Abraham Sutzkever

Abraham Sutzkever (אַבֿרהם סוצקעווער; אברהם סוצקבר; 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."

Abraham (Avrom) Sutzkever was born on July 15, 1913, in Smorgon, Vilna Governorate, Russian Empire, now Smarhon, Belarus.

During World War I, his family moved to Omsk, Siberia, where his father, Hertz Sutzkever, died.

In 1921, his mother, Rayne (née Fainberg), moved the family to Vilnius, where Sutzkever attended cheder.

Sutzkever attended the Polish Jewish high school Herzliah, audited university classes in Polish literature, and was introduced by a friend to Russian poetry.

His earliest poems were written in Hebrew.

In 1930 Sutzkever joined the Jewish scouting organization, Bin ("Bee"), in whose magazine he published his first piece.

There he also met his wife Freydke.

Sutzkever was among the Modernist writers and artists of the Yung Vilne ("Young Vilna") group in the early 1930s.

In the 1930s, his work was translated into Russian by Boris Pasternak.

In 1933, he became part of the writers’ and artists’ group Yung-Vilne, along with fellow poets Shmerke Kaczerginski, Chaim Grade, and Leyzer Volf.

In 1937, his first volume of Yiddish poetry, Lider (Songs), was published by the Yiddish PEN International Club; a second, Valdiks (Of the Forest; 1940), appeared after he moved from Warsaw, during the interval of Lithuanian autonomy.

He married Freydke in 1939, a day before the start of World War II.

In 1941, following the Nazi occupation of Vilnius, Sutzkever and his wife were sent to the Vilna Ghetto.

Sutzkever and his friends hid a diary by Theodor Herzl, drawings by Marc Chagall and Alexander Bogen, 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 Kaczerginski, he fought the occupying forces as a partisan.

Sutzkever joined a Jewish unit and was smuggled into the Soviet Union.

Sutzkever's 1943 narrative poem, Kol Nidre, reached the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in Moscow, whose members included Ilya Ehrenburg and Solomon Mikhoels, as well as the exiled future president of Soviet Lithuania, Justas Paleckis.

They implored the Kremlin to rescue him.

So an aircraft located Sutzkever and Freydke in March 1944, and flew them to Moscow, where their daughter, Rina, was born.

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.

In Moscow, he wrote a chronicle of his experiences in the Vilna ghetto (Fun vilner geto,1946), a poetry collection Lider fun geto (1946; “Songs from the Ghetto”) and began Geheymshtot ("Secret City",1948), an epic poem about Jews hiding in the sewers of Vilna.

After a brief sojourn in Poland and Paris, he emigrated to Mandatory Palestine, arriving in Tel Aviv in 1947.

Within two years, Sutzkever founded Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain).

Sutzkever was a keen traveller, touring South American jungles and African savannahs, where the sight of elephants and the song of a Basotho chief inspired more Yiddish verse.

In 1949, Sutzkever founded the Yiddish literary quarterly Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain), Israel's only Yiddish literary quarterly, which he edited until its demise in 1995.

Sutzkever resuscitated the careers of Yiddish writers from Europe, the Americas, the Soviet Union and Israel.

Many in the Zionist movement, however, dismissed Yiddish as a defeatist diaspora argot.

"They will not uproot my tongue," he retorted.

"I shall wake all generations with my roar."

Sutzkever's poetry was translated into Hebrew by Nathan Alterman, Avraham Shlonsky and Leah Goldberg.

Belatedly, in 1985 Sutzkever became the first Yiddish writer to win the prestigious Israel Prize for his literature.

An English compendium appeared in 1991.

Freydke died in 2003.

Abraham Sutzkever died on January 20, 2010, in Tel Aviv at the age of 96.

Rina and another daughter, Mira, survive him, along with two grandchildren.

Sutzkever wrote poetry from an early age, initially in Hebrew.

He published his first poem in Bin, the Jewish scouts magazine.