Sesto Pals, pen name of Simion (also Simon, Semion) Șestopali (born Шестопаль, also rendered as S(h)estopal, Sestopaly, or Sestopali; ca. 1912 – October 27, 2002), was a Russian-born Romanian and Israeli writer. Primarily a poet-philosopher, he also earned recognition as a graphic artist. He first became known in his teenage years, when, as a friend and associate of Gherasim Luca, he put out the review Alge. Its avant-garde aesthetics and its testing of censorship resulted in their prosecution. While Luca endured as a public intellectual and a founder of the Romanian surrealist cell, Pals became a recluse.
Forgotten by the general public, exposed to antisemitic and later communist persecution, he continued to write for himself and an intimate circle of friends. He had a successful career in civil and railway engineering, but political nonconformity resulted in his marginalization for part of the 1960s.
Moving to Haifa in 1970, Pals was rediscovered by later generations of Romanian and Israeli readers, known to them for the moderate surrealism of his poetry and prose, and, to a lesser degree, for his take on Hegelian philosophy. His editorial debut came well into his 80s, when Pals was already bedridden and contemplating death. This led to his rediscovery as a contributor to both Romanian and Israeli literature.
Biography
Early life Simion "Senia" Michäel Finkenthal, "Sesto Pals în anul de grație 1958 (I)", in Apostrof, Nr. 10/2006 Shestopal, the scion of a Ukrainian Jewish family, was born in Odessa, officially on September 18, 1913, but more likely on September 5, 1912. Michäel Finkenthal, "Gherasim Luca și Sesto Pals, o prietenie la granițele avangardei suprarealiste", in Observator Cultural, Nr. 668, April 2013 Michäel Finkenthal, "Ce s-a întîmplat cu 'algiștii' în 1933?" , in Apostrof, Nr. 1/2007 The writer's father, known later in life as "Emanoil Șestopali", Lucy Sestopali, "Repere biografice", in Observator Cultural, Nr. 320, May 2006 Paul Cernat, "Sesto Pals, avangardistul subteran", in Observator Cultural, Nr. 179, July–August 2003 Michäel Finkenthal, "Sesto Pals, dialoguri între întuneric și lumină", in Viața Românească, Nr. 11-12/2009 was a Stambuliote Jew who had taken Italian citizenship."Comunicate și circulări Ministeriale. Comisiunea de naturalizare", in Monitorul Oficial, Issue 54/1934, pp. 1431–1432 According to literary historian Ovid Crohmălniceanu, the poet's own familiarity with Jewish mythology and the Hebrew language can be read as a clue that he was enlisted in a cheder.Crohmălniceanu (2001), p. 171 S. Sfarti, who worked with the poet-engineer in the 1950s, notes that his name was unusual in his adoptive Romania, making his ethnicity hard to pin down, and never discussed at his office."Poșta", in Minimum, Vol. XVII, Issue 193, April 2003, pp. 78–79 The family name probably originated in a Russian moniker for "six fingers" or "six toes", and Simion bragged that he himself had inherited an extra toe.
Simion lived in Odessa with his parents and his brother Fima until 1920, when they were chased out of the country by the revolutionary war. His father continued to enjoy protection from the Italian diplomatic mission, before moving with his family to Romania and legally changing his name. In 1922, a tribunal in Covurlui County registered his renunciation of Italian citizenship. Simion's mother, Berta née Berman, later arranged for her own relatives to settle in the new country. They lived in Galați, where Simion and Fima began their schooling, until 1923, then moved to Bucharest; in the 1930s, their home address was at No 6 on Brâncoveanu Street.
Simion enlisted at the Matei Basarab High School, where he was colleagues with poet Gherasim Luca. Sharing a school-desk, the two became close friends. They also associated with Aurel Baranga, who was in the same school, but slightly younger. Their circle also included female colleagues and admirers, among them Henriette Iacobsohn, future wife of the cartoonist Saul Steinberg, and Amelia Pavel, later an essayist and art historian. Pavel, who vacationed with Simion at Sovata in summer 1930, remembered him as a "nice and well-behaved youth". Amelia Pavel, "Prieteni din anii '30" , in România Literară, Nr. 30/2003 Nevertheless, all three young men made a habit of deriding cultural conventions: Pals was almost expelled from school when he burst out laughing during a lecture on poet-laureate Vasile Alecsandri. In 1930, having kept up with the Western European and Romanian avant-garde, Luca founded the radical youth magazine Alge ("Algae"), with collaborations from Șestopali (the nominal "chief editor"), Baranga, and Jules Perahim; they were later joined by Paul Păun. Șestopali experimented with literary pseudonyms, sometimes signing his work for Alge as D. AmprentPop, p. 41 and then, for the first time ever, Sesto Pals. A quasi-anagram of his Romanian name-and-initial, it was sometimes corrected to Șesto Pals in later reference, but the poet always signed his work sans diacritic. Michäel Finkenthal, "Poezia este trăire transcendentală (II)", in Observator Cultural, Nr. 599, November 2011
Obscenity scandal Underfunded, Alge only put out six or seven issues in this 1930 edition. By February 1932, Pals had established his own single-issue magazine, titled Muci ("Snot") and distributed free of charge at one of Perahim's art shows. Like Păun and the other Alge men, he was also co-opted by unu, the more established avant-garde sheet, but had a tense encounter with its editor, Sașa Pană. Nonetheless, unu hosted some of Pals' prose poems, including one which mockingly advertised Perahim's art as a "horrid crime" against the state. In addition to writing poetry, he was interested in hard science, taking his baccalaureate with honors in physics. He barely passed the overall examination, after having again slammed Alecsandri's work in his Romanian literature paper.
In 1933, Luca reissued Alge in a more licentious edition, and challenged the cultural establishment by sending a copy to Nicolae Iorga, the nationalist historian and political figure. A clampdown on their activities followed: all known contributors were caught in a police investigation, and Pals' home was searched for incriminating proof. Despite no longer being a contributor (and feeling alienated by Păun and Baranga's leftist militancy), Pals was implicated by his nominal editorial contribution. He was eventually arrested in mid-July 1933"Știri și polemici. Colportori de pornografii arestați", in Viitorul, July 16, 1933, p. 3 and sent to Văcărești Prison, where his colleagues were also rounded up. Pals later recalled being subjected to a thorough interrogation by the examining magistrate, and sharing a cell with a known communist. Taking his instructions from Iorga, the coroner alleged that the Șestopalis were themselves communists, sent in from the Soviet Union to subvert Romanian society. The family was threatened with expulsion.
The writers' parents eventually obtained their release, with Emanoil pleading with his son that he amend his ways. The court ruled against the Alge group, and issued two-year suspended sentences against them. This tarnished their judicial record, leaving Pals exposed to persecution. 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, Pals finally matriculated with the Polytechnic, where he majored in mining engineering and metallurgy. He kept out of literary life. When, in 1939, Luca returned from Paris a committed surrealist, Pals was invited to attend the sessions of his Bucharest surrealist circle. He did so on occasion, meeting with new recruits such as Dolfi Trost and Gellu Naum, but, as Pals biographer Michäel Finkenthal notes, "chain smoked [and] kept himself dead silent." Pals himself later asserted: "I never did 'fade' out of sight, I have always been out of sight." Michäel Finkenthal, "Poezia este trăire transcendentală (I)", in Observator Cultural, Nr. 597, October 2011
Antisemitic persecution and communist oppression Pals graduated in 1940, just as the National Renaissance Front dictatorship had barred Jews from employment in most fields, including technical. Pushed out of literary life, Pals discovered philosophy, and became an avid reader of Hegel. Finkenthal notes that his "rather obsessive preoccupation" was "to quantify qualitative values", a "strange mixture of Hegelianism and abstract arithmetic". Then, at the height of World War II, the Șestopalis came to be persecuted under tighter racial laws. Pals' brother Fima escaped to Palestine.Michäel Finkenthal, "Gherasim Luca, teoretician al suprarealismului?", in Mozaicul, Nr. 11-12/2013, pp. 7-8 Pals was singled out for compulsory labor, and sent to work as a "Jewish engineer" for the State Railways. By his own account, he was a salaried worker there after 1942."Ion Caraion văzut din familie", in Săptămîna, Issue 591, April 1982, p. 7 Making occasional returns to Bucharest, he had an amorous affair with Lucia "Lucy" Metsch, a Paris-trained painter of Bukovina Jewish extraction. She had narrowly escaped the Einsatzgruppen, and was working at The Barașeum.
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. Later that year, he returned to Bucharest, joining the City Planning Institute as founder and president of its geotechnical engineering section. He continued to advance professionally after the establishment of a communist regime. Around 1955, his job was to verify structural work on new railway bridges; as Sfarti recounts, his engineering reports were "always impeccable." The trade unions' newspaper, Munca, praised him for his invention of a drilling-and-probing technique for investigating underground structures. As this source noted, by January 1956 his invention had been used on fifteen new bridges, and had saved up to 2.5 million lei in building costs."Cercetarea fundațiilor la poduri prin perforare cu aparat mecanic", in Munca, January 26, 1956, p. 2
In 1946, engineer Șestopali parted with Lucy and married Valentina Berman. This created controversy: Valentina was Pals' first cousin and his junior by 15 years. She was also Holocaust survivor, having just returned from the concentration camp in Berezivka, Transnistria.Ovid Crohmălniceanu, Amintiri deghizate, Editura Nemira, Bucharest, 1994, p. 135. Although he still refrained from an open affiliation, Pals continued to visit Luca and the surrealists, introducing his wife to them. His half-sister-in-law, Mura Vlad, was a published novelist and translator from Russian. The marriage soon crumbled: Pals was an absentee husband, and Valentina found it hard to cope with the rigors of life in communized Romania. Working as a state-registered typist, in 1956 she met the poet Ion Caraion, becoming his admirer, muse, and lover. Răzvan Voncu, "Sesto Pals și secretele avangardei", in România Literară, Nr. 26/2014 Pals accepted the informal separation, resuming his love affair with Lucy Metsch, who now worked as a scenic painter for Sahia Film. He was increasingly withdrawn and troubled, dedicating himself to writing down a whole corpus of literary and philosophical works that he would not publish.