Eve’s Lament

July 29 1986 – 22 Tammuz 5746

Israel

Israeli poet and academic Dan Pagis, who escaped from a concentration camp in Ukraine as an adolescent and arrived in Mandate Palestine in 1946, passed away. Pagis taught medieval Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem while penning some of the most movingly minimalistic Holocaust-themed poetry, including the wrenching rondo “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car”: “Here in this carload / Am I, Eve /With my son Abel. / If you see my firstborn son, / Cain son of Man, / Tell him I am …”