Abraham Sutzkever

Abraham Sutzkever Poems

Abraham Sutzkever Biography

Abraham Sutzkever (July 15, 1913 – January 20, 2010) was an acclaimed Yiddish poet. The New York Times wrote that Sutzkever was "the greatest poet of the Holocaust." Biography Abraham (Avrom) Sutzkever was born on July 15, 1913 in Smorgon, Russian Empire, now Smarhoń, Belarus. During World War I, his family fled eastwards from the German invasion and settled in Omsk, Siberia, where his father, Hertz Sutzkever, died. Three years after the war, his mother, Rayne (née Fainberg), moved the family to Vilna, where Sutzkever attended cheder. In 1930, he joined the Bee Jewish scouting movement. He married Freydke in 1939, a day before World War II. In 1941, he and his wife were sent to the Vilna Ghetto. Ordered by the Nazis to hand over important Jewish manuscripts and artworks for display in an Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question, to be based in Frankfurt, Sutzkever and his friends hid a diary by Theodor Herzl, drawings by Marc Chagall and other treasured works behind plaster and brick walls in the ghetto. His mother and newborn son were murdered by the Nazis. On September 12, 1943, he and his wife escaped to the forests, and together with fellow Yiddish poet Shmerke Kaczerginsky he fought the occupying forces as a partisan. Sutzkever joined a Jewish unit under the command of Moshe Judka Rudnitski, and took part in several missions before being smuggled into the Soviet Union. In July 1943, he gave a fellow partisan a notebook of his poems, which reached the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in Moscow. In March 1944, a small plane was sent to the Vilna forests to bring Sutzkever and his wife to Russia. In February 1946, he was called up as a witness at the Nuremberg Trials testifying against Franz Murer, the murderer of his mother and son. After a brief sojourn in Poland and Paris, he immigrated to Mandate Palestine, arriving in Tel Aviv in 1947. Sutzkever has two daughters, Mira and Rina. He died on January 20, 2010 in Tel Aviv at the age of 96. Literary career Sutzkever wrote poetry from an early age, initially in Hebrew. He published his first poem in Bin, the Jewish scouts magazine. Sutzkever was among the Modernist writers and artists of the Yung Vilne ("Young Vilna") group in the early 1930s. In 1937, he published his first volume of Yiddish poetry, Lider (Songs). Sutzkever's second book of poetry, Valdiks ("From the Forest"), was published in 1940. In Moscow, he wrote a chronicle of his experiences in the Vilna ghetto (Fun vilner geto) and began Geheymshtot ("Secret City"), an epic poem about Jews hiding in the sewers of Vilna. Sutzkever founded the literary quarterly Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain). Paul Glasser of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York called him the most important Jewish poet in the postwar world. He became a public advocate of Yiddish, encouraging Jewish communities around the world not to let the language die. In the 1970s Sutzkever wrote the series Lider fun togbukh ("Poems from a Diary, 1974–1981"), considered his masterpiece. The theme that runs through much of his work is that destroyed landscapes and societies can be reborn, and the murdered Jews of the ghetto live on in the memories of the survivors. Sutzkever's poetry was translated into Hebrew by Nathan Alterman, Avraham Shlonsky and Leah Goldberg. In the 1930s, his work was translated into Russian by Boris Pasternak.)

The Best Poem Of Abraham Sutzkever

Frozen Jews

Did you ever see in fields of snow
Frozen Jews, in row upon row?

Breathless they lie, marbled and blue.
Of death in their bodies, no hint and no clue.

Somewhere their spirit is frozen and saved
Like a golden fish in a frozen wave.

Not speaking. Not silent. Just thinking bright.
The sun too lies frozen in snow at night.

On a rosy lip, in the freeze, still glows
A smile — will not move, not budge since it froze.

Near his mother, a baby starving, at rest.
How strange: she cannot give him her breast.

The fist of a naked old man in surprise:
He cannot release his force from the ice.

So far, I have tasted all kinds of death,
None will surprise me, will catch my breath.

But now, overcome in the mid-July heat
By a frost, like madness, right in the street:

They come toward me, blue bones in a row —
Frozen Jews over plains of snow.

My skin is covered with a marble veil.
My words slow down, my light that is frail.

My motions freeze, like the old man's surprise,
Who cannot release his force from the ice.

Moscow, July 10, 1944

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