Abraham Sutzkever

Abstract

Abraham Sutzkever (Yiddish: Avrom Sutskever; Hebrew: Avraham Sutskever) (b. 1913–d. 2010) was a titan of Yiddish literature. Over the course of six decades, he published more than thirty volumes of poetry and prose. He also edited the most important postwar Yiddish journal of arts and letters, Di goldene keyt, from 1949 to 1995. From his youth in Vilna and Siberia to his later years in Tel Aviv, Sutzkever insistently posited the power of poetry to sustain life and culture. His wartime experiences further marked the writer as both poet and hero. During his incarceration in the Vilna Ghetto, he served as a member of the “Paper Brigade,” rescuing the cultural heritage of the Jewish community of the “Jerusalem of Lithuania.” He also took up arms as a partisan fighter in the forests surrounding the city. After the war, he testified in graphic detail at the Nuremberg Tribunals at the request of the Soviet Union. A writer of wide-ranging interests—from the frozen tundra of Omsk to the cafés of Paris, from the cellars of the Vilna Ghetto to the shores of the Red Sea—Sutzkever continually exercised his neologistic skills, poeticizing his present life in conversation with the memories of his past and his cultural ambitions for the future. Some of his most prominent volumes include his first collection, Lider (Poems), published in Warsaw in 1937; his epic poem Sibir (Siberia), illustrated by Marc Chagall and published in Jerusalem in 1953; the series of experimental prose poems of memorialization, Griner akvaryum (Green Aquarium), published in Jerusalem in 1975; and one of his later volumes, Lider fun togbukh (Poems from a Diary), published in Tel Aviv in 1977.