47-64. Greenstein, Michael. “Canadian Poetry after Auschwitz.” Canadian Poetry 20 (1987) in http://www.uwo.ca/english/canadianpoetry/cpjrn/vol20/vol20index.htm Griffin, Dustin. Satire: A Critical Reintroduction. Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1994. Gubar, Susan. Poetry after Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth- Century Art Forms. Methuen: New York and London, 1985 (rpt. 1986). Kertzer,J.M. “Personality and Authority: A.M. Klein's Self-Portrait,” Canadian Poetry 15 (Fall/Winter 1984) (http://www.uwo.ca/english/canadianpoetry/cpjrn/vol15/kertzer.htm) Langer, Lawrence L. The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination. 3rd printing. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977. Lyotard, Jean-François. “Discussions, or Phrasing ‘after Auschwitz,’” (translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele) in The Lyotard Reader. Ed. Andrew Benjamin. Blackwell. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1989; rpt. 1993. Pp. 360-392. Lyotard, Jean-François. “The Sign of History’” (translated by Geoff Bennington), in The Lyotard Reader. Ed. Andrew Benjamin.

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תקציר עברי

חיבור זה בוחן את השימוש בפרודיה (לרבות פרודיה קדושה), אירוניה והומור שחור, וכן סטירה בשירי שואה נבחרים של המשורר הישראלי דן פגיס והמשורר הקנדי-יהודי א.מ. קליין.

למרות הבדלים של ביוגרפיה (פגיס חי בישראל בעוד קליין חי בקנדה) ושל סביבה תרבותית (סביבה דוברת עברית לעומת זו הדוברת אנגלית), קיימים הרבה קווים מקבילים בשימוש שלהם בכלים אלה.

בדיון, יהיה שימוש רחב בשני טקסטים תיאורטיים: :A Theory of Parody

The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms של לינדה האטצ'ון ו- Against

,the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture של

דוד ג. רוסקיס, במיוחד התיאוריה שלו לגבי פרודיה קדושה.

עבודה זו מראה שבשימושם בכלי של פרודיה קדושה בשירי השואה שלהם, פגיס

וקליין פועלים בתוך ההקשר של התגובה היהודית המסורתית לאסונות.

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אוניברסיטת בן-גוריון בנגב

הפקולטה למדעי הרוח והחברה

המחלקה לשפות זרות ובלשנות ע"ש אברהמס-קוריאל

אירוניה אחרי אושוויץ?: ניתוח השוואתי של שירת השואה של דן פגיס וא.מ. קליין

חיבור זה מהווה חלק מהדרישות לקבלת התואר "מוסמך למדעי הרוח והחברה" (.M.A)

מאת: צבי (מרק אליוט) שפירא בהנחיית פרופ' אפרים זיכר

חתימת הסטודנט: ______תאריך: ______

חתימת המנחה: ______תאריך: ______

חתימת י"ור הוועדה המחלקתית: ______תאריך: ______

אלול תשע"ג

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