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 The Yiddish language recently lost its greatest poet and one of its most inspiring personalities. Avrum (Abraham) Sutzkever, an oyster (treasure) of both the Jewish people and world literature, was born into an oreme ober gelernte mishpokhe (a poor but well educated family). As a young child, he fled Cossackpogromen (pogroms) with his mishpokhe (family) and moved to a yidisher gegnt (Jewish neighborhood) in Vilne Poland (now Vilnius Lithuania). Vilnius was then known as der yerushalim fun Lite (the Jerusalem of Lithuania) and was the worldwide center of Yiddish language literary culture.
As a child, Sutzkever displayed a great talant (talent) as a poet and participated in the bin (bee) scout movement which focused on Jewish and Yiddish culture. A modernist poet, he got aroysgegbn (published) his first bukh (book) of poetry in 1937.
When Vilna’s Jews were confined into two ghettos in 1941, Sutzkever along with dozens of other literary and cultural figures continued Vilna’s Yiddish cultural life within di moyern fun geto (the ghetto walls). The city’s Yiddish language universities were re-established as one university and renamed geto universitet (ghetto university). Hundreds of teater forshtelungen (theater productions) were performed for the ghetto’s residents and zhurnaln (magazines) were published in the ghetto, an effort in which Sutzkever played a leading role. Sutzkever won the ghetto’s chief literary premie (prize) in 1942 for his poem “The Grave Child”, written about his own murdered infant son. Another famous poem of Sutzkever’s details how he hid from Nazi soldiers during the liquidation of the ghetto in a keyver (grave), watching others run for their lives as he lay entombed among his murdered people. As conditions in the ghetto worsened, Sutzkever became a mitglid (member) of the faraynikte partizaner organizatsye (united partisan organization) in 1942, which is often cited as being the first such organization founded anywhere in Nazi occupied Europe. During this time, Sutzkever risked his life to help tsu unterhaltn (to hide) thousands of documents from the YIVO (yidisher visnshaftlekher institute=Yiddish scientific Institute) archives from the Nazis within the ghetto walls. Most of the documents that he hid, which detail the history of a thousand years of Jewish life, survived the war and are in the YIVO archives today in New York. Ironically enough, the documents that the Nazis took also survived the war, being perfectly preserved in a museum in Berlin dedicated to the “oysgeshtorbn”(extinct) Jewish people. In 1943 one of Sutzkever’s poems was snuck out of the ghetto and read in Moscow, from where an unprecedented rescue mission was launched by Soviet authorities. He and his wife escaped from the ghetto and were transported behind the front by fliger (airplane). In Israel, he continued writing and publishing, again returning back to his modernist roots. For decades he edited the Yiddish literary journal di goldene kayt (the golden chain), which was the world’s foremost Yiddish literary magazine until his retirement in 1995. Translations of some of his strongest post-war poems written in the early 1970s, along with many of his wartime poems that were first published in 1979, are available in numerous languages and have cemented his reputation as one of the foremost modernist poets of the 20th century. Several literary critics have remarked that if Sutzkever wrote in English or French, and not Yiddish, er volt gehat geven (he would have been) one of the most famous poets in the world. He died in Tel Aviv on January 20th of this year, 2010. Zol er hobn a likhtikn gan edn.
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