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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 Empire-born and 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 Surrealism 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 Hegelianism. 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.
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
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 Surrealism, 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
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 Romanian leu 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.
During that decade, the Șestopalis came into conflict with the communist regime. In 1957, an investigation began into Caraion's samizdat poetry, which was highly critical of the regime, and which Valentina had helped circulate. At the risk of incriminating himself, Pals returned to his conjugal home and protected his estranged wife. In mid-1958, Valentina was arrested by the Securitate, then implicated in Caraion's trial for sedition. She dismissed the option to denounce Caraion in exchange for freedom, and was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor.Sipoș, p. 6 Daniel Cristea-Enache, "Ion cel Negru", in România Literară, Nr. 2/2007 Pals himself wrote a statement denouncing both Valentina and Caraion, accusing the latter of having seduced and beguiled his wife. He 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, Pals applied for an exit visa and Aliyah; as Sfari notes, this came as a surprise to him. This rebellious gesture also resulted in Pals' demotion with reduced pay, and his relocation to the remote town of Dej. Valentina, released from prison under a general amnesty, divorced him in 1963, and later married Caraion. Pals also married Lucy in 1965, and, starting 1967, retook his position at the Bucharest Planning Institute. He 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.
Caraion, who had agreed to collaborate with the Securitate in return for his freedom, was repeatedly blackmailed by his former supervisors.Sipoș, pp. 6, 7 During the backlash that followed his departure, in April 1982 the national-communist weekly Săptămîna published Sestopali's statements against the Caraions, as part of a series called "Ion Caraion as seen by his family". Pals had by then resumed his professional career in Haifa, where he oversaw the digging of . He traveled outside the country to meet Luca, who was living in Paris. However, his health declined abruptly, and he was forced to take retirement in 1982. He suffered from gastrointestinal cancer, and was treated at the Rabin Medical Center. A Generous Step Toward Prevention, Rabin Medical Center Spokesman Department, November 25, 2007; retrieved December 29, 2014
Working from his home, a small apartment in Bnei Brak, Pals focused entirely on philosophical essays, which he composed in French, Michäel Finkenthal, "Note de drum", in Observator Cultural, Nr. 351, December 2006 and a new set of visual poetry pieces. He reluctantly agreed to have samples of these works published in Romanian diaspora magazines—including Caraion's Don Quijote and Alexandru Lungu's Argo. In 1985, the Honolulu exile Ștefan Baciu dedicated him a special issue of his MELE, a poetry newsletter. It included homage pieces by his old friends Păun and Bogza.Crohmălniceanu (2001), pp. 172, 200 Interviewed about his work by journalist Solo Har-Herescu in 1993, Pals was oblique: "I am not fit to answer, as my head is filled with those snake-like questions, poisoning my replies, eating them up as they ... bite into their own tails, making it hard to know where tails begin and heads end." His only reason for writing was "an inner urging", as "so much better poems" already existed, which were still "of no use to the reading public".
Pals was still working on this on October 17, 2002, when he had to be taken to hospital. He died in Tel Aviv, on October 27, 2002. Michäel Finkenthal, "Epistolă despre trup", in Apostrof, Nr. 5-6/2006 Just days before this happened, the Romanian review Tribuna hosted three of his final poems. Pals' last work saw print a month later, in Ultima Oră, the Tel Aviv Romanian-Jewish newspaper. A revised edition of Omul ciudat came out at Editura Paideia, with illustrations by Mariana Macri, daughter of Pals' friend Ionathan X. Uranus. Much of Pals' sizable fortune was bequeathed to the Rabin Medical Center, founding a research unit "for early detection and prevention of gastrointestinal cancer".
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. Although most of Pals' texts remained unpublished and under-researched, a follow-up to Omul ciudat, titled Întuneric și lumină ("Darkness and Light") was put out in Romania in 2007. His 2013 centennial was celebrated in Romania under the auspices of the Museum of Romanian Literature and Gaudeamus Book Fair. "Târgul Internațional Gaudeamus. Programul zilei de sâmbătă, 23 noiembrie (I)", in Ziarul Financiar, November 15, 2013 Interest in Pals' work and personality was kept alive by the philosopher-physicist Michäel Finkenthal, who also collected some of the lesser known prose works into a 2014 anthology. A fictionalized portrayal of Pals as "the bizarre poet" is found in Virgil Duda's 2011 novel, Un cetățean al lumii ("A Citizen of the World"). Paul Cernat, "Legături fără frontiere", in Revista 22, Nr. 1139, January 2012
By the mid-1950s, when he settled for a format of blank verse and , Pals was prone to philosophical meditation, and explored much deeper into lyrical themes. As argued by Finkenthal, this change was prompted by his separation from Valentina: "From now on, the poet finds himself locked in a world where things happen, things change, where there is no longer room for any refuge into love or wisdom." Michäel Finkenthal, "Sesto Pals în anul de grație 1958 (II)", in Apostrof, Nr. 12/2006 According to Voncu, there was another cultural layer: like Gellu Naum and other late arrivals on the avant-garde scene, Pals was moving away from the sheer negativity of Alge, and attempting to construct instead a post-philosophical surrealism. Cernat sees Pals' surrealism as having "a familiar face", with classical-format like those of Tristan Tzara, H. Bonciu, and Jacques Prévert.
Some of Pals' poems, tentatively dated to 1958, seemingly allude to Valentina's arrest by the communists and the whole wave of political repression. Such dark and brooding works are held by both Finkenthal and Voncu as proof that Caraion and Pals influenced each other directly, despite their erotic rivalry. One fragment depicts silent struggles between the scheming fishermen and their catch, implying that fish still have a dying hope:
In 1960s prose poems which display influences from Franz Kafka or Urmuz, Pals amplified his sense of bafflement about the human condition. Nonetheless, Finkenthal writes, his very series of lyrical verse hints at "truths that are inaccessible to common mortals". He reconciled himself with the idea of time by denying its concreteness, but drew a line between general time and "the time of creation". The latter allowed for a future, and therefore provided room for "affirmation and oblivion". This meant that, "once he puts himself on the line, an artist will have to fade into his own affirmation." The moribund Pals sketched out a quaint prophecy:
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