Early life Simion "Senia" Shestopal, the scion of a
Ukrainian Jewish family, was born in
Odessa, officially on September 18, 1913, but more likely on September 5, 1912. The writer's father, known later in life as "Emanoil Șestopali", was a
Stambuliote Jew who had taken
Italian citizenship. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
Obscenity scandal Underfunded,
Alge only put out six or seven issues in this 1930 edition. 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.
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. Pals was singled out for compulsory labor, and sent to work as a "Jewish engineer" for the
State Railways. Making occasional returns to Bucharest, 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. Although he still refrained from an open affiliation, Pals continued to visit Luca and the surrealists, introducing his wife to them. Pals accepted the informal separation, resuming his love affair with Lucy Metsch, 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". By his own account, the latter was living a quiet and exceptionally fulfilling life, down to 1970: caught up in his work during daytime, he turned to writing literature at night, and reconnected with his avant-garde friends. Caraion, who had agreed to collaborate with the Securitate in return for his freedom, was repeatedly blackmailed by his former supervisors. 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". Working from his home, a small apartment in
Bnei Brak, 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. 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". Just days before this happened, the Romanian review
Tribuna hosted three of his final poems. 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. ==Work==