165 “On ne meurt qu’une fois; et c’est pour si longtemps!” 1 Despite Molière’s famous epigram, Dan Pagis did not die only once. 2 He survived many deaths as he struggled to survive from an imminent bodily or spiritual death for a long time, both by escaping labor camps in the Ukraine during World War II and, then, by speaking of his trauma in poetry with a sound, clear voice when he fnally arrived in the Land of Israel after the war and decided to consecrate his life to studying and writing. His vita is indeed quite simple: Dan Pagis was born in Rădăuţi, in the Bukovina (Romania) in 1930; his father left for Pales- tine and did not see his son again before the end of World War II; his mother died when he was young, and he was raised by his grandparents until he was deported to a labor camp in the Ukraine, from which he daringly escaped in 1944, living from hand to mouth until the end of the war. Only after the war could Dan Pagis rejoin his father who eventually bought him the ticket to come by ship to Palestine in 1946. He got his doctorate in Hebrew language and literature in 1968 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he later worked as professor in Medieval Jewish Literature until his premature death in 1986. 3 Pagis’ devotion to Hebrew—a language that he decided to learn from scratch when he frst arrived in Tel Aviv and on which he would spend his entire academic activity—cannot be understood without these existential premises. The premature loss of his mother, the involuntary yet real deser- tion by his father, the experience of deportation, and the precarious life after escaping from the labor camp in the Ukraine—all this deeply impacted on Pagis’ perception of life and death. Indeed, his choice to fee to Palestine and to learn Hebrew was not incidental, rather the most obvious spiritual reac- tion to actual life experiences. It is therefore not excessive to assume that, before cancer would take him in 1986, Dan Pagis died at least once, in a very Chapter 9 Hebrew as “Remedy” to the Shoah in Dan Pagis’ Poetry Federico Dal Bo Reuter_9781793606068.indb 165 12/11/2019 8:06:53 PM