“I Am Dan—Who Am I Supposed to Be?”: The Murder Mystery in the Poetry of Dan Pagis

To this very day Dan Pagis’s poetry is shrouded in the secret of his biography. His first given name was discovered only years after he died, and he seems to have told nobody about what befell him during the Holocaust years. In his poetry, Pagis refers to the mystery of his name, dropping hints that he then takes back. Why did Pagis avoid divulging his first name? What did that name stand for, in Pagis’s experience? Or maybe we should ask it this way: Who is the figure hiding behind this name? This article seeks to explore how the poems momentarily show us the boy he was, his outline and traces, only to conceal them quickly, to remove his features from the face of the earth and from the text. He acts as a self-killer—a murderer, but one who keeps returning to the site of the crime, leaving his traces. The article argues that he moves through a chain of changing identities: victim, murderer, detective. As a result, he gets bogged down in a never-ending chase between them. As this article shows, these games eventually expose the at times terrifying commutations between the former child and the signifier “Holocaust.”