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.
[7] 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.
[8] 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.
[3] 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.
[10] 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.
[3] 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"),[3] Baranga, and Jules Perahim; they were later joined by Paul Păun.
[3][4][6] 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.
[3] Nonetheless, unu hosted some of Pals' prose poems, including one which mockingly advertised Perahim's art as a "horrid crime" against the state.
[3] 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.
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 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.
[16] Making occasional returns to Bucharest,[15] he had an amorous affair with Lucia "Lucy" Metsch, a Paris-trained painter of Bukovina Jewish extraction.
[1][6][18][19][20] Pals accepted the informal separation, resuming his love affair with Lucy Metsch,[1][20] who now worked as a scenic painter for Sahia Film.
[4][6] He earned respect in the engineers' community, and had several professional awards to his name,[1][5] while privately working on a set of essays which sought to reconcile Hegelianism with existentialism and phenomenology.
[22] 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.
[4] He 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.
[25] Working from his home, a small apartment in Bnei Brak,[1] Pals focused entirely on philosophical essays, which he composed in French,[26] and a new set of visual poetry pieces.
[14] Sesto Pals the poet was rediscovered in Romania only after the 1989 Revolution: in 1998, Nicolae Tzone published a book of his poetry with Editura Vinea, as Omul ciudat ("The Bizarre Man").
It was only at this time that Pals' former colleagues in the Bucharest Planning Institute discovered that he was the same as the avant-garde poet, as Sfarti confessed in a letter to the editors.
[4] Pals' health condition was declining to such a degree that he had to be carried to that ceremony; by 1999, he was bedridden and tube-fed, but fully conscious and perfecting poems that were supposed to convey his final message to the world.
[4] A revised edition of Omul ciudat came out at Editura Paideia, with illustrations by Mariana Macri, daughter of Pals' friend Ionathan X.
[5] Much of Pals' sizable fortune was bequeathed to the Rabin Medical Center, founding a research unit "for early detection and prevention of gastrointestinal cancer".
[1] 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.
[20] 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").
[22] Various other exegetes have contrarily reached the conclusion that Pals' Alge poetry is ahead of its time and context, one of the more notable contribution to the second-wave avant-garde in Romania.
Paul Cernat describes a clash of visions between the "prophetic" ambitions of Alge and Pals' character, that of a "vulnerable introvert, terrorized by the precariousness of the human condition".
[5] According to Ion Pop, some of these poems stand out among the "purely awkward exercises" of youth, as "unhinged" expressionist pieces in succession to those of Adrian Maniu and Jules Laforgue.
[5] Several poems are singled out by Crohmălniceanu for being biblical-themed and distinctly apocalyptic, while yet others are "socially-inspired", "unanimistic" and "fraternal", addressed to "those people I meet on the tram".
"[33] 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.