Abraham Sutzkever, 96, Jewish Poet and Partisan, Dies
Matthew Kruk
Abraham Sutzkever, 96, Jewish Poet and Partisan, Dies By JOSEPH BERGER
Abraham Sutzkever, one of the great Yiddish poets of his generation who
evoked the nightmare of the Holocaust with images of a wagonload of worn
shoes and the haunting silence of a sky of white stars, died Wednesday
in Tel Aviv. He was 96.
His daughter Mira Sutzkever confirmed his death.
"In the postwar world, he was the most important Jewish poet and a world
class poet in general," said Dr. Paul Glasser, associate dean of the Max
Weinreich Center for Advanced Jewish Studies at the YIVO Institute for
Jewish Research in Manhattan. "People thought he should have gotten the
Nobel Prize, but now he won't."
Mr. Sutzkever had helped rescue YIVO manuscripts and other treasures
from the Nazis when they occupied the Lithuanian city of Vilna.
Writing poetry helped Mr. Sutzkever survive a war in which he lost his
mother and an infant son as well as the Jewish soul of his beloved city
of Vilna, which prided itself as the Jerusalem of Lithuania for its
fiercely cultivated intellectualism.
There, with his sometimes flint-hard, sometimes lyrical voice, he found
an audience as a member of a renowned group of Yiddish artists and
writers, Yung Vilne, which included Chaim Grade, Shmerke Kaczerginski
and Leyzer Volf.
That golden age came to an end in June 1941, when the Nazis invaded the
city and eventually herded its 60,000 Jews - one-third of its
population - into a ghetto as the first step toward mass killings in
giant pits and deportations to concentration camps.
Mr. Sutzkever, a wiry man with an impish sense of humor and a
full-throated appetite for living, smuggled arms into the ghetto. When
he was assigned by the Nazis to round up books that would be sent to
Frankfurt for an ominously named Institute for the Study of the Jewish
Question, he and other intellectuals in a so-called Paper Brigade
concealed precious books and art works, including a diary by Theodor
Herzl and drawings by Chagall, in building cavities and crannies.
He helped unearth many of them when he briefly returned to Vilna after
the war, and those treasures wound up in YIVO's home in exile in
Manhattan.
All that time he composed poems, writing, he once said, while crawling
through sewers and even while hiding in a coffin.
"If I didn't write, I wouldn't live," he said in an interview with The
New York Times in 1985 while reminiscing over a glass of French cognac.
"When I was in the Vilna ghetto, I believed, as an observant Jew
believes in the Messiah, that as long as I was writing, was able to be a
poet, I would have a weapon against death."
In a 1942 poem called "My Mother," he wrote of a dead mother who tells
her son:
If you remain
I will still be alive
as the pit of the plum
contains in itself the tree
the nest and the bird
and all else besides.
His poem about a sky filled with white stars was put to a plaintive
melody and became a classic of Yiddish song - "Unter Dayne Vayse Shtern"
("Beneath the Whiteness of Your Stars").
Mr. Sutzkever and his wife, Freydke, fled the ghetto with a group of
partisans and were airlifted to Moscow, where their daughter Rina was
born. The family made its way to Poland and Paris and finally to the
British mandate of Palestine, where they remained after independence in
1948.
In Israel, where modern Hebrew was the muscular language, he devoted
himself to keeping Yiddish alive even as the number of speakers
diminished year after year. He founded and edited Israel's leading
Yiddish literary journal, Di Goldene Keyt (The Golden Chain), until it
stopped publishing in 1995. And he continued to turn out Yiddish poetry,
most notably "Lider fun Togbukh" ("Poems From a Diary 1974-1981"), which
many regard as his masterpiece. In 1985, he was awarded the country's
most prestigious award, the Israel Prize.
Mr. Sutzkever's wife died seven years ago. In addition to his daughters
Mira and Rina Sutzkever Kalderon, he is survived by two grandchildren.
Abraham Sutzkever was born in 1913 in Smargon, a small industrial city
southwest of Vilna in today's Belarus. With the outbreak of World War I,
his parents fled to Siberia.
In 1921, after the death of his father, his mother resettled the family
in Vilna, where Mr. Sutzkever attended Polish-Jewish schools, audited
Polish literature classes at Vilna's university and studied Yiddish
literature with the great linguist Max Weinreich. His debut on the Vilna
cultural scene was notable for his rejection of politically themed poems
for ones that emphasized wordplay and experiments with sound and rhythm.
Many readers remember him most, however, for poems that capture the
pathos of what he and other Jews experienced in the war, like the verses
he wrote in 1942 in "A Vogn Shikh" ("A Wagon of Shoes"), about a wagon
clattering through Vilna's alleys filled with a heap of "throbbing
shoes."
The poet asks:
Tell me the truth, oh, shoes,
Where disappeared the feet?
The feet of pumps so shoddy,
With buttondrops like dew -
Where is the little body?
Where is the woman, too?
All children's shoes - but where
Are all the children's feet?
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
Hyfler/Rosner
"Matthew Kruk" <nob...@home.com> wrote in message
news:wmS6n.156268$N07....@en-nntp-05.dc1.easynews.com...
> January 24, 2010
> Abraham Sutzkever, 96, Jewish Poet and Partisan, Dies By
> JOSEPH BERGER
>
> Abraham Sutzkever, one of the great Yiddish poets of his
> generation who evoked the nightmare of the Holocaust with
> images of a wagonload of worn shoes and the haunting
> silence of a sky of white stars, died Wednesday in Tel
> Aviv. He was 96.
>
> His daughter Mira Sutzkever confirmed his death.
>
> "In the postwar world, he was the most important Jewish
> poet and a world class poet in general," said Dr. Paul
> Glasser, associate dean of the Max Weinreich Center for
> Advanced Jewish Studies at the YIVO Institute for Jewish
> Research in Manhattan. "People thought he should have
> gotten the Nobel Prize, but now he won't."
>
I had him on my list one year, but took him off. I think
because Hyfler worked with someone whose father was a good
friend.
He was one of the few LIVING people to have an entry in the
YIVO Encyclopedia of Eastern European Yiddish culture that
was published in recent years.