38 Facts About Sesto Pals

Sesto Pals first became known in his teenage years, when, as a friend and associate of Gherasim Luca, he put out the review Alge.

Sesto Pals had a successful career in civil and railway engineering, but political nonconformity resulted in his marginalization for part of the 1960s.

Sesto Pals's father continued to enjoy protection from the Italian diplomatic mission, before moving with his family to Romania and legally changing his name.

Nevertheless, all three young men made a habit of deriding cultural conventions: Sesto Pals was almost expelled from school when he burst out laughing during a lecture on poet-laureate Vasile Alecsandri.

Sesto Pals barely passed the overall examination, after having again slammed Alecsandri's work in his Romanian literature paper.

Sesto Pals was eventually arrested in mid-July 1933 and sent to Vacaresti Prison, where his colleagues were rounded up.

Sesto Pals later recalled being subjected to a thorough interrogation by the examining magistrate, and sharing a cell with a known communist.

Sesto Pals was traumatized by the whole experience, and no longer bothered with his college admission, although his grades qualified him for enlistment at the Bucharest Polytechnic.

In 1934, when he and his family were naturalized Romanian, Sesto Pals finally matriculated with the Polytechnic, where he majored in mining engineering and metallurgy.

When, in 1939, Luca returned from Paris a committed surrealist, Sesto Pals was invited to attend the sessions of his Bucharest surrealist circle.

Sesto Pals graduated in 1940, just as the National Renaissance Front dictatorship had barred Jews from employment in most fields, including technical.

Sesto Pals was singled out for compulsory labor, and sent to work as a "Jewish engineer" for the State Railways.

Sesto Pals had narrowly escaped the Einsatzgruppen, and was working at The Baraseum.

Sesto Pals sought full employment after the antifascist coup of 1944, and, in 1945, was dispatched to oversee the construction of railway tunnels in Cluj County.

Sesto Pals continued to advance professionally after the establishment of a communist regime.

Sesto Pals was Holocaust survivor, having just returned from the concentration camp in Berezivka, Transnistria.

Sesto Pals's half-sister-in-law, Mura Vlad, was a published novelist and translator from Russian.

The marriage soon crumbled: Sesto Pals was an absentee husband, and Valentina found it hard to cope with the rigors of life in communized Romania.

Sesto Pals accepted the informal separation, resuming his love affair with Lucy Metsch, who now worked as a scenic painter for Sahia Film.

Sesto Pals was increasingly withdrawn and troubled, dedicating himself to writing down a whole corpus of literary and philosophical works that he would not publish.

At the risk of incriminating himself, Sesto Pals returned to his conjugal home and protected his estranged wife.

Sesto Pals dismissed the option to denounce Caraion in exchange for freedom, and was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor.

Sesto Pals himself wrote a statement denouncing both Valentina and Caraion, accusing the latter of having seduced and beguiled his wife.

Sesto Pals accuses Caraion of having networked for far-right elements in the anti-communist underground, and specifically for the Iron Guard; he claimed that Valentina was cynically used by Caraion, to support a movement that had been "responsible for [her] past suffering".

In 1962, Sesto Pals applied for an exit visa and emigration to Israel; as Sfari notes, this came as a surprise to him.

Sesto Pals married Lucy in 1965, and, starting 1967, retook his position at the Bucharest Planning Institute.

Sesto Pals earned respect in the engineers' community, and had several professional awards to his name, while privately working on a set of essays which sought to reconcile Hegelianism with existentialism and phenomenology.

Sesto Pals still refrained from going public, although two of his close friends, former avant-garde writers Baranga and Geo Bogza, were well regarded by the regime and could arrange him a publishing deal.

Sesto Pals was more preoccupied with discovering "the mystery of existence through one's own existence".

Sesto Pals was forced by the authorities to leave his voluminous manuscripts behind in Romania; he split them into fascicles, which he hid in various places.

Sesto Pals had by then resumed his professional career in Haifa, where he oversaw the digging of utility tunnels.

Sesto Pals traveled outside the country to meet Luca, who was living in Paris.

Sesto Pals suffered from gastrointestinal cancer, and was treated at the Rabin Medical Center.

Sesto Pals was still working on this on October 17,2002, when he had to be taken to hospital.

Sesto Pals was survived by Lucy, who died in 2006, and by Valentina Caraion, both of whom participated in the effort to recover and edit his work.

Such dark and brooding works are held by both Finkenthal and Voncu as proof that Caraion and Sesto Pals influenced each other directly, despite their erotic rivalry.

In 1960s prose poems which display influences from Franz Kafka or Urmuz, Sesto Pals amplified his sense of bafflement about the human condition.

Sesto Pals reconciled himself with the idea of time by denying its concreteness, but drew a line between general time and "the time of creation".