Engaging the Shoah through the Poetry of Dan Pagis

Memory and Metaphor

In the field of Holocaust Studies, there has been a great deal written in English about poets such as Paul Celan, but Dan Pagis’s body of work remains largely undiscovered. By analyzing the Holocaust poetry of Dan Pagis and correlating it to his biography through the identifying tropes of Pagis’s literature, this book seeks to reveal that the speakers of Pagis’ poems embody a resistance to traditional historical, temporal, and structural narratives while also outlining the scarring effects of trauma continually revisited through poetic engagement. Beyond this, the secondary aim of this book is to bring Pagis’s work to light for an audience that solely reads and speaks English.