Avraham Sutzkever z”l

“Walk through Words as through a Minefield”

The death of Avraham Sutzkever in Tel Aviv on January 20, 2010 symbolizes the end of an era in modern Yiddish culture, in which he played a central role over many years of extremely full and rich artistic work. Like many of his generation, the Holocaust was for him the profound rupture that split his life into “before” and “after”. He experienced it at firsthand and it left its impression on his writing and his cultural activity.

Sutzkever was born in 1913 in the town of Smorgon on the cultural border of Jewish Lithuania. During World War I his family was deported from the war zones by the Russian authorities, together with masses of Jews. They wound up in Siberia, where he spent his childhood in exceptional surroundings and landscapes for one who would in time come to be a Yiddish poet. After his father’s death in 1920, the family settled in Vilna — the city where Sutzkever grew to adulthood and began to write; the city that served for all his life as his cultural reference point. His first poems, in the early 1930s, were written in the context of his tense relations with the other members of the “Young Vilna” (Yung Vilne) group of writers and artists, which included Sutzkever, Chaim Grade, Leyzer Wolf, Shmerke Kaczerginski and others. The writings of most of the group’s members showed clear signs of the radical tendencies that characterized a large part of Polish Jewish youth in those days, while Sutzkever’s poetry distanced itself from the immediate political and social context. The values of late Romanticism are clearly evident in the thematic focuses of his poetry — the centrality of the world of nature, the desire to become one with it, the shaping of the figure of the poet full of optimism and youthful energy and the wish to shape his future in a blend of reason and emotion.

Sutzkever was able to publish two books of poetry before the Holocaust — the second bore a title that can be construed as a clear declaration of intent: Valdiks (“Sylvan”),1. which appeared in Vilna in 1940, in that short and very turbulent period in which the city became Lithuanian, before the Soviets returned and took it over. Anyone reading the book today cannot but reflect on the dramatic difference between the poetic world created in it, which is entirely a hymn to nature, and the fate already awaiting the author and most of his readers and which overtook them only several months after the book appeared. In time, after the Holocaust, Sutzkever collected his poems from 1939–1941 in one of his books in a section called very appositely “Fun antlofenem indsl” (“From the Island that Fled”).2

In the first days after the German attack on the USSR, Sutzkever and his wife Freydke (Freda) joined the thousands of refugees trying to flee to territories still under Soviet rule, but because of the Germans’ rapid advance, their escape route was blocked and they returned to Vilna. At that crucial moment the “Young Vilna” group was broken up, and its members went their different ways: Chaim Grade and Leyzer Wolf managed to escape, but Wolf died of hunger and disease in the Soviet Union in 1943. Conversely, Avraham Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski shared the fate of the Jews of Vilna, were interned in the ghetto and endured all its sufferings. Sutzkever managed to survive through various murder actions. In late 1941, he hid for several weeks in the cellar of a stranger, a woman who gave shelter to the uninvited and completely unknown Jewish man who knocked on her door. However, such a hiding place could serve only for a short time and ultimately Sutzkever returned to the ghetto. In the first months of the ghetto’s existence Sutzkever underwent extremely traumatic personal events: his wife gave birth in the ghetto hospital, but the Nazis did not allow Jewish women to give birth and the baby was murdered. Shortly afterwards the poet’s mother was also murdered in one of the actions.

Throughout his experience of the Holocaust, from the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Vilna, in the ghetto, and until its destruction, Sutzkever continued to write poetry. The first series of his poems from these years, “Penimer in zumpn” (“Faces in Swamps”), was written in hiding in the first days of the Nazi occupation, in June-July 1941; the last poems from the ghetto period were written shortly before its liquidation, in September 1943. There are also poems that Sutzkever began to write in the ghetto and completed subsequently.

Naturally, it was impossible even to think about publishing the poems in the Vilna ghetto. Publication became possible only when Sutzkever reached Moscow in 1944. There is more than one version of many of the poems that Sutzkever wrote in the Holocaust period, inter alia because he copied them several times in the hope that at least one of the copies would survive. In several cases Sutzkever reedited the poems that he had written during the Holocaust, wishing to give them a more definite stylistic form or to adapt them to poetic norms that he learned after the liberation. Hence there are poems written by Sutzkever whose first handwritten version has a more modern and liberated style than the version that was published. Most of the poems written by Sutzkever during the Holocaust were collected into two anthologies that appeared in New York immediately after the Holocaust — Di festung (“The Fortress”) and Lider fun geto (“Poems from the Ghetto”),3 although several of them were published for the first time only many years later.

During the Holocaust Sutzkever’s poetry underwent a most significant transformation: the poet’s personal voice that characterized his first period remained prominent, but in the ghetto conditions it became the voice of the individual confronting the dread of destruction and extermination, to which was added a new voice, the public voice. Sutzkever devoted several of his poems to the heroes of the armed and spiritual resistance with whom he was personally acquainted — Yitzhak Wittenberg, Commander of the FPO (Fareynikte Partizaner organizatsye; United Partisan Organization); the teacher Mira (Mira Bernstein, a well-known teacher in the Vilna Ghetto); the intellectual Zelig Kalmanovich, to whom the series of poems “Der novi” (“The Prophet”) is dedicated; and the woman who rescued him when he fled the ghetto. In several of his poems he called for open armed resistance, such as “A nem ton dos ayzn” (“Take Hold of the Iron”) that was read out at a public event in the ghetto marking May 1 (1943). His poem “Unter dayne vayse shtern” (“Under Your White Stars”) was set to music immediately after it was written, was sung by many during the last months before the liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto, and after the Holocaust was one of the representative texts that best expresses its horrors. Alongside the short lyric poem Sutzkever also wrote narrative poems, two of which survived in their entirety. One is “Dos keyverkind” (“The Grave-Child”) that bears the date “Vilna ghetto, April 12, 1942”, and is devoted to the painful subject that was also a fresh wound in the poet’s heart — birth in the impossible conditions of the Holocaust, a birth that was evidence of the vital forces challenging the rule of death. A year later Sutzkever completed the poem “Kol nidrey”, that describes the unexpected meeting in the ghetto between a Red Army soldier captured by the Germans and his father whom he had not seen for many years.

When Sutzkever collected his Holocaust period poems and his later poems on the Holocaust many years afterwards into an anthology called Lider fun yam-hamoves (“Poems from the Sea of Death”),4 he wrote in the preface: “When the very sun became like ashes — I believed with perfect faith: as long as poetry does not abandon me, lead will not destroy me; as long as I live my life as a poet in the valley of the shadow of death, my sufferings will merit tikkun and redemption.”

The speaker in Sutzkever’s Holocaust poems is indeed in many cases a writer who sees in his poetry a shelter and shield against the death stalking him — a new expression, in most extreme conditions of existence, of the romantic ideal as regards the poet withstanding all obstacles. In all these poems the Germans are barely mentioned explicitly by name; the poet avoids mention of them by various rhetorical means, since the true and important self-examination in his poetry is conducted with himself and those who share his destiny. Thus for instance in his poem “Ikh lig in an orn” (“I am Lying in a Coffin”) written in August 1941, the speaker in the poem is released if only for a moment from the horror of the destruction with which he is menaced through his poetic imagination that connects between the poles of death and birth, stagnation and movement, imprisonment and release:

איך ליג אין אַן אָרון,
ווי אין הילצערנע קליידער,
איך ליג.
זאָל זייַן, ס׳איז אַ שיפֿ ל
אויף שטורמישע כוואַליעס,
זאָל זײַן, ס׳איז אַ וויג.

I am lying in this coffin,
As I would lie
In stiff wooden clothing.
This could be a small boat
On dangerous waves
This could be a cradle.5

At the same time, his poem “Under Your White Stars” is a more multifaceted expression of facing death. The poem opens precisely with the expression of the inmost desire to attain eternal peace, although the poet speaks of it indirectly and his wish merges with the yearning for purification. In the poem the speaker becomes dramatically a “broken string” that nonetheless continues the creative act. Here too the identity of the enemy is not explicit, as if it should not be mentioned. Yet, the poet is clearly aware of the danger from within. His feverish search for a fitting addressee for his words and poetry contrasts completely with the “murderous calm” characterizing his immediate surroundings.

Two-thirds of Vilna’s Jews were murdered in the first months of the Nazi occupation, and nonetheless a kind of pseudo-“normality” prevailed in the ghetto from 1942 until shortly before its liquidation. In this period Sutzkever was active in the cultural life organized in the shadow of extermination. In January 1942 the first soiree of the ghetto theater was held; Sutzkever helped to select the literary texts read out there. The initiative to create a ghetto theater initially aroused acute opposition; some saw it as a desecration of the respect due the dead and also as a means for the Judenrat to blunt the public’s alertness. However, in time the opponents realized that these soirees truly helped to keep up the spirits of the Jews. Sutzkever was also active in the ghetto “youth club”, where he conducted a literary study group, read modern Yiddish poetry with the youngsters and even organized an exhibition in memory of Yehoash, the poet who translated the Bible into Yiddish and with whose works Sutzkever closely identified.

The creation of the “Association of Writers and Artists” was one of the cultural initiatives that developed in the ghetto. At one of the literary evenings that it organized, Sutzkever read the poem “Dos keyverkind.” Herman Kruk, the director of the main library in the ghetto, described the impression that the poem made on its listeners.

After the author read the work, it was a long time before anyone said anything. The proximity of the dramatic events, the form of the work, and its sublimity had such an effect that everyone kept their mouths shut…. This is, I think, the first sublime evening of great creative excitement.6

That year Sutzkever received a prize from the Vilna Ghetto Association of Writers and Artists for the poem — the first literary prize that he received in his life, and in the ghetto of all places.

After the occupation of Vilna one of the goals that the Nazis set themselves was to collect the Jewish books and cultural treasures in order to classify them — most were destined for destruction and a few were sent to Germany to the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage (Institute for the Investigation of the Jewish Question). For this the Nazis recruited a group to work in the YIVO (the Institute for Jewish Research established in Vilna in 1925) building, which was outside the ghetto. The group, including Avraham Sutzkever, Shmerke Kaczerginski, Różka Korczak and others, was ordered to classify the materials from the Institute library and from other libraries. However, they set themselves a goal opposite that of their oppressors — they sought to save everything possible from the Jewish cultural treasures. Some of the material was concealed in various hiding places in the ghetto, some was deposited with non-Jews and some was hidden in the YIVO building itself. The work group also included members of the ghetto underground and because they went to work daily outside the ghetto, they could smuggle in weapons and printed training material that they acquired by chance on assembly of improvised combat means. The ghetto residents mockingly called this group Di papirene brigade (“The Paper Brigade”), since the place and nature of their work did not allow them to smuggle food into the ghetto — the main task undertaken by anyone working outside the ghetto — but the group members’ main concern was spiritual resistance against the oppressor.

In September 1943, as tension increased with expectation of the liquidation of the ghetto, Sutzkever, his wife and Shmerke Kaczerginski with a group of FPO members, managed to flee to the forest and join a Soviet partisan unit. The status of the Jewish soldiers in this unit was extremely difficult and paved with obstacles, but ultimately they found their place in it. Sutzkever’s reputation had preceded him to the Soviet capital after a copy of the poem “Kol nidrey” was smuggled out of the ghetto and read out at a special evening held there. When it became known in Moscow that he had escaped from the ghetto and was in the forest with the partisans, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee activists used their influence to smuggle him out from behind enemy lines and bring him to a safe haven. As it turned out, Sutzkever’s abovementioned belief that poetry has the power to save the writer from destruction and death, to which he adhered even in the most difficult times, was validated in most exceptional conditions.

Sutzkever was flown to Moscow and was among the speakers at the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee meeting in April 1944, where he described the Holocaust of the Jews of Vilna and the struggle of the partisans in the forest. Ilya Ehrenburg devoted an article to him in Pravda. This exceptional event aroused great excitement among Soviet and world Jewry, particularly in light of the general Soviet policy of concealing both the dimensions of the Holocaust and the part of the Jews in combating the Nazis. After publication of the article, Sutzkever received hundreds of letters from all corners of the Soviet Union; he was contacted by refugees from Vilna who sought information on their relatives and recounted their fate in the war period — fighting in the ranks of the Red Army, the lives of refugees in this vast country, the unclear news on the Holocaust, the faint hope that any of their relatives had survived.

While in Moscow, Sutzkever mobilized for the task of documenting the destruction of Vilna Jewry. His book on the Vilna ghetto, written in 1945, was the first important work on the subject, even though it did not deviate from Soviet norms since it was slated for publication in the Soviet Union. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee sent copies for publication overseas and the book therefore appeared in Paris before its publication in Moscow. Immediately afterwards the book was also published in Buenos Aires and it appeared in installments in two

daily Yiddish newspapers in New York. This extensive publication of the book shows the desire of the Jewish public, certainly the Yiddishspeaking public, so soon after the Holocaust, to read testimonies on what had happened. The writing and testimonies on the Holocaust of Vilna Jewry by Różka Korczak, Shmerke Kaczerginski and Mark Dworżecki appeared parallel to Sutzkever’s book or immediately after it.

As soon as Vilna was liberated, Sutzkever returned, hoping to participate in rebuilding Jewish life in the city and retrieving the Jewish cultural treasures from their hiding places. However, the attitude of the Soviet authorities to these efforts generally was either passive or hostile. The prominent figures among the survivors, such as Abba Kovner, Avraham Sutzkever and others, quickly understood that they had to change their goal and direct their efforts to organizing the survivors to leave Soviet-controlled areas and to smuggling the rescued cultural treasures outside the USSR. Sutzkever himself understood that he had to take a decision in this spirit. However, prior to this he was charged with an unexpected mission by the Soviet authorities — to testify at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremburg as one of the witnesses for the prosecution and the first Jew among them. In February 1946, Sutzkever gave his testimony, recounting in detail the extermination of Vilna Jewry and several of the acts of murder that he had personally witnessed and the humiliation that he himself had undergone.

Soon afterwards Sutzkever left the Soviet Union and made his way gradually to Palestine, arriving in 1947. In this period of his wanderings Sutzkever concentrated on writing a large epic poem, “Geheymshtot” (“Secret Town”), which recounts the fate of ten survivors who hide in the sewers of Vilna after the liquidation of the ghetto and attempt to create an illusion of normality in these impossible conditions after the destruction of their entire world. The meticulous formal structure of the poem, its language and rich and skilled stanzas show the poet’s desire to produce an artistic commemoration of the Holocaust and to set at its center the wish to cling to life and to give new meaning to the existence of the survivors.

From his immigration to Israel and during the long years of his life Sutzkever contended with the memory of the Holocaust in many and varied ways. As the editor of the most prestigious Yiddish literary journal in Israel and the world, the quarterly Di goldene keyt, which he 

founded and edited from 1949 onwards, he was aware of the centrality of the subject of the Holocaust in the world of Yiddish writers. In the issues of Di goldene keyt Sutzkever also published works written during the Holocaust period for the first time, such as Yitzhak Katznelson’s play “By the Rivers of Babylon”, as well as poetry and prose written by survivors — Ka-tzetnik, Leib Rochman, Yeshayahu Spiegel and others — and also the works of Yiddish writers who witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust from afar. As a writer, Sutzkever himself ceaselessly sought new artistic ways to contend with the most complex subject of all. In his first book of poetry in Israel, In fayer-vogn (In the Chariot of Fire),7 he devoted a separate section to the Holocaust with this significant title “Di karsh fun dermonung” (“The Cherry of Remembrance”). This title shows the conspicuous change of emphasis in his lyrical world — the Holocaust experiences would no longer offer him events for immediate and direct processing, but a field in which the power of memory is constantly increasing. The section opens with the poem “Oytoportret” (“Self-Portrait”); its focus is the figure of the survivor returning to the city where he grew up, which now for him is a space empty of people where he undertakes a painful examination of his past:

אָ מאָל, ווען איך בין אין אַ קעלער געלעגן,
בײַנאַנד מיט אַ מת ווי אַ בויגן פּאַפּיר,
באַלויכטן מיט פֿאספֿאָרנעם שניי פֿונעם באַלקן —
פֿאַרשריבן האָב איך מיט אַ שטיקעלע קויל
אַ ליד אויף פּאַפּירענעם לײַב פֿון מײַן שכן.

Once, as I lay in a cellar,
With a corpse like a sheet of paper,
Lit from the ceiling by phosphorescent snow —
I wrote with a piece of coal
A poem on the paper corpse of my neighbor.
Now, there is not even a corpse, —
Disgraced whiteness,
Draped with soot.8

The traumatic experience that flickers in the survivor’s consciousness questions the morality of writing poetry during the Holocaust: is the person writing poetry “on the corpse” preserving his memory or disregarding it? Does the poet who likens the corpse to “white paper” not sin in making the dead into “material” for his writing? Sutzkever now deals indirectly with the shred of faith that he clutched at in the ghetto period: that poetry would save him from death. From a slightly distant emotional perspective he now sees the other side of this belief — the moral price paid by the poet who writes “on” the corpses.

In the early 1950s Sutzkever wrote a series of modern prose pieces called griner akvarium (Green Aquarium), the result of this confrontation with the new face of the Holocaust revealed from the perspective of years to one who had personally experienced it — the artistic possibilities and the ethical dangers in the wish for distancing and aestheticization: “Walk through words as through a minefield: one false step, one false move, and all the words you strung in a lifetime on your veins will be blown apart with you.”9 

The speaker appearing at the beginning of the series lives in a dual consciousness — his wish to abolish the border between the living and the dead conflicts with his painful awareness that the border between the worlds is nonetheless impassable. With the passage of time the memory of the Holocaust became an increasingly central element in Sutzkever’s creative world as a poet wishing to bridge between classicism and modernism. This remembrance flickered as an omnipotent presence in extremely unexpected ways and circumstances and gave the apparently normal present a startlingly strange dimension. The work of art cannot free itself of this, even if it so wishes:

 

דער שמייכל פֿון מײַדאַנעק פֿאַלט
אויף חתונות און בריתן.
אין אָפּערע.
טעאַטער.
הינטער די קוליסן.
אין קנייטשן פֿ ון דײַן ברויט־און־זאָלץ,
געזאַלצענעם געוויסן.

דער גרינער שמייכל פֿאַלט
אויף דײַן עלעגיע, דײַן באַלאַדע
און אויף אַ ליאַדע
ציטערקלאַנג באַזונדער.

The smile of Maidanek falls
On wedding and bris.
In opera.
Theater.
In the wings.
In creases of your bread and salt,
Salty conscience.
The green smile falls,
On your elegy, your ballad
On every
Tremor of a sound.10

Sutzkever’s wonderful ability to renew and expand the borders of his poetic world reached its climax in the series “Poems from My Diary,” that he wrote over approximately a decade, 1974–1985. The poems have as title only the year in which they were written and this gives the entire series the nature of a continuous text in which the memory of the Holocaust is surprisingly and at the same time naturally present.

 

ס׳געהערט צו מיר די אָפּגעהאָקטע האָנט, וואָס קריק מיט יאָרן
געפֿונען האָב איך זי אין גאָרטן צווישן פּאָמידאָרן.
און ווײַל זי איז אַ מענערהאַנט וואָס האָט קיין בעל־הבית ניט
געהערט זי מיר. אַ דריטע האַנט. איך שרײַב אָן איר קיין אות ניט.

- - -

ס׳געהערט צו מיר די אָפּגעהאַקטע האַנט וואָס האָט געצערטלט
קאָן זײַן, אַ יונגע פֿרוי, ווען מ’האָט איר בעל־הבית צעפֿערטלט.
און איך האָב זי געפֿונען ווען דער מאַן האָט זי פֿאַרלאָרן
סעפּטעמבער נײַנצן איין און פֿערציק צווישן פּאָמידאָרן.

The chopped-off hand belongs to me, my catch
Of years ago in a tomato patch.
A human hand, no owner anywhere,
I made it mine.
My third hand,
Without it,
I can write no lime.
- - -
To me belongs the chopped-off hand that used to stroke
Perhaps a woman’s hair, before it’s owner broke.
I found it where he lost it. It was without a scratch —
September nineteen forty-one, in a tomato patch.
(Translated into English by Benjamin Harshav)12

In many ways, this poem is a summary of Sutzkever’s entire work and his different portrayals of the Holocaust in it. The world of nature that played such an important role in the early period of his writing is expressed now in a new way. This is a domesticated and processed nature in which a human hand planted a “tomato plot”, with its glaring red color. Anyone reading the poem in Yiddish may also remember that devout Jews sometimes doubted the kashrut of tomatoes because they reminded them of blood. In such a seemingly idyllic vegetable plot, the poet discovers only part of the corpse of the anonymous, nameless, faceless slain man, evidence of the atrocity perpetrated precisely in September, the most beautiful month of the year in Eastern Europe. Not only is the murderer not mentioned by name, but the poem only alludes to the nature of his acts. In this late poem, Sutzkever makes absolutely no attempt to restore the destroyed world with its great cultural wealth, and here he abandons the wish that was so characteristic of post-Holocaust Yiddish culture. However, it is clear to him that this is a world whose integrity was irremediably destroyed, and the poet’s writing is nourished only by the scattered parts surviving from it. The poems in the “Poems from My Diary” series, as noted, bear only the years in which they were written as titles, and these determine their order. This poem was included in the section “1981” and it makes brief mention of the bloody events that occurred forty years previously: the first mass murders, in fact, their remnants. The subject of discussion forty years later is the tension between the consuming power of time that threatens to blur and negate the memory of the atrocity, and the poet’s ever continuing steadfastness in preserving the memory of the slain. They are the source of his work, even if their features have been obscured beyond recognition. Over the years Sutzkever maintained his power and ability to renew his poetry also in face of the sad reality of the ever shrinking number of readers in the original language. In this way his place was established as the most important Yiddish writer of the post-Holocaust generation and as one of the exemplary figures of modern Jewish culture.

Translated from the Hebrew by Stephanie Nakache

• 1. Valdiks (Yiddish) (Vilna: Yidisher lit.erat.n-fareyn un Pen-k.lub, 1940)
• 2. Yidishe gas (Yiddish) (New York: Matones, 1948), pp. 73–112.
• 3. Di Festung: Lider un poemes geshribn in vilner geto un in vald 1941–1944 (Yiddish) (New York: IKUF, 1945); Lider fun geto (Yiddish) (New York: IKUF, 1946).
• 4. Lider fun yam-hamoves: Fun vilner geto, vald, un vander (Yiddish) (New York: Farlag Bergen Belsen, 1968).
• 5. Poetishe verk (Yiddish) (Tel Aviv: Yoyvl-komitet, 1963), I, p. 249. English version in Marguerite M. Striar, ed., Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), p. 143.
• 6. Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps 1939–1944, edited by Benjamin Harshav (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 280.
• 7. In fayer-vogn (Yiddish) (Tel Aviv: Di goldene keyt, 1952).
• 8. Poetishe verk, p. 96; Avraham Sutzkever, Selected Poetry and Prose, translated and edited by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 232.
• 9. Poetishe verk, p. 227; English version in Sutzkever, Selected Poetry and Prose, p. 357.
• 10. Firkantike oysyes un mofsim (Tel Aviv: Di goldene keyt, 1968), p. 69. English version of “The Smile of Maidanek,” in Sutzkever, Selected Poetry and Prose, p. 306.
• 12. Tzviling Bruder, p. 109; Selected Poetry and Prose, p. 49