Avraham Sutzkever, our beloved relative, was a renowned Yiddish poet. He received the Israel Prize in Yiddish literature in 1985. "BLACK HONEY", a recently released documentary on the life and work of Avraham Sutzkever, is currently available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idS6QfmfOKs  ____________________________________________________________________

New book : just released: FROM THE VILNA GHETTO TO NUREMBERG: Memoir and Testimony, by Abraham Sutzkever, edited and translated by Justin Cammy.

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FILM

VER VET BLAYBN? (WHO WILL REMAIN?) Dirs. Emily FelderChrista Whitney | 60 min Documentary, Virtual Screening USA 2020 English

Attempting to better understand her grandfather Avrom Sutzkever, Israeli actress Hadas Kalderon travels to Lithuania, using her grandfather’s diary to trace his early life in Vilna and his survival of the Holocaust.

Sutzkever (1913–2010) was an acclaimed Yiddish poet—described by The New York Times as the “greatest poet of the Holocaust.” His verse drew on his youth in Siberia and Vilna, his spiritual and material resistance during World War II, and his post-war life in the State of Israel.

Kalderon, whose native language is Hebrew and must rely on translation of her grandfather’s work, is nevertheless determined to connect with what remains of the poet’s bygone world and confront the personal responsibility of preserving her grandfather’s literary legacy. Woven into the documentary are family home videos, newly recorded interviews, and archival recordings, including Sutzkever’s testimony at the Nuremberg Trial.

Recitation of his poetry and personal reflections on resisting Nazi forces as a partisan fighter reveal how Sutzkever tried to make sense of the Holocaust and its aftermath. As Kalderon strives to reconstruct the stories told by her grandfather, the film examines the limits of language, geography, and time.

Film rental includes access to a conversation with Justin Cammy, professor of Jewish Studies and of World Literatures at Smith College, Christa P. Whitney (co-director and producer) and Emily Felder (co-director and editor); on Wednesday, May 26, 2021 at 3:00 PM. _________________________________________________________________________________

Abraham Sutzkever (Yiddish: אַבֿרהם סוצקעווער — Avrom Sutskever; Hebrew: 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."

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. _______________________________________________________________________________________

__ From the Smorgon Yizkor Book currently in translation:

- Smarhon, Belarus (Smorgonie, District Vilna; memorial book and testimony) https://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/smorgon/smorgon.html

Avraham Sutzkever From a conversation with Yacov Pat

Translated by Anita Frishman Gabbay and Frieda Levin Dym

Avraham Sutzkever: A.S. Yacov Pat: Y.P.

Y.P. Let us begin with the childhood years.

A.S. I was born in Smorgon, not far from Vilna, in 1913. I came from a well-known rabbinic family.

Y.P. How did your family get from Smorgon to Siberia? 

A.S. I'll start around the First World War. A rumour was going around and my family heard from a Jew “Gutermacher” who said, “You will more likely be able to survive the war in Siberia”[1]

Y.P. Your father, Hershl, was a scholar and studied the Torah [with you] in Siberia. Hershl was also a fiddle player and brought his fiddle from Smorgon to play.[2]

A.S. The brightness of the Siberian fields was my inspiration. My first poem, called “Siberia” made me famous.

Y.P. I would like to hear more about your father, the scholar from Smorgon and the fiddler from Siberia.

A.S. At age 30, he had a heart attack while playing those Rabbi levi-itzhak's melodies.

Y.P. It was a difficult [time], but also a “bright” Siberia for the Sutzkever family. Your father was still young and was already supporting his family by peddling in the marketplace. After your father's death, your mother with her young family returned to Smorgon. At the time you were only 8 years old. Right before the First World War, your father had a leather factory in Smorgon. As your mother and children came back, they found everything burnt down. And, shortly after, your family left for Vilna.

A.S. My grandfather from my mother's side, was the Michalizker Rabbi, Rabbi, Shabtai Feinberg.[3] [Page 139]

I remember from my Vilna years, [a} “yung vilna”— a club of young intellectuals and friends. Beside devouring books [of] Yiddish literature, I loved to wander through the Jewish quarter, the market, the Vilner shulhof—all with very sharp eyes and ears in order to absorb the rhythm of everything Yiddish around me. The group, “young vilna”, which began in the 1930s, made their own impression in the literary circles, one did not envy the other.[4]

My mother Reina z'l (Reina), with her holy prayer book in hand, was taken away to Ponar--that's the way it was. Actually, she did go [take] with her holy prayer book (siddur).

Y.P. Let us discuss the events from the Vilna ghetto, your memories and how you survived.

A.S. My entire Yiddish being was revealed to me in the Vilna ghetto. I can honestly say “life and death” were in the hands of the Yiddish language. Without which i could not have warded off death. My Yiddishkeit was my “magic wand”, without which I could not have “warded” off death. [Page 140]

I believed, that if I spoke with the purity of words, that death would not take over. It was divine justice.

Y.P. Afterwards came the partisan movement, each day and night [bringing] miracles. When the time came, when one did not have any more hope of survival, a Soviet airplane came to the rescue of the partisans. On this airplane you were saved. Thank G-d!

A.S. This is how it was: On the 12th of September, together with my wife and other partisans, we escaped through the barbed wire that surrounded the ghetto, to the Naroch woods, and to the Jewish partisan organization ”Nekama”. When the Lithuanian partisan group in Moscow found out, that I was with the partisans, a telegram arrived to the commander of the Vorosilov-Brigade, Feodor Markov, stating that my wife and I should be brought to Moscow. So, in March of 1944, i am greeted by a group of partisans. I arrived in the Hushatsch province by plane, then airlifted again to Moscow. Here I was asked to be a witness in the Nuremburg trials. On the morning of February 27, 1946 my wife and I started our testimony. As I looked over to my right side, several feet from me, I saw those “murderers” sitting in two rows, may their memory be erased. The first one—Goering, like a wounded beast—here is Streicher, looking like a pregnant cow. I spoke for 38 minutes. I came to the land of Israel in September 1947.

Abraham Sutzkever[5] is the founder of the “Goldene Keyt', the golden chain, a literary quarterly, remaining its editor in Tel Aviv. To date, he has a collection of 47 works. His poetic works include:

The Fortress, 1943 The Jewish Street, 1948 My Home Town, 1948 In the Fire Wagon, 1952 From Three Worlds, 1953 Ode to Death, 1955 In the Sinai Desert, 1957 Oasis, 1960 Holy Earth, 1961 [Page 141] Siberia, with drawing by Marc Chagall, Jerusalem, 1953. In 1962, the poem [Siberia] was translated into English by Yacov Sontag; he was awarded a prize by UNESCO as well as from the International Pen Club[6]. The poem is included in the series of UNESCO works “of our time”. Translator's Footnotes

Gutermacher meaning good man or a mensch. Wikipedia has Abraham's father's name as Hertz, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Sutzkever/ . Michalizker is referencing a person from the town of Mikaelishok. Potentially a reference to the traditional or classic writers of Yiddish literature. Abraham Sutzkever smuggled arms into the Vilna ghetto and concealed rare Jewish books and manuscripts of the YIVO collection, which he unearthed after the war. Writing poetry under aggravated conditions, he described several brushes with death: the murder of his mother and his new born son, the cultural underground resistance, and ghetto events and personalities. Admiration for his poems smuggled from the ghetto by a Lithuanian courier prompted the Jewish anti-fascist committee in the USSR to airlift Sutzkever to Moscow.

UNESCO, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [Page 142]

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Abraham Sutzkever by Aharon Rubin

Translated by Anita Frishman Gabbay and Frieda Levin Dym

The writer, Abraham Sutzkever, was born and bred in Smorgon, both on his father's side and his mother's side. Abraham Sutzkever's grandfather on his father's side was a “Hassidic” Jew through and through. In this [Hassidism] thinking, the study of the Torah was a great blessing. He was a wealthy leather manufacturer. The factory was situated on Vilner Gas (Street).Every week there were hundreds of clients. He had two sons, Shmuel and Naphtali Zvi–Hershl. When the grandfather died, the two sons inherited the factory. Shmuel, the older son, looked after the factory. Hershel was interested in studying, so he basically made an arrangement to receive an income from his brother from the factory.

With Grandfather in Smorgon by Avraham Sutzkewer

Translated by Jerrold Landau

Then, when my grandmother Was busy with vinegar and honey So noble, She sent me for my birthday A clock – Then my time was In the same manner. It was a wall clock that originated from the moon. The ink is insufficient to describe its style. She saved it (If my memory served me correctly) At the time of her wedding, from a fire at grandfather's house in Smorgon, That city, where in a wreath of laurels, I was born.

It was handicapped With crooked legs of lead; With its bitter chains That dangle from there. A snowman, an androgynous From red wood and steel. With burning eyes Like stars, twelve in number.

I have my guest, my dear one Set at the head: I will shine you and clean you And there will be your throne.

[Page 145] And even though it was cleaved It then never cleave My time. It was all mine. And if my grandmother had a desire To knock with a blue umbrella In the Garden of Eden – The clock would not allow for us to be separated. Grandmother had become a homey cuckoo. Every hour she called out from her grave: Cuckoo! Yours is the time, and yours, yours: Cuckoo! Now, when that clock has been burnt As well as my time like burnt-up rye, Only, the blind cuckoo seeks a nest in my memory. From Midbar Sinai, 1957

____________________________________________________________________________________________- 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. ______________________________________________________________________________________ 

Avraham Sutzkever was a partisan in the Vilna ghetto. Please see entry by Tilly Harkavy Amcis from the profile of Dvora Romm, Dvora Romm, on the use of the lead from the printing presses of the closed Romm Publishing House as weapons by these partisans against the Nazis in WWII. (An excerpt from Sutzkever's poem, focusing on Vilna's Romm printing press famed for its classical editions of the Babylonian Talmud, follows here:

'Like fingers stretched out through

the bars in the night/ To catch the free light of the air that is

shed/—We sneak in the dark to grab up, as in spite,/The Rom printing

plates, with old wisdom inbred./We dreamers now have to be soldiers and

fight/And melt into bullets the soul of the lead.')

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Sutzkever was transferred by the Russians to Moscow during WWII. He emigrated to Israel in 1947.

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Jerusalem Post Diaspora

YIDDISH POET AVRAHAM SUTZKEVER: POETRY SAVED MY LIFE

“You could take Sutzkever’s life from beginning to end and it would be the most astonishing guide to the most dramatic moments in Jewish history of the 20th century,” Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse said.

BY CNAAN LIPHSHIZ/JTA JULY 28, 2019 10:06

MINSK, Belarus (JTA) — When Yiddish poet Avraham Sutzkever said that poetry saved his life, he meant it more literally than many of his listeners realized.

In 1944, Sutzkever and his wife, Freydke, needed to walk through a minefield to reach the plane that would take them to freedom. And to do so, they stepped to the rhythm of poetic meter — short, short, long, and sometimes long, short, long.

His poems about the Holocaust in Vilnius and his role in saving priceless Jewish texts from the Nazis led the Soviet authorities – likely Joseph Stalin himself — to send not one but two rescue missions into Nazi-occupied Lithuania to fly the Sutzkevers to Moscow. Two years later he was tasked with testifying on behalf of the Soviet Union at the Nuremberg trials in Germany aiming to bring Nazi criminals to justice.

Nearly a decade after his death in 2010 in Israel, Sutzkever’s astonishing life story is being told on film for the first time in an award-winning documentary co-produced by his granddaughter, Hadas Calderon-Sutzkever, with funding from the Claims Conference.

“You could take Sutzkever’s life from beginning to end and it would be the most astonishing guide to the most dramatic moments in Jewish history of the 20th century,” Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse says in the film, which is titled “Black Honey: The Life and Poetry of Avraham Sutzkever.” It won the Yad Vashem award for movies about the Holocaust at last year’s Jerusalem Film Festival.

Sutzkever’s accounts from the Vilna Ghetto in Lithuania, which he wrote and dated in descriptive poems, are among the most unusual and affecting testimonies from that hell on Earth. Only 1 percent of the approximately 40,000 prisoners survived.

One of the poems, “The Teacher Mira,” heartbreakingly chronicles how teacher Mira Bernstein cared for her dwindling flock of charges in the ghetto — orphans whose parents had been murdered. Sutzkever named one of his two daughters Mira for that teacher.

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Another poem documents how partisans made weapons from the large lead plates of the Jewish Rom Printing House in Vilnius because “Jewish bravery that lies in words must echo in the world in bullets,” as Sutzkever wrote.

And still another verse recounts how Bruno Kittel, the Nazi SS officer who oversaw the liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto, executed a man while holding a pistol in one hand and playing a piano with the other.

Becoming a ghetto diarist — he began dating his poems and composing a new one nearly every day during his incarceration in 1941 – did not come naturally to Sutzkever. Before the war, his focus on nature’s beauty, as he recalled it from his childhood in Siberia, made him an outsider to Vilnius’ Yiddish literary scene, with its socialist and political themes.

In the ghetto, Sutzkever’s poems turned macabre, particular and personal. The most chilling example is his description of holding the lifeless body of his and Freydke’s first child. Born at the ghetto hospital, the newborn was poisoned immediately after birth at the orders of the Nazis, who forbade births there.

“I wanted to swallow you whole my child / when I felt your little body cooling between my fingers / like a warm cup of tea,” he wrote.

Sutzkever’s mother also was murdered near the ghetto, and he wrote about that, too. His father had died in Siberia when he was 7, forcing the family to move to Vilnius.

In what seems like a trauma-induced delusion, Sutzkever said he believed that producing excellent poetry would make him indestructible to the Nazis. This could explain his extraordinary willingness to risk his own life.

As a writer in the ghetto, he was tasked in 1943 with sorting and cataloging select Jewish writings that the Nazis wanted to preserve for their archives about their annihilation of European Jewry. But Sutzkever and a handful of other members of the “paper brigade” risked their lives to smuggle and stash hundreds of priceless writings that are in Israel today thanks to their actions.

In 1943, Sutzkever and his wife escaped the ghetto.

During the escape, a German sentry spotted Sutzkever after curfew, the poet recalled. Instead of running or begging for his life, he walked up to the German and told him, “I’m glad I met you. Do you know where I can go, where there are no Germans?” The sentry allowed him to escape, and a non-Jewish woman hid him in her potato cellar until he joined the partisans, Sutzkever said.

From the partisans, his poems and some rescued documents reached Moscow, providing early and chilling evidence of what was happening to the Jews of Lithuania. The texts reached key individuals in Moscow’s wartime literary scene, including the Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg, who was one of the few intellectuals that Stalin trusted.

In 1944, a Red Army plane was sent to retrieve the Sutzkevers from near the partisan camp, where Freydke acted as a nurse. But it was downed by German anti-aircraft fire. A second plane was sent two weeks later. The Sutzkevers had to traverse a minefield to reach it.

“Part of the time, I walked in anapests, some of the time I walked in amphibrachs,” Sutzkever told his friend and translator Dory Manor, referring to lines of poetic meter. With Freydke walking in his footprints, “I immersed myself within a rhythm of melody and to that rhythm we walked a kilometer through a mine field and came out on the other side,” Sutzkever later wrote.

He was carrying a suitcase made of metal salvaged from the wings of the first rescue airplane. It contained historical documents, including a program of a concert of the Vilna Ghetto Philharmonic orchestra. (Nearly all its players had been murdered already by the time Sutzkever brought the brochure to Moscow.)

Two years after his extraction, which was featured on the front page of the Communist Party daily Pravda, Sutzkever testified at the Nuremberg trials in Germany. He wanted to deliver his testimony in Yiddish, but Soviet authorities forced him to do it in Russian.

In 1947, the Soviets allowed Sutzkever to emigrate. New York, where he would have expected a warm embrace from that city’s Yiddish literary scene, would have been the obvious choice. Instead, the Sutzkevers chose war-torn, prestate Israel, where Yiddish was marginalized by a government that reviled it as an ugly consequence of living in the Diaspora.

Nevertheless, Sutzkever established a highly regarded Yiddish-language weekly in Israel, Di Goldene Keyt (“The Golden Chain”), which remained active for 46 years until its closure in 1995.

In Israel, Sutzkever was recognized early on as one of the Yiddish language’s great poets — Dan Miron, the Yiddish scholar and literary critic, has crowned him “the king of Yiddish prose in the second half of the 20th century.” But at his death at the age of 96, Sutzkever remained largely unknown to consumers of mainstream literature in Israel despite having won the country’s highest literary distinction, the Israel Prize, in 1985.

Sutzkever’s refusal to have a documentary made about him during his lifetime was typical of his humility, which to some degree ensured his relative anonymity, said Chaim Chesler, co-founder of the Limmud FSU cultural organization. In May, Limmud FSU screened “Black Honey” in Minsk, Belarus, the first time it was shown in the former Soviet Union. (The film’s next U.S. screening is scheduled for Sept. 15 at the Sabes JCC Camp Olami in Minneapolis.)

Sutzkever didn’t lose his voice in his new country, and he composed one of the longest and most complex poems ever written about Israel’s War of Independence, “Spiritual Earth.”

All of a sudden, “he was able to renew himself and Yiddish poetry with unprecedented material,” said Benny Mer, a writer and Yiddish translator.

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http://www.eilatgordinlevitan.com/vilna/vilna_pages/vilna_stories_s...:

Abraham Sutzkever

Splinters of Eternity: The Poetry of Abraham Sutzkever

http://yiddishbookcenter.org/story.php?n=10028

by Ruth Wisse

Abraham Sutzkever is a great poet with great belief in

the powers of poetry. Born in Smorgon in 1913, he came of age in the

neighboring city of Vilna, when its Jewish youth was pioneering a

modern Yiddish culture in the newly independent Poland. Sutzkever was

a child of his time: he joined the Jewish scout organization, played

soccer, hiked in the forests. Fatherless since early childhood, he

experienced both the independence and the economic hardship of a

one-parent family. Like quite a number of his friends and neighbors,

he began to write poetry at an early age. But while most of his

contemporaries in the local writers' and artists' group Yung Vilne

considered art an instrument of social and political struggle,

Sutzkever looked for the immutable power within poetry that transcends

the changeable human order. "Do not love grey time," he writes in one

poem of 1940, and in another, laying claim to all the splendors that

his roaming eye can behold, "in everything/ I come upon a splinter/ of

eternity."

This faith in the transcendent potential of poetry acquired magnified

importance when the Germans occupied Vilna in June 1941 and began to

annihilate its Jewish population. Forced with his wife, his mother,

and his fellow Jews into the constricting ghetto, Sutzkever claimed

for the poet ever greater moral and aesthetic powers.

In this small lyric of 24 lines in all, the poet explores the artistic

paradox of motion in stasis. Based on the actual experience of hiding

-- in a coffin! -- during a German aktion, the poem joins the speaker

imaginatively to the infant Moses in his bark and to a sister who died

and is thus truly interred. Song issues from the tomb; from a small

and narrow poem sounds a resonant faith. Sutzkever's ghetto poetry

discovers di groyskayt fun kleynkayt, the immensity of value in such a

homely act as warming one's icy hands over a pile of horse manure, the

intimation of freedom and beauty when a butterfly penetrates a bunker

of hunted children. The poet resists the degradation being imposed on

him not only through his ability to keep writing poetry, but by making

aesthetic resistance the subject of his verse.

Sutzkever's poetry of and about the period of destruction made him

famous throughout the Yiddish-speaking world. When a partisan courier

brought his poems to Moscow in the winter of 1943, a special plane was

dispatched to an air strip near the Narocz forests to airlift

Sutzkever with his wife, who had escaped with a group of ghetto

fighters, to the Soviet Union as a symbol of the Jewish resistance to

fascism. Some of his poems of the ghetto, such as "Teacher Mira" and

"On the Death of Yankev Gershteyn" commemorate its inspiring cultural

personalities. The lyric "Under Your White Stars" -- a modern de

profundis -- was set to music and sung as a ghetto hymn.

The enormity of the history to which he bore witness inspired

Sutzkever to write epic poems as well as lyrics. The narrative poem

Geheymshtot (Secret Town, 1945-47), in several hundred stanzas of

amphibrach tetrameter, depicts a symbolic ten survivors who hide in

the sewers beneath Vilna. The epic poem Gaystike Erd (Spiritual Soil)

commemorates the arrival of Sutzkever with his wife and infant

daughter in Eretz Yisrael aboard the ship Patria. In each work, a

constellation of dramatic personages represents the human and

ideological variety of Jews who share a common fate -- the crucible of

destruction in the one case, and the reclamation of national

sovereignty in the other.

Sutzkever's ripest and most remarkable works are the reflective lyrics

of his later years, collected under the title Poems of a Diary. Just

as the title yokes the everyday prosiness of the diary to the

heightened occasion of the formal poem, so, too, the lyrics unite

contrarieties, fusing all that is normally divided. "A funeral by day,

a concert by night/ to attend both is my fate." This opening line

introduces a series of such pairings from light and shadow to woman

and man, each augmenting the theme that opposites must unite because

there can no longer be innocence without experience. Another poem

demonstrates that "distance nears," bringing the end within sight of

the beginning, compressing and cancelling out the separation between

life and death. When the poet receives a letter from his homeland with

an enclosed blade of grass from the beautiful woods of Ponar -- the

place of trysting that the Germans turned into the major killing field

of Vilna Jewry -- he turns it into the baton of a symphonic offering

to the Lord and Master of the universe. Sutzkever uses rhyme to

actualize these themes, creating an ultimate harmony, an immutable

form for mutability.

Perhaps more than any other modern Jewish writer, Sutzkever has lived

the life of the romantic poet-hero. He was at the center of the Jewish

national tragedy in Europe, and in Israel on the eve of Jewish

national rebirth. He took great risks in rescuing Jewish cultural

treasures from Vilna and was the witness for Jewry at the Nuremberg

trials of Nazi war criminals. But he accords the highest value to

poetry in the way that the psalmist serves God through song. Without

direct use of religious language, his poetry translates the inherited

faith of his ancestors into the personal perception of the

extraordinary in the ordinary.

Ruth Wisse is Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and

Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her most

recent books on literature are The Modern Jewish Canon and I. L.

Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture.

Abraham Sutzkever at 90: Yiddish Poet Extraordinaire

(Nov 7, 2003)

by Dr. Kenneth Libo Ph.D and Michael Skakun

Made possible by a generous grant from the Smart Family Foundation.

Literature at its best is a defiance of destiny, a protest against

oblivion. In the face of history's brutal logic, it offers the

irresistible magic of dreams. Nowhere perhaps is this more poignantly

evident than in Yiddish poetry, the late flower of European culture,

which blossomed in the imperishable verse of Abraham Sutzkever, who

turns ninety this year.A virtuoso of poetic meter, rhyme and rhythm,

Sutzkever has been called the "Ariel of Yiddish literature," whose

voice, a mix of utter refinement and complexity, rises above the

bloody crossroads of history. In "Vi Azoy?" he writes of "…black

shrieks/ where shards of days shudder in spasm/ in a bottomless,

roofless chasm…" As a Holocaust survivor, Sutzkever recounts the

quintessential Jewish pilgrimage in the twentieth century from

annihilation to renewal. The current YIVO-sponsored exhibit at the

Center for Jewish History reveals the trajectory of his extraordinary

life. A descendant of renowned rabbinic and Hasidic figures, Sutzkever

is a child of the twentieth century. His birth in 1913 in Smorgon,

Poland nearly coincides with the outbreak of World War I. Early on he

came to know displacement and dispossession. He and his family fled

Vilna when he was an infant for the "relative safety" of Siberia. His

kinship with nature was so powerful that in "Siberia," a book of poems

illustrated by Marc Chagall, he invests the grimness of space with

inimitable beauty.In 1920, after his father died in Siberia of heart

failure at the age of 30, the Sutzkevers returned to Vilna where

Abraham received a traditional Jewish education. He came of age as a

member of Yung Vilne (Young Vilna), an aspiring group of Yiddish

writers who like himself were to leave an indelible impression on

interwar Polish Jewish culture. Sutzkever raised the standard of

aesthetic perfection and avant-garde modernism, which often irked his

contemporaries. However, in time, Sutzkever's genius won out. His

unorthodox rhymes and verbal effects caught the attention of New

York-based Yiddish poet Aaron Glanz Layeles, the leader of the In

Zikhisten (Introspectivists) who sought to fuse form and content,

feeling and rationality. They invited him to become a regular

contributor to the landmark Yiddish journal, "In Zikh." Sutzkever's

first book, "Lider" (Songs) appeared in 1937 to wide critical acclaim.

In 1940 he published his second volume of poems "Valdeks" (Forest), a

hymn to nature, further solidifying his reputation.The Nazis invaded

the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 and two days later occupied Vilna.

Imprisoned in the Vilna Ghetto, Sutzkever risked his life to smuggle

hundreds of rare books and manuscripts housed in YIVO, located at the

time in Vilna. In the midst of tragedy, he continued to write poems of

classical meter and perfect rhyme, hurling their beauty against the

unspeakable barbarity of the Nazis. Here is an example from a poem

focusing on Vilna's Rom printing press famed for its classical

editions of the Babylonian Talmud:Like fingers stretched out through

the bars in the nightTo catch the free light of the air that is

shed—We sneak in the dark to grab up, as in spite,The Rom printing

plates, with old wisdom inbred.We dreamers now have to be soldiers and

fightAnd melt into bullets the soul of the lead.Sutzkever joined the

Vilna Ghetto underground, smuggled weapons and taught Yiddish poetry.

On September 12, 1943, he escaped the Vilna Ghetto and joined a

partisan fighters unit. Surviving the most vicious of Nazi

anti-guerilla offensives, he took refuge in the forest and the

freezing waters of Lake Narocz. In 1944 he was airlifted out of the

forests to Moscow where he inspired Dovid Bergelson and Peretz

Markish, who later fell victim to Stalin. Meanwhile, Ilya Ehrenberg

compared his work to a Greek tragedy and Boris Pasternak translated

his poetry into Russian. Miraculously, Sutzkever retrieved the

cultural treasures he had buried in Vilna and succeeded in sending

them to New York where they constitute an integral part of Yoyo's

archival holdings.In 1947, Sutzkever arrived in British-occupied

Palestine as part of the brioche, the Zionist illegal immigration. In

1948, he founded the leading Yiddish journal, "Die Golden Key" (The

Golden Chain), which put literary Yiddish back on the map, a not

inconsiderable feat in Israel where a hostile atmosphere made matelote

unwelcome. Even in the midst of revival, Sutzkever continued to write

imperishable verses about the vanished world of Vilna in such

collections as "Yiddishe Gas" (Jewish Street) and "Geheymshtot"

(Secret City).Sutzkever at 90 is perhaps the last of a line of great

Yiddish writers beginning in the nineteenth century with Mendele

Mokher Sforim, Sholom Aleichem and Yehuda Leib Peretz. Though his

literary forebears are hardly strangers to tragedy and suffering,

Sutzkever's experience of cataclysm and genocide – he is a man for

whom "rivers of blood" are not a metaphor -- surpasses anything they

could have ever imagined. That Sutzkever responds with lyricism laced

with lamentation to what he has witnessed serve as timely and eloquent

proof of the incontestable power of literature as resistance and

transcendence.

---

The poet Abraham Sutskever holds conversations with his parents

through his writing. They talk to him and he to them. By writing about

them and listening to what they have to say he finds continued

guidance. In one of his poems he writes about his mother's death at

the hands of the Nazis during the Vilna massacre. He imagines rushing

into her room after her death and finding her torn nightshirt.

Sutskever says that he threw off his clothes and climbed into her open

shirt. "It's no longer a shirt but your bright skin/ it's your cold,

surviving mortality."

But after he had taken on her skin, she speaks to him. She tells him

not to do it. "It's a sin, a sin./ Accept our separation/ as just."

What is this sin? It is giving up his own life, to take on his mother'

s for her sake. She tells him, "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."

The sentiment of the poem is correct. For Sutskever to take up his

mother's life would compound the tragedy. If he wants to honor her, it

is enough for him to live. It is that which ensures her immortality.

Life is complete and each life is unique. To give up life, to deny

one's own specialness is to commit a sin.

She tells him that the seed contains the flower, the acorn the tree.

She will remain alive because he exists. His very existence attests to

hers. In this way her presence is real and eternal. And in this way

her son continues to talk to her. l

__________________________________________________________________________________________ YAD VASHEM REPORTS FOR OTHER SUTZKEVERS:

Suckower, Abraham

Abraham Suckower was born in Kremenchug, Ukraine in 1922 to Nakhum

and Malka. He was a tractor driver and single. Prior to WWII he lived

in Smorgon, Poland. Abraham perished in 1941 near Polock, Belorussia (

lost while trying to escape the Germans. This information is based on

a Page of Testimony (displayed on left) submitted on 27/12/1956 by his

sister Chaia Sara Lutz of Petach Tikva

______________________ Suckower Mojsze

Mojsze Suckower was born in Smorgon, Poland in 1913 to Malka. He was

a tanner and married. Prior to WWII he lived in Smorgon, Poland.

During the war was in Smorgon, Poland. Mojsze perished in 1944 in

Lublin, Poland. This information is based on a Page of Testimony

(displayed on left) submitted on 01/01/1957 by his sister Chaia Sara

Lutz of Petach Tikva

___________________________

Suckower Itka

Itka Suckower was born in Smargon, Poland in 1915 to Yisrael and

Pnina. She was married to Moshe. Prior to WWII she lived in Smorgon,

Poland. During the war was in Smorgon, Poland. Itka perished in 1943

in Wilna, Poland. This information is based on a Page of Testimony

(displayed on left) submitted on 27/12/1956 by her sister-in-law Chaia

Sara Lutz of Petach Tikva

---

Suckiver Itke

Itke Suckiver nee Shemesh was born in Smorgonie, Poland in 1915 to

Yisrael and Perel. She was married and had a little child. Prior to

WWII she lived in Smorgonie, Poland. During the war was in Oszmiana,

Poland. Itke perished in Ponary with son; Nachum age 3. This

information is based on a Page of Testimony (displayed on left)

submitted on 15/07/1955 by her sister Miryam' husband; Avraham Gelman

of Chedera.

____________________________

Suckewer Raja

Raja Suckewer was born in Wilno, Poland in 1914 to Herzl and

Nekhama. She was a clerk and single. Prior to WWII she lived in Wilno,

Poland. During the war was in Woronow, Poland. Raja perished in 1942

in Woronow, Poland. This information is based on a Page of Testimony

(displayed on left) submitted on 03/09/1956 by her brother, Eliezer

Suckewer, a Shoah survivor. Address; Hibat Zion Street # 10 - Ramat

Gan

---

Suckewer Yafa

Yafa Suckewer was born in Dewenishki, Poland in 1906 to Eliahu and

Sima. She was a housewife and married to Eliezer. Prior to WWII she

lived in Dzwiniszki, Poland. During the war was in Ejszyszki, Poland.

Yafa perished in 1941 in Ejszyszki, Poland with children; Herzl age 11

and Sima age 4. This information is based on a Page of Testimony

(displayed on left) submitted on 03/09/1956 by her husband, Eliezer

Suckewer, a Shoah survivor. Address; Hibat Zion Street # 10 - Ramat

Gan

---

Chodosz Fruma nee Sutzkever

Fruma Chodosz was born in Smorgon, Poland in 1909 to Moshe and

Sheina. She was a housewife and married. Prior to WWII she lived in

Smorgon, Poland. During the war was in Smorgon, Poland. She perished

in 1942 in Kurenets, Poland with her 3 children; . Chaia age 16, Chaia

age 13 and Sara age 8s based on a Page of Testimony ) submitted on

20/11/1955 by her relative Miryam Dialko of Kfar Saba.

---

Sutzkever Isaak

Isaak Sutzkever was born in Wilno, Poland in 1888 to Maxim. He was a

widowed. Prior to WWII he lived in Moskva, Russia. During the war was

in Army, Ussr. Isaak perished in 1941 in Moskva, Russia at the age of

53. This information is based on a Page of Testimony (displayed on

left) submitted by his niece in Russia; Irma Abramovitz

____________________________

Sutzkever Aleksander

Aleksander Sutzkever was born in Moskva, Russia in 1920 to Isaak and

Rakhel. He was a student and single. Prior to WWII he lived in Moskva,

Russia. During the war was in Moskva, Russia. Aleksander perished in

1941 in Moskva, Russia at the age of 21. This information is based on

a Page of Testimony (displayed on left) submitted by his cousin. More

Details...

----------------------------------

Sockower Beila nee Weisbord

Beila Sockower was born in Lebiedziewo, Poland in 1920 To Itka and

Feyve. She was a seamstress and married to Yosef. Prior to WWII she

lived in Smorgon, Poland. During the war was in Smorgon, Poland. Beila

perished in Lebiedziew, Poland. This information is based on a Page of

Testimony (displayed on left) submitted on 10/02/1957 by her sister ;

Miryam Chositza of Kfar Saba.

____________________________________

Suckewer Rhaja

Rhaja Suckewer was born in Wilno, Poland. Prior to WWII she lived in

Dziewieniszki, Poland. During the war was in Dziewieniszki, Poland.

Rhaja perished in Lida, Poland at the age of 35. This information is

based on a Page of Testimony (displayed on left) submitted by her

friend Dalbinski from Holon

____________________________________

Sutzkover Sheina

Sheina Sutzkover was born in Divenishok, Poland in 1900 to Eliahu

and Sima. She was a housewife and married. Prior to WWII she lived in

Divenishok, Poland. During the war was in Divenishok, Poland. Sheina

perished in the Shoah. This information is based on a Page of

Testimony (displayed on left) submitted on 20/08/1998 by her niece.

Dvora Fridman of Givataim

_________________________________

Sutzkover Yehudit

Yehudit Sutzkover nee Shemesh was born to Yisrael and Perel. She was

married. Prior to WWII she lived in Smorgon, Poland. During the war

was in Smorgon, Poland. Yehudit perished in Poland. This information

is based on a Page of Testimony (displayed on left) submitted on

28/08/1999 by her nephew from Israel Reuven Shemesh of Chedera ( there

is a phone number)

______________________________________

Khasia nee Sutzkover.

She was married to Unknown. Prior to WWII she

lived in Oszmiana, Poland. Khasia perished in the Shoah. This

information is based on a list of victims from Yizkor books found in

the Oshmana Memorial Book (Hebrew, Yiddish, English), Tel Aviv 1969

page 551

____________________________

Chayka Sutzkever was born in Wilno, Poland in 1917. Prior to WWII she

lived in Antokolski Street, Wilno, Poland and was a member of Hashomer

Hatzair. During the war was in Wilno, Poland at Same. She perished in

1942 in Ponary at the age of 25. This information is based on a Page

of Testimony (displayed on left) submitted on 14/04/1999 by her boy

friend from Israel, a Shoah survivor; Baraz of beer Sheva

__________________________________

Goder Chasha

Chasha Goder nee Sutzkover was born in Wilno, Poland to Joseph and

Fanny. During the war was in Minsk, Belorussia. Chasha perished in the

Shoah. This information is based on a Page of Testimony (displayed on

left) submitted by her great niece from United states Ilene Unterman

Zimmer of New York

______________________________

Cyrulnik Erma nee Sutzkever

Erma Cyrulnik was born in Wilna, Poland in 1910. She was married.

During the war was in Smorgon, Poland. Erma perished in 1943 in the

Shoah with daughter; Sima age 16. This information is based on a Page

of Testimony (displayed on left) submitted on 01/01/1955 by her

relative Miryam Pialko Kfar Saba

_______________________________________

Sutzkover Veisbrod Itka

Itka Veisbrod was born in Lebedowa, Poland in 1895 to Khaim. She was

married to Faive. Prior to WWII she lived in Lebedowa, Poland. During

the war was in Lebedowa, Poland. Itka perished in 1942 in Lebedowa,

Poland at the age of 47. This information is based on a Page of

Testimony ( submitted on 01/01/1994 by her daughter Miryam Chositza of

Kfar Saba.

_______________________________

Kucher Sheina

Sheina Kucher nee Sutzkover was born in Wilno, Poland in 1848 to

Zalman and Rivka ( Bonimovitz). She was a housewife and married to

Hirsh. Prior to WWII she lived in Wilno, Poland. Sheina perished in

1942 in Wilno at the age of 80. This information is based on a Page of

Testimony (displayed on left) submitted on 02/05/1999 by her

granddaughter, a Shoah survivor Sonia Sara Kucher Yechieli from Tel

Aviv ( nachmani 3)

__________________________________

Sutzkover Shmuel

Shmuel Sutzkover was born in 1905. He was a worker and married to

Chaia. Prior to WWII he lived in Minsk, Belorussia. During the war was

in Minsk, Belorussia. Shmuel perished in 1943 in the Shoah at the age

of 38. This information is based on a Page of Testimony (displayed on

left) submitted by his sister in law Sofia Gurevitz

_____________________________________

Sutzkover Chaia

Chaia Sutzkover nee Barkan was born in 1908 to Samuil and Chernya. She

was a worker and married to David. Prior to WWII she lived in Minsk,

Belorussia. During the war was in Minsk, Belorussia. She perished in

1943 in the Shoah at the age of 35. This information is based on a

Page of Testimony (displayed on left) submitted by her sister. Sofia

Gurevitz

_______________________________

Sutzkover Mere

Mere Sutzkover was born in Minsk, Belorussia in 1934 to Samuil and

Chaia. She was a pupil and a child. Prior to WWII she lived in Minsk,

Belorussia. During the war was in Minsk, Belorussia. Mere perished in

1943 in Minsk, Belorussia at the age of 9. This information is based

on a Page of Testimony (displayed on left) submitted by her aunt.

Sofia Gurevitz

________________________________

Sutzkover Rakhil

Rakhil Sutzkover was born in Minsk, Belorussia in 1925 to Samuil.

She was a pupil and married. Prior to WWII she lived in Minsk,

Belorussia. During the war was in Minsk, Belorussia. Rakhil perished

in 1943 in Minsk, Belorussia at the age of 18. This information is

based on a Page of Testimony (displayed on left) submitted by her

aunt. Sofia Gurevitz

________________________________

Sutzkover Khaim

Khaim Sutzkover was born in Minsk, Belorussia in 1934 to Samuil. He

was a pupil and a child. Prior to WWII he lived in Minsk, Belorussia.

During the war was in Minsk, Belorussia. Khaim perished in 1943 in

Minsk, Belorussia at the age of 9. This information is based on a Page

of Testimony (displayed on left) submitted by his aunt Sofia Gurevitz

__________________________________

Sutzkover Volf

Volf Sutzkover was born in Minsk, Belorussia in 1890. He was a

ritual slaughterer and married to Sara. Prior to WWII he lived in

Borisov, Belorussia. During the war was in Borisov, Belorussia. Volf

perished in 1941 in Borisov, Belorussia at the age of 51. This

information is based on a Page of Testimony (displayed on left)

submitted on 01/01/1995 by his nephew

Submitter's Last Name GENKIN

Submitter's First Name GRIGORI

______________________________

Sutzkover Sara

Sara Sutzkover nee Gurevich was born in Minsk, Belorussia in 1904 to

Yuda. She was a housewife and married to Vulf. Prior to WWII she lived

in Borisov, Belorussia. During the war was in Borisov, Belorussia.

Sara perished in 1941 in Borisov, Belorussia at the age of 37. This

information is based on a Page of Testimony (displayed on left)

submitted on 01/01/1995 by her nephew

Submitter's Last Name GENKIN

Submitter's First Name GRIGORI

____________________________________________________

Sutzkever Yakov

Yakov Sutzkever was born in 1909 to Yefrem and Tzilya. He was an

architect and single. Prior to WWII he lived in Moskva, Russia. During

the war was in Moskva, Russia. Yakov perished in 1942 in Belaya

Tserkov, Ukraine. This information is based on a Page of Testimony

(displayed on left) submitted on 25/07/1998 by his niece Vorobeichik

Rozaliya

________________________________________

Suzkenwer Jacob

Jacob Suzkenwer was born in Echaroki in 1892. Jacob perished in the

Shoah. This information is based on a list of deportation from France

found in the Le Memorial de la deportation des juifs de france, Beate

et Serge Klarsfeld, Paris 1978. More

__________________________________________________________________________________________-

On September last year I made an inquiry about SUTZKEVER from Smorgon

to the Lithuanian State Historical Archives asking them to assist me

to built the family tree.

The LVIA informed me they " keep the vital records of the Lithuanian

Jewish communities dating up to 1940 if the documents were not

destroyed during wars and fires.

In Tsarist period (till 1918) Smorgon was a place in the Oszmiany

district of

former Vilno gubernia (Vilnius province). Now it is a place in Grodno

province, Belarus.Our archive has not received any vital records of

Smorgon Jewish Community for keeping." Smorgon was destroyed in 1915.

"The archive keeps the Revision lists and some other lists for the

different years of the first part of the 19 Th century for families

registered in Smorgon Jewish Community" I ordered those. It will take

at least a year and half.

Avraham SUTZKEVER a partisan, a well known Yiddish poet and the younger

brother of my father Moshe SAVIR SUCKEVER z"l lives in Tel Aviv.We are

all part of this family what ever spelling is used.

Ester DE PAZ

SUTZKEVER from Smorgon

FINBERG from Michaliskes

GITELMAN and GIZUNTERMAN from Tereblicz

____________________________________________________________________________________________

An artist's rendition of Avraham Sutzkever during his testimony at the Nuernberg trial. Avraham Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski, members of the Jewish underground in the Vilnius ghetto.

The author and poet Avraham Sutzkever ________________________________________________________________________________________

Excerpts from the Smorgon Yizkor Book:

Abraham Sutzkever by Aharon Rubin

Translated by Anita Frishman Gabbay and Frieda Levin Dym

The writer, Abraham Sutzkever, was born and bred in Smorgon, both on his father's side and his mother's side. Abraham Sutzkever's grandfather on his father's side was a “Hassidic” Jew through and through. In this [Hassidism] thinking, the study of the Torah was a great blessing. He was a wealthy leather manufacturer. The factory was situated on Vilner Gas (Street).Every week there were hundreds of clients. He had two sons, Shmuel and Naphtali Zvi–Hershl. When the grandfather died, the two sons inherited the factory. Shmuel, the older son, looked after the factory. Hershel was interested in studying, so he basically made an arrangement to receive an income from his brother from the factory.

This is the story of Zebulon and Issachar[1]:

Abraham Sutzkever's mother came from a Smorgon family deeply devoted to the study of Torah and were extremely religious. In Smorgon there was a Jew by the name of Itzele. He was the richest and most respected Jew in Smorgon, and he owned a row of shops in the market square along with a large home with a large property. And at the edge of Krever Gas, he had a watermill that was called the “Veiter Mill”. (Veiter Mill likely translates into “further mill” so perhaps there was a closer one).

This [Rabbi Itzele] was Abraham Sutzkever's great grandfather. Rabbi Itzele had a son who was a devout Hassidic Jew, and therefore, he was nicknamed, the “Pashut”, Avremele Itzele's. He married his daughter to a Rabbi Shabtai Feinberg. Rabbi Shabtai inherited his father–in–law's leather factory. However, he had very little interest in this enterprise. Rabbi Shabtai gave lessons in the large Synagogue.

[Page 143]

In those days, Smorgon was not only a center for the leather industry, but also a center for Torah study. Smorgon was famous for its Yeshiva. From near and far, students would come to the Synagogue to listen to Rabbi Shabtai's fiery sermons and discussions.

Commerce and Torah study did not go together, and Rabbi Shabtai was invited to preside over the Rabbinate in Mikaelishok. Rabbi Shabtai liquidated the factory and took the position in the Rabbinate. He is the author of “AKIKI – MAGINIM”. His daughter Reina was Abraham Sutzkever's mother.

Translator's Note

Zebulon and Issachar represent two tribes referenced in the Torah where the former represented business and the latter representing study and learning. The two worked out an arrangement conducive to both. Return [Page 146]

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Avraham Sutzkever From a conversation with Yacov Pat

Translated by Anita Frishman Gabbay and Frieda Levin Dym

Avraham Sutzkever: A.S. Yacov Pat: Y.P.

Y.P. Let us begin with the childhood years. A.S. I was born in Smorgon, not far from Vilna, in 1913. I came from a well-known rabbinic family Y.P. How did your family get from Smorgon to Siberia? A.S. I'll start around the First World War. A rumour was going around and my family heard from a Jew “gutermacher” who said, “You will more likely be able to survive the war in Siberia”[1] Y.P. Your father, Hershl, was a scholar and studied the Torah [with you] in Siberia. Hershl was also a fiddle player and brought his fiddle from Smorgon to play.[2] A.S. The brightness of the Siberian fields was my inspiration. My first poem, called “Siberia” made me famous. Y.P. I would like to hear more about your father, the scholar from Smorgon and the fiddler from Siberia. A.S. At age 30, he had a heart attack while playing those Rabbi levi-itzhak's melodies. Y.P. It was a difficult [time], but also a “bright” Siberia for the Sutzkever family. Your father was still young and was already supporting his family by peddling in the marketplace. After your father's death, your mother with her young family returned to Smorgon. At the time you were only 8 years old. Right before the First World War, your father had a leather factory in Smorgon. As your mother and children came back, they found everything burnt down. And, shortly after, your family left for Vilna. A.S. My grandfather from my mother's side, was the Michalizker Rabbi, Rabbi, Shabtai Feinberg.[3] [Page 139]

	I remember from my Vilna years, [a} “yung vilna”— a club of young intellectuals and friends. Beside devouring books [of] Yiddish literature, I loved to wander through the Jewish quarter, the market, the Vilner shulhof—all with very sharp eyes and ears in order to absorb the rhythm of everything Yiddish around me. The group, “young vilna”, which began in the 1930s, made their own impression in the literary circles, one did not envy the other.[4]

My mother Reinaz'l (Reina), with her holy prayer book in hand, was taken away to Ponar--that's the way it was. Actually, she did go [take] with her holy prayer book (siddur). Y.P. Let us discuss the events from the Vilna ghetto, your memories and how you survived. A.S. My entire Yiddish being was revealed to me in the Vilna ghetto. I can honestly say “life and death” were in the hands of the Yiddish language. Without which i could not have warded off death. My Yiddishkeit was my “magic wand”, without which I could not have “warded” off death. [Page 140]

	I believed, that if I spoke with the purity of words, that death would not take over. It was divine justice. Y.P.	Afterwards came the partisan movement, each day and night [bringing] miracles. When the time came, when one did not have any more hope of survival, a Soviet airplane came to the rescue of the partisans. On this airplane you were saved. Thank G-d! A.S.	This is how it was: On the 12th of September, together with my wife and other partisans, we escaped through the barbed wire that surrounded the ghetto, to the Naroch woods, and to the Jewish partisan organization ”Nekama”. When the Lithuanian partisan group in Moscow found out, that I was with the partisans, a telegram arrived to the commander of the Vorosilov-Brigade, Feodor Markov, stating that my wife and I should be brought to Moscow. So, in March of 1944, i am greeted by a group of partisans. I arrived in the Hushatsch province by plane, then airlifted again to Moscow. Here I was asked to be a witness in the Nuremburg trials. On the morning of February 27, 1946 my wife and I started our testimony. As I looked over to my right side, several feet from me, I saw those “murderers” sitting in two rows, may their memory be erased. The first one—Goering, like a wounded beast—here is Streicher, looking like a pregnant cow. I spoke for 38 minutes. I came to the land of Israel in September 1947.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Abraham Sutzkever[5] is the founder of the “Goldene Keyt', the golden chain, a literary quarterly, remaining its editor in Tel Aviv. To date, he has a collection of 47 works. His poetic works include:

The Fortress, 1943 The Jewish Street, 1948 My Home Town, 1948 In the Fire Wagon, 1952 From Three Worlds, 1953 Ode to Death, 1955 In the Sinai Desert, 1957 Oasis, 1960 Holy Earth, 1961 [Page 141] Siberia, with drawing by Marc Chagall, Jerusalem, 1953. In 1962, the poem [Siberia] was translated into English by Yacov Sontag; he was awarded a prize by UNESCO as well as from the International Pen Club[6]. The poem is included in the series of UNESCO works “of our time”.

Translator's Footnotes

Gutermacher meaning good man or a mensch. Wikipedia has Abraham's father's name as Hertz, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Sutzkever/ Michalizker is referencing a person from the town of Mikaelishok. Potentially a reference to the traditional or classic writers of Yiddish literature. Abraham Sutzkever smuggled arms into the Vilna ghetto and concealed rare Jewish books and manuscripts of the YIVO collection, which he unearthed after the war. Writing poetry under aggravated conditions, he described several brushes with death: the murder of his mother and his new born son, the cultural underground resistance, and ghetto events and personalities. Admiration for his poems smuggled from the ghetto by a Lithuanian courier prompted the Jewish anti-fascist committee in the USSR to airlift Sutzkever to Moscow. UNESCO, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [Page 142]

With Grandfather in Smorgon (from Smorgon Yizkor Book) by Avraham Sutzkewer

Translated by Jerrold Landau

Then, when my grandmother Was busy with vinegar and honey So noble, She sent me for my birthday A clock – Then my time was In the same manner. It was a wall clock that originated from the moon. The ink is insufficient to describe its style. She saved it (If my memory served me correctly) At the time of her wedding, from a fire at grandfather's house in Smorgon, That city, where in a wreath of laurels, I was born.

It was handicapped With crooked legs of lead; With its bitter chains That dangle from there. A snowman, an androgynous From red wood and steel. With burning eyes Like stars, twelve in number.

I have my guest, my dear one Set at the head: I will shine you and clean you And there will be your throne.

[Page 145] And even though it was cleaved It then never cleave My time. It was all mine. And if my grandmother had a desire To knock with a blue umbrella In the Garden of Eden – The clock would not allow for us to be separated. Grandmother had become a homey cuckoo. Every hour she called out from her grave: Cuckoo! Yours is the time, and yours, yours: Cuckoo! Now, when that clock has been burnt As well as my time like burnt-up rye, Only, the blind cuckoo seeks a nest in my memory. From Midbar Sinai, 1957

[Page 146]

________________________________________________________________________________________

https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/4993/yiddish-heroism-hebre...

Yiddish Heroism, Hebrew Tears By Dara Horn Winter 2019 Print Email Facebook Twitter Black Honey, The Life and Poetry of Avraham Sutzkever directed by Uri Barbash, produced by Yair Qedar

Go2Films, 76 minutes

I can’t recall the last time I saw a documentary with as many people crying onscreen as there are in Black Honey, a new documentary on the life and work of the great Yiddish poet Avraham Sutzkever. I suppose this shouldn’t be surprising for a film about a Holocaust survivor, except that none of the crying is about the Holocaust. It’s about what came after, the compromises and concessions that remain unspoken even in this wonderfully wordy film. And that’s what makes Black Honey so phenomenally powerful and, perhaps unintentionally, uncomfortable.

Sutzkever’s life was more action-packed than any Marvel superhero’s—and as stark, gory, and unsubtle as a comic book in its battle between good and evil. That’s even before you get to the epic power of his work—and for Sutzkever, life and work were not even slightly separate, since his was a life not merely shaped by poetry in a metaphorical sense but literally saved by it, when a poem of his produced an airplane. So it is surely too much to ask this film to be more open about the fact that it is really about something else, specifically the something that its talking heads keep crying about. It’s too much because until now we didn’t even have the basic documentary narrative, the superhero recap of his life’s work. But Black Honey is even more than an account of the poet’s life, and anyone who cares about literature or Jewish culture needs to see it.

Avraham (“Avrom” in Yiddish; “Abrashe” to his family and friends) Sutzkever was born in Smorgon, Lithuania, in 1913. When he was two, his family was evacuated from the First World War’s eastern front to the remote Siberian town of Omsk, where he lived until the age of seven and where his father died early, at the age of 30. Sutzkever later published a mind-blowing cycle of poems titled Siberia, in which he imagined his childhood landscape as a fantastical wonderland infused with his father’s memory; the poems gleam with an awe that’s only enhanced by grief. (The work was illustrated by Marc Chagall.) Sutzkever’s family moved from Omsk to Vilna, the “Jerusalem of Lithuania,” where he met his wife Freydke when they were both 12, and where his poetry rocketed him to international fame in his twenties.

Movie poster for Black Honey depicting a man with glasses Poster advertising Black Honey. (Courtesy of Go2Films.) In 1941 the Nazis conquered Vilna. They murdered more than 75,000 Jews in a forest outside the city and warehoused the remaining 20,000 in a ghetto of eight blocks. In the ghetto, the Nazis outlawed Jewish births; the Sutzkevers’ baby boy, born after this Pharaonic edict, was murdered in the ghetto hospital as Sutzkever watched. With horror compounding horror, Sutzkever obsessively wrote poems that would become central to the Vilna Ghetto’s extraordinary culture.

These poems don’t merely collect and record pain. They reveal irrepressible beauty and create an unbroken chain through past Jewish traumas. Through partisan organizations, they were read and recited as far away as Moscow. One unforgettable poem, “Moses,” describes a woman abandoning a baby in Vilna’s icy river:

How far is the Viliya [river] from the Nile?

Same water flows, other days beget.

The horror of eternity makes it a habit:

Return again, so man should not forget.

In another, the poet warms his hands over fresh manure and notes, “The warm breath of a pile of dung / May become a poem, a thing of beauty.” In “The Lead Plates of the Rom Printers,” Sutzkever describes young fighters melting down the plates used to print Talmuds into bullets. A Hanukkah anthem, it announces: “We poured out the letters—in lead lines engraved. / Thus did, in the Temple, our forefathers wield / The golden menorahs, poured in oil that was saved.” (I quote here from Benjamin Harshav’s translations, whose slight clunkiness results from trying to maintain the poems’ formal properties. The film’s English translations of Sutzkever’s poetry ignore rhyme and meter completely, while its Hebrew translations attempt to preserve them—a choice that suggests what’s really at stake in this film, as we will soon explore.)

In 1942, the Nazis drafted a squad of Jewish intellectuals, including Sutzkever, to loot Vilna’s cultural treasures, including those housed at YIVO, the city’s renowned archive and research center for Yiddish culture, for a future Nazi institute for the study of “Judaism without Jews.” They were to select important material so that the rest could be pulped. Dubbing themselves the “Paper Brigade,” Sutzkever and his fellow humanists outwitted the Nazis by using the opportunity (and risking their lives) to rescue and hide many of these treasures; a trove of materials that belonged to YIVO has been rediscovered only in the last few years.

Smuggling books led to smuggling weapons for Vilna’s partisans, providing Sutzkever with links beyond the ghetto’s walls. In late 1943, the Sutzkevers escaped the ghetto through the sewers, traveling hundreds of miles on foot through swamps. And then came the moment when poetry saved their lives. The members of the Jewish Antifascist Committee in Moscow were astounded by Sutzkever’s epic poem “Kol Nidre,” with its eyewitness evidence of the genocide in progress, and they succeeded in getting the Kremlin to send a plane to rescue the poet and his wife. The first plane they sent was shot down by the Germans and crashed on a frozen lake. To reach the second plane, Sutzkever and Freydke had to walk through an area full of landmines. They walked to the rhythm of his poems. “Sometimes I walked in anapests, and sometimes in antibrachs,” he told the Israeli scholar Dory Manor.

After the war, Sutzkever was called to testify at Nuremberg. Then he and his wife made their last great escape, this time to prestate Israel—where Sutzkever almost singlehandedly maintained the country’s Yiddish literary culture until his death in 2010, at the age of 96.

This is the story of an actual superhero, a living embodiment of every platitude about fighting evil and never giving up. The platitude about the transcendent power of poetic creativity is a slightly harder sell, even if it did actually save the Sutzkevers’ lives.

The film’s literary scholars make much of this idea of poetry saving Sutzkever’s life, as if it were inevitable, which, to be fair, is quite close to Sutzkever’s own understanding of his creativity. “It was as clear as day to Sutzkever that he wasn’t going to die,” Manor claims. “He was absolutely convinced that unlike other people he wouldn’t die because he was gifted with something miraculous, prophetic, divine—his poetry.” The eminent Israeli literary critic Dan Miron seems to understand Sutzkever as a prophet for the god of art. In his onscreen analysis, he describes him almost as an heir to the Hebrew poet Shaul Tchernichovsky, who wrote a scandalous ode to the Greek god Apollo out of his desire to give Jewish creativity the holy status that art had in other languages. Miron sees evidence of this attitude in Sutzkever’s heart-stopping ballad “Teacher Mira,” about a ghetto teacher (based on an actual person) whose total devotion to her young students never wavers, even as the number of her students dwindles, in each of the ballad’s stanzas, from 130 to seven. Miron points to a line describing Teacher Mira carrying “a child in her arms, a golden lyre.” “He meant,” Miron declares, imagining Sutzkever’s thought process, “that ‘I am walking this death march with the golden lyre Apollo gave me’—the lyre of classical poetry, in every sense of the word.”

Black and white photograph of two parents with their little girl Avraham Sutzkever with his wife, Freydke, and daughter, Mira, in an undated photo. (Courtesy of Go2Films.) I understood that verse differently, connecting it to Sutzkever’s poem “On My Thirtieth Birthday,” a lament after his baby’s murder that recalls his father playing Hasidic melodies on his violin before his death at age 30. “And like my father, / I have a red violin,” Sutzkever wrote. “See, I tear my veins / and play on them my melody!” This poem is not quoted in the film. But to me, the images of musical instruments in these two poems, both about the murder of children, evoke the limitations of art in the face of unimaginable grief. I don’t insist upon this interpretation, but despite the scholars’ hard sell on the power of creativity, the Apollo-worship of art as sacred doesn’t come off well in this film.

There’s one other moment in Black Honey where a musical instrument comes up. In that memorable scene, we learn about Bruno Kittel, an SS officer who supervised the Vilna Ghetto’s liquidation. Talented in both music and murder, Kittel set up a piano at Vilna’s deportation point, where he played concertos as Jews boarded trains to extermination camps. During one mass deportation, a teenage boy approached Kittel as he played, begging for his life. Kittel took out his pistol and shot the boy dead with his right hand, while continuing to play the piano with his left.

Amazingly, moments like this—and there are many—don’t cause anyone to cry in this film. That fact alone reveals the deep resignation to murder and martyrdom buried in the heart of Jewish culture, even after 70 years of Israel’s independence. The moments of tears are quite different and worthy of examination. Each is a freeze-frame from the farthest border of translation, a border whose crossing is full of unanticipated pain.

The least surprising tears come from Sutzkever’s Israeli granddaughter Hadas Calderon, a professional actor (and one of the film’s producers) whose stage presence is palpable even in the film’s talking-head format. Sutzkever never returned to Germany after testifying at Nuremberg, refusing all invitations. Calderon, born into a different world, received her grandfather’s permission in 2010 to perform a piece about his life and work in Heidelberg with an Israeli-German collaborative theater group. “I had a very clear goal,” Calderon explains: “to tell the story of my family.” The morning of the premiere, she learned of her grandfather’s death. The performance went on as a kind of living eulogy. At the curtain call, the lead German actor went out and stopped the audience’s applause to announce that Sutzkever had died. “He said this in German,” Calderon recalls. She had suppressed her emotions during the performance, she says, “but when he said ‘Avraham Sutzkever died,’ in German, I fell to pieces. . . . and when the German audience applauded him, applauded Avraham Sutzkever . . .” Here Calderon falls to pieces once again, onscreen. It is hard to miss that she is not actually crying over her grandfather’s death but over something far more intense.

The more unexpected tears come from the Israeli Yiddish scholar Avraham Novershtern, the head of Hebrew University’s Yiddish department, who has been instrumental in the development of Yiddish scholarship in Israel. Novershtern describes how Sutzkever established Di goldene keyt (the Golden Chain, a phrase denoting the Yiddish literary tradition), the Yiddish literary journal whose endurance and high caliber made it the central address for Yiddish culture worldwide in the years after Israel’s independence. In 1948, Sutzkever sought funding for the journal from the Histadrut, the central labor union that at the time held the country’s greatest political clout. Novershtern recounts how, in the midst of Israel’s war for independence, Sutzkever came to petition Yosef Sprinzak, the head of the Histadrut, about supporting his Yiddish journal—without realizing that Sprinzak’s son had fallen in battle only days before. It is at this point that Novershtern cries onscreen.

I don’t pretend to know exactly why this story was so resonant for Novershtern, though in a country where nearly everyone’s children serve in the military, one can guess. But there is a deeper emotional significance to this incident in Sutzkever’s life, and in the life of the people of Israel, that is in perfect keeping with Novershtern’s emotions. At that moment Sutzkever and Sprinzak had something profound in common: They were both fathers of martyrs, both struggling to build something that could somehow redeem, however slightly, those horrific losses. Sprinzak’s boy died fighting to save Sutzkever’s daughters, and he succeeded in that sense he was not merely a martyr but a superhero. Sutzkever’s boy could only become a poem. His father was fighting for that poem. Sprinzak said yes.

The third moment of tears in the film comes from the Harvard professor emerita Ruth R. Wisse, though hers are suppressed enough to be plausibly deniable. She describes an encounter with Sutzkever at a conference when she was a young woman, honored to have the opportunity for casual conversation with the literary giant. All went well, she recalls, until she asked him an innocent question about a detail in a story he was recounting from the war. Sutzkever roared at her, “Vos veystu fun di tsapeldike rukzek?” “What do you know of the quivering knapsacks?” Wisse then explains what he meant: Jewish mothers in the ghetto, left with no options, smuggled their living infants out of their homes in order to abandon them to die. Barely suppressing her own tears, she describes how she instantly saw herself through the poet-survivor’s eyes: “He totally lost confidence in me. Suddenly he saw that this girl, she understands nothing . . . and indeed I did not know, and he was right.” To me, this moment haunts the entire film and reveals its purpose.

What do we know, indeed, of the tsapeldike rukzek? Thankfully, nothing—and one of the foundational purposes of the state of Israel is the assurance that this knowledge can be safely forgotten. While watching this scene, I was reminded of a small moment in my own life. I was in Israel for a work trip a few years after the Second Intifada, and at one point I passed through a checkpoint in a taxi. It was a nothing of a stop: Soldiers asked for ID, checked the trunk, and sent us on our way. But as these strangers checked each car, it occurred to me that this entire apparatus existed solely for the purpose of keeping me alive. Despite the soldiers’ youth, I felt weirdly mothered, as if I were a child and someone was going to elaborate lengths and taking risks whose complexity I couldn’t begin to understand, just to protect me. I thought of my own country, where daily life is well equipped with first responders but not especially with first preventers, and where the fact that people like me have been consistent targets of persecution for several millennia is utterly irrelevant to how anyone regards my safety. This situation can only be considered a blessing. But in the taxi at that moment, I was struck by the sudden thought that for all its devotion to keeping me free, my native country does not place any particular priority on keeping me alive. I could, of course, summon all kinds of arguments against this feeling. But it was a feeling, not an argument, and I found myself crying in the back of the cab, my tears as irrational and uncomfortable as those of all the teary people in this film.

These tears returned to me as I watched Wisse hold back hers, reaching the edge of what she and I are blessed not to know. One of Sutzkever’s many masterpieces is a series of prose poems entitled “Green Aquarium,” in which the poet imagines his murdered loved ones trapped inside an aquarium representing memory. He can see them vividly right before his eyes, but if he smashes the glass, those he loved would be lost forever; their memory can only endure if intimacy is impossible. This experience of an inaccessible past, which was entirely personal for survivors, extends in a collective sense to everyone who reads and studies Yiddish literature now. We can only look through the glass.

Abstract line drawing of a face Self-portrait of Avraham Sutzkever, 1986. (Courtesy of Ruth R. Wisse.) This uncomfortable reality is part of the structure of the film itself. Among the many people interviewed in the film, only one—Yitskhok Niborski of Bibliothèque Medem, a Yiddish archive in Paris—responds in Yiddish. With the exception of English spoken by Wisse, a few recordings of Sutzkever reading his own work, and Niborski’s interviews and read-alouds, the bulk of the film, including all the other interviews and most of Sutzkever’s poetry, is in Hebrew.

It is not at all surprising that people in the film chose to speak the language they use daily. In fact, it is a relief to observe scholars deeply devoted to Yiddish literature dispensing with the desperate denial of previous generations of passionate Yiddishists, who often insisted on using Yiddish at every opportunity. Yet it was also alarming to hear Sutzkever’s poetry not merely rendered into Hebrew but to hear those Hebrew lyrics read aloud by disembodied voices as though they were the originals, the Yiddish abandoned entirely—especially when those same Hebrew verses were provided simultaneously onscreen, so a reading of the original Yiddish would not have obscured anyone’s understanding. A translation is of course necessary and in no way surprising. What’s surprising is a translation provided as though it were the original. That overriding translation into Hebrew is exactly what this film ultimately achieves, and it is the film’s real subject and purpose.

Of course, this is exactly the opposite of what Sutzkever himself saw as his own subject and purpose. His devotion to the Yiddish language was total; after the Holocaust he saw the language itself as the most powerful memorial. When he was called to testify at the Nuremberg trials mere months after the war’s end, he planned to give his testimony in Yiddish: “I want to speak the language of the people the defendants tried with all their might to destroy. Thus, our language will be heard, until [Nazi defendant] Alfred Rosenberg explodes.” His Soviet rescuers had other ideas. It was more useful, they insisted, to have the Soviet people hear his testimony in Russian. In one of the film’s many amazing moments, we get to see archival footage of Sutzkever’s Russian-language testimony at Nuremberg—and we see him refuse to sit down before the Nazi henchmen, even when the presiding judge asks him to take his seat.

The film presents Sutzkever’s Russian-language testimony as though it were a logistical snafu, rather than part of the long Soviet erasure of Jewish culture that would continue for nearly 50 years. Just a few years later, Stalin culminated his purge of Jewish culture in the USSR with the executions of famed Yiddish writers and poets, whose ranks would surely have included Sutzkever himself had he not continued on to Tel Aviv. Sutzkever was an ace at dodging bullets.

Photo of a woman speaking with a microphone to a crowd Hadas Calderon, the granddaughter of Avraham Sutzkever, speaking on the 100th anniversary of his birth. (Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum.) The same cannot be said of the language that the poet came to see as a memorial. Sutzkever’s career once he arrived in Israel was a long one: He lived to 96 and continued publishing Yiddish poetry for most of those years. Miron makes an impassioned plea for Sutzkever to be understood as an Israeli poet, pointing out that the greatest poem on Israel’s War for Independence is a Yiddish work by Sutzkever, Gaystike erd. None of this quite matters, though. The film describes his Israeli funeral in 2010, attended by only a few dozen people. Miron recalls conversations with Sutzkever during which the poet repeatedly asked, “Will people remember me?” Miron promised him: “As long as someone remains in this world who can taste a Yiddish word, you will be remembered.” But this film, in its entirety, is aiming for something different—and dare I say, something better.

The Zionist concept of shlilat hagalut (negation of the exile), which steamrolled Jews from diverse communities into a uniform Israeli identity with a single language, was a psychological necessity for a young state. Today, Israeli society has the cultural confidence to rediscover aspects of diaspora Jewish heritage that were previously taboo. The film dutifully reports on the Yishuv’s repression of Yiddish, but nearly all the people who fought that culture war are dead now, leaving room for their descendants to develop a different approach to the Yiddish literary legacy. (The fact that there are currently tens of thousands of native Yiddish speakers in Israel—a population that is young and growing—is ignored completely in this film, since they are haredi and therefore presumed to be allergic to non-haredi people and literature. I question that presumption, if only because no one seems willing or able to test it.) That legacy, as the film fails to actually state out loud, will endure in the future—in Hebrew.

Jewish tradition has long sanctified the act of translation of Hebrew texts into other languages. To the mythologies about Targum Onkelos and the Septuagint, we might add a modern footnote that takes translation in the opposite direction. When future Nobel laureate Saul Bellow first met the future Hebrew Nobel laureate S. Y. Agnon in 1961, Agnon urged him to have his novels translated into Hebrew, because “they would only survive in the holy tongue.” When Bellow offered the counterexample of the great 19th-century German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, Agnon calmly replied, “We have him beautifully translated into Hebrew. He is safe.”

Agnon was making a point about non-Jewish languages, but this film makes clear that the same point might well apply to Yiddish literature too. Black Honey, in its grand Hebrew recitations of Sutzkever’s Yiddish lyrics, as well as in its powerful introduction to the poet for a mainly Hebrew-speaking audience, is itself an enactment of exactly that process. By bringing this master’s work to the wider world in Hebrew, it has reinvented and revived Sutzkever as the Israeli poet he tragically never quite became in life.

As a lover of Sutzkever’s work, I’m grateful, to the point of tears, to know that he is safe.

Print Email Facebook Twitter ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dara Horn Dara Horn is the author of five novels, most recently Eternal Life (W. W. Norton & Company).

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https://vimeo.com/348447644/f339ee43ef
Short video about historical link between Avraham Sutzkever and Dvora Romm. ________________________________________________________________________________________

"Avraham Sutzkever on Poetry and Partisan Life" (Sutzkever's voice, speaking in Yiddish, English subtitles, photographs, etc.). Very powerful:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kofcyfycOFE _________________________________________________________________________________________

אברהם סוצקבר

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לידה 15 ביולי 1913 סמרגון, בלארוס פטירה 20 בינואר 2010 (בגיל 96) תל־אביב–יפו, ישראל עיסוק משורר, סופר שפות היצירה פולנית, יידיש פרסים והוקרה פרס ישראל (1985) פרס איציק מאנגר ליצירה ספרותית ביידיש

אברהם סוּצְקֵבֵר (ביידיש: סוצקעווער; 15 ביולי 1913 - 19 בינואר 2010) היה מהחשובים במשוררי היידיש במחצית השנייה של המאה ה-20. כונה בפי אחדים "סלובצקי".

תוכן עניינים 1 נעוריו באירופה 2 בזמן מלחמת העולם השנייה 3 בישראל 4 ספריו בתרגום עברי 4.1 ספר יובל 5 לקריאה נוספת 6 קישורים חיצוניים 7 הערות שוליים

נעוריו באירופה אברהם סוצקבר נולד ב-1913 בעיירה סמרגון שבאזור ליטא (כיום בבלארוס), בגוברניית גרודנו שבתחום המושב של האימפריה הרוסית. ב-1915, בעת מלחמת העולם הראשונה, כשהיה סוצקבר בן שנתיים, גורשה משפחתו לעומק רוסיה, יחד עם מאות אלפי היהודים שישבו באזור הגבול בין רוסיה לגרמניה. כל יהודי סמרגון הועזבו תוך יממה, והעיר נשרפה על ידי הצבא הרוסי הנסוג.

משפחת סוצקבר נדדה ברחבי סיביר, והשתקעה בעיר אומסק. שם עברו עליה מאורעות קשים: אביו, הרץ סוצקבר נפטר בצעירותו, והמהפכה הרוסית איימה עליהם מספר פעמים. ב-1920 שבה אמו האלמנה ריינה לבית פיינברג, עם שלושת ילדיה לליטא והשתקעה בעיר בירתה וילנה. סוצקבר למד שם בבית ספר יהודי דתי. בית הספר התיכון בו למד סוצקבר היה בית ספר פולני־עברי. הוא החל לכתוב שירה כבר בגיל 13, כשתחילה כתב בעברית ואחר כך עבר ליידיש, אף שמעולם לא למד בבית ספר שפה זו. בהמשך הוא הצטרף לקבוצת המשוררים והכותבים היהודים "ווילנה הצעירה". ספר שיריו הראשון, ביידיש, הוצא לאור על ידי איגוד סופרי היידיש בוורשה. בסוף אוגוסט 1939 נשא לאישה את פרידה.

בזמן מלחמת העולם השנייה בעקבות הכיבוש הנאצי ב-1941 ניסו סוצקבר ואשתו להימלט מזרחה, לברית המועצות, אולם עקב התקדמותם המהירה של הגרמנים נחסמה דרכם והם נאלצו לשוב לווילנה. הוא נכלא מספטמבר אותה שנה בגטו וילנה. בחודשים הראשונים בגטו חווה סוצקבר אירועים קשים ביותר: אשתו ילדה בבית החולים של הגטו, אך הנאצים רצחו את התינוק, כיוון שלידות היו אסורות בגטו. זמן קצר לאחר מכן נשלחה גם אמו באחת האקציות למחנה השמדה. מכאן ואילך ארגן סוצקבר את החיים התרבותיים בגטו והמשיך בכתיבתו ללא לאות. ביולי 1943 העביר לפרטיזן שייקה גרטמן מחברת משיריו ובה שתי פואמות שכתב בגטו, "דאס קבר קינד" (ילד הקבר) ו"כל נדרי". הוא רצה שיצירותיו יגיעו לסופרים יהודיים במוסקבה, בהם פרץ מארקיש. בעקבות הוויתור של המחתרת היהודית על מרד חמוש, ברח עם רעייתו ועם לוחמים נוספים מחבריו בספטמבר 1943, לקראת חיסולו של הגטו, ליערות שסביב לעיר, שם הצטרפו לפרטיזנים שפעלו בגבוי הצבא האדום. הוא נשלח ליחידת פרטיזנים רחוקה, ביערות נארוץ' שבבלארוס.

היצירות ששלח ביולי 1943 הגיעו בשלום למוסקבה, התפרסמו שם, ועשו רושם כה עז על קוראים יהודים המקורבים לשלטון, עד כי במרץ 1944 נשלח מטוס מיוחד בהוראת סטלין להביאו מיערות נארוץ' לבירה הרוסית. השלטון הסובייטי הקים אז את הוועד היהודי האנטי-פשיסטי, והוא קיווה לסחוט את האמריקאים בעזרת הבטחות שווא ליהודי ברית המועצות. פרשת הצלתו מיערות בלארוס בעזרת מטוס מיוחד של חיל האוויר הסובייטי, היא פרשה מיוחדת במינה, ומעידה על החשיבות העצומה שייחס סטלין להפשרת היחסים עם ארצות הברית בעת המלחמה. השתלשלות האירוע: ראש ממשלת ליטא הסובייטית יוסטאס פלצקיס (הגולה במוסקבה) שמע שסוצקבר, אותו הכיר ממפגש משוררים בתחילת 1940, שוהה ביערות עם הפרטיזנים; הוא פנה לחיל האוויר הסובייטי וביקש שישלחו מטוס לחלצו.[1] המטוס הראשון שנשלח למשימה הופל על ידי הגרמנים ביער, והזוג סוצקבר חולץ רק בניסיון שני. מכנפי המטוס שהתרסק הרכיבו הפרטיזנים מזוודה, בה ארז סוצקבר את שיריו ומסמכיו מגטו וילנה.[2] המזוודה נמצאת כיום בארכיון הספרייה הלאומית. איליה ארנבורג כתב עליו מאמר ב"פראבדה". לאחר פרסום המאמר קיבל סוצקבר מאות מכתבים מכל רחבי ברית המועצות.

סוצקבר היה אחד הניצולים היחידים של גטו וילנה, ובזכותו ניצלו גם אוצרות התרבות של הגטו. הוא כתב את שירו הידוע תחת זיו כוכבי שמיים, שהפך להמנון היהודים בגטו וילנה ואחר כך לשיר המזוהה ביותר עם יום השואה בישראל. כאשר הסתתר ביערות, השתמש סוצקובר בנוצת תרנגולת ומיץ של דובדבנים סחוטים, וכך כתב בהיעדר דיו ועט.

בשנת 1946 הוא נבחר להיות העד היהודי היחיד מטעם רוסיה הסובייטית במשפטי נירנברג.

בישראל לאחר המלחמה חזר סוצקבר לווילנה, אך לא השתלב בעיר שהייתה תחת השלטון הסובייטי, ולאחר זמן קצר בחר להגר ממנה. תחילה היגרו בני הזוג לצרפת ושהו תקופה מסוימת בפריז, שם פגשו במארק שאגאל. לאחר זמן מה החליטו לעבור לגור בארץ.

ב-1947, זמן קצר לפני קום המדינה, בעזרתה של גולדה מאיר, הגיע סוצקבר עם אשתו פרידה לארץ ישראל. בארץ התייחסו אליו בראש ובראשונה בתור משורר ניצול שואה, ותיאוריו על מה שעבר עליו בשנות השואה הותירו רושם עמוק בלבם של סופרים, עיתונאים ובקהל הרחב כולו. מעטים היו משוררי היידיש ששרדו את המלחמה והחליטו להגיע לארץ ישראל.

סוצקבר דבק בלשון היידיש, והאמין באפשרות חידוש תרבות היידיש במסגרת החיים היהודיים בארץ. בישראל ייסד סוצקבר, עם אחרים, ובתמיכה ממשלתית של שלטון מפא"י, את הרבעון הספרותי "די גאָלדענע קייט" ("שרשרת הזהב"), ששימש אכסניה עולמית ליוצרי ספרות היידיש וסופריה, וערך אותו מ-1949 עד 1998. סוצקבר הופיע בפסטיבלי שירה בינלאומית, תורגם לשפות רבות, וזכה בעשרות פרסים ספרותיים, לרבות פרס ישראל ופרס איציק מאנגר ליצירה ספרותית ביידיש.[3] מאז הגיעו לארץ התגורר סצוקבר בתל אביב.

בשנת 1982 הפקיד סוצקבר את ארכיונו בספרייה הלאומית בירושלים.[4]

אברהם סוקצבר נפטר בראשית שנת 2010, בגיל 96, ונטמן בבית העלמין קריית שאול. הותיר אחריו שתי בנות. נכדתו היא השחקנית הדס קלדרון, בתה של הציירת רינה סוצקבר.

ב-15 ביולי 2013 הוסר הלוט מעל לוחית זיכרון בכניסה לביתו בתל אביב.

ספריו בתרגום עברי גיטו וילנה: (מיידיש: נתן ליבנה), תל אביב: תש"ז-1947. חרות עלי לוח: שירים, מרחביה: 1949.[5] עיר הסתרים: פואימה (תורגמה מיידיש בידי י’ גולה [=%D7%A2%D7%96%D7%A8%D7%90 פליישר]), תל אביב: עם עובד, 1963. ברכב אש: שירים ופואימות (תרגמו מיידיש ה’ בנימין בנימין הרושובסקי, ואחרים, בלווית מבוא מאת דב סדן), ירושלים: מוסד ביאליק, תשכ"ד-1964.[6] שירים ופואימות, נבחרו ותורגמו בידי משוררים עברים שונים, הובאו לדפוס בידי א"ד שפיר, תל אביב: עם עובד, תשל"ה-1975. אקוואריום ירוק: סיפורים (מיידיש: ק"א ברתיני), תל אביב: הקיבוץ המאוחד, תשל"ט-1979. הלילה הראשון בגיטו: מחזור שירים (תרגם מיידיש: ק. א. ברתיני; רישומים: שמואל בק), תל אביב: עם עובד, 1981. כנפי שחם: שירים מן היומן ושירים אחרים (תרגמו מיידיש: יעקב אורלנד ואחרים; האמן במסיכת היומן - מסה מאת דן מירון; הביא לדפוס: ק.א. ברתיני), תל אביב: עם עובד, 1983. סיביר: פואמה (מיידיש: ה. בנימין [=%D7%91%D7%A0%D7%99%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%9F הרושובסקי]; ציורים: מארק שאגאל), תל אביב: הקיבוץ המאוחד, 1983. כינוס דומיות, מבחר שירים, אברהם סוצקבר (תרגם מיידיש והקדים מבוא: בנימין הרשב; שירים רבים תורגמו בידי מתרגמים שונים; ערכה ניצה דרורי-פרמן), תל אביב: כרמל ועם עובד, 2005. חרוזים שחורים: אוטוביוגרפיה מדומיינת (תרגם מיידיש בני מר). תל אביב: הוצאת הקיבוץ המאוחד, 2015. גטו וילנה: תרגום מחודש מיידיש: ויקי שיפריס, תל אביב: עם עובד, 2016. בנוסף לספריו, תורגמו לעברית גם שירים בודדים רבים משלו. בין המתרגמים: לאה גולדברג, אברהם שלונסקי, נתן אלתרמן, יעקב אורלנד, אמיר גלבע, בנימין הרשב, אבא קובנר, שמעון הלקין, אביגדור המאירי, אהרון צייטלין, אברהם רגלסון, עזרא זוסמן, אשר ברש, דוד וינפלד, ק. א. ברתיני, אברהם יבין, עמינדב דיקמן, דן מירון, רועי גרינוולד ודורי מנור.

שירי אברהם סוצקבר תורגמו גם לאנגלית. בין מתרגמיו גם המשורר היהודי-קנדי, סימור מיין. ספר תרגומיו "Burnt Pearls, Ghetto Poems", יצא לאור בקנדה בשנת 1981.

ספר יובל ייחוס פון ליד: לכבוד אברהם סוצקעוואר, מערכת דב סדן ואחרים, ועד היובל אברהם סוצקבר, תל אביב, 1983 (304 עמודים). לקריאה נוספת על יצירתו של אברהם סוצקבר נתפרסמו עשרות רבות של מאמרי ביקורת, בעברית וביידיש, מסות וכתבות. הרשימה המובאת כאן מצומצמת. כל הרוצה להרחיב ימצא את הרשימות המלאות ברמב"י, באתר בית הספרים הלאומי.

בין המבקרים והמתייחסים ליצירתו בכל מופעיה, ניתן לציין את שלום לוריא, נחמן רפ, דוד וולפה, יוסף פרידלנדר, בנימין הרשב, ק. א. ברתיני, דן מירון, בני מר, אברהם בלאט, יוסף קוריס, דב סדן, בנימין יצחק מיכלי, גרשון ויינר, חנה בלוך, יהודה אלברג, התר ולנסיה, יחיאל שיינטוך, נח גריס, טניה הדר, חוה טורניאנסקי, ליאונרד פראגר, שמואל ורסס, אברהם נוברשטרן, חנא שמרוק, ישעיהו שפיגל, דוד רוסקיס ורבים נוספים.

דן מירון, "ענף עם אחרוני דובדבנים: על שירת אברהם סוצקוור", בספרו הצד האפל בצחוקו של שלום עליכם: מסות על חשיבותה של הרצינות ביחס ליידיש ולספרותה, עם עובד, 2004, עמ' 251–268. קישורים חיצוניים מיזמי קרן ויקימדיה ויקיציטוט ציטוטים בוויקיציטוט: אברהם סוצקבר ויקישיתוף תמונות ומדיה בוויקישיתוף: אברהם סוצקבר הקלטות וראיונות עם אברהם סוצקבר , המרכז הלאומי לספרי יידיש, באתר ארכיון האינטרנט (ביידיש) "פגישה שנייה עם סוצקעווער " – שיר מאת דורי מנור, מתוך בריטון, אחוזת בית, תל אביב 2005 כתבי אברהם סוצקבר

בפרויקט בן-יהודה הספרים של אברהם סוצקבר , באתר "סימניה" אברהם סוצקבר, ישראל ראבון בווילנה , באתר הארץ, 17 ביולי 2008 שירי לב-ארי, שירים מאירים באמצע החורבן , באתר הארץ, 23 בדצמבר 2004 אברהם סוצקבר, צעצועים , באתר הארץ, 14 בינואר 2011 דוד רוסקיס, מסע מטאפיסי מסיביר לסיני , באתר הארץ, 18 במאי 2005 אמיר מנשהוף, כוכב שלאחר ההבדלה , באתר הארץ, 17 ביולי 2009 המשורר אברהם סוצקבר הלך לעולמו , באתר ynet, 20 בינואר 2010 רבקה איילון, היהודי שראה יונים בגטו , באתר ynet, 21 בינואר 2010 מיה סלע, עכבר העיר אונליין, אברהם סוצקבר, המשורר שלא מכירים את שמו , באתר הארץ, 28 בינואר 2010 עדותו של אברהם סוצקבר במשפטי נירנברג דורי מנור, יש גונג דממה בבן-אדם , באתר הארץ, 29 בינואר 2010 דורי מנור, יש גוֹנְג דממה בבן-אדם , בבלוג של משה סקאל באתר "רשימות", פורסם בגרסה מקוצרת בעיתון "הארץ", 29.1.2010 אלי אשד, הזרעים הרוחניים של אברהם סוצקבר , בלוג באתר "רשימות", 2.2.2010 לזכרו של אברהם סוצקבר, מתוך אתר יד ושם על יצירתו של סוצקבר

באתר יד ושם קטע קול ערן סבאג, "חיים של אחרים" על אברהם סוצקבר ‏, 12 במרץ 2013 מיה וינשטוק, החיים, המוות והשואה: אברהם סוצקבר , באתר ynet, 6 בספטמבר 2015 סרטונים אלי אליהו, הדבר הכי גרוע שיכול לקרות למשורר קרה לאברהם סוצקבר , באתר הארץ, 3 באוקטובר 2015 סרטונים עופרה עופר אורן,סיפורו של שיר: תחת זיו כוכבי שמים , בבלוג "סופרת ספרים", 1 במאי 2016 עופרה עופר אורן, "גטו וילנה": על מה שצריך, וכל כך קשה, לקרוא , בבלוג "סופרת ספרים", 3 במאי 2016 סרטונים סבי אברהם סוצקבר - הדס קלדרון , סרטון באתר יוטיוב הדר בן-יהודה, המשורר שחולץ במטוס מיערות הפרטיזנים , באתר הספרייה הלאומית, אפריל 2017 מתי שמואלוף מראיין את הנכדה של סוצקבר, הדס קלדרון , באתר J61, אוקטובר, 2018 (באנגלית) מיצירתו (בתרגום לעברית):

ששה משירי סוצקבר, מתורגמים בידי אברהם רגלסון, בפרויקט בן-יהודה שני שירים , בתרגום ה. בנימין, באתר "הספריה החדשה" "תחת זיו כוכבי שמים", מילים ומנגינה באתר "זמרשת" פואמה ותערוכת איורים: "אל פולין" , באתר "הַמּוּסָךְ - מוסף לספרות" של הספרייה הלאומית, 24 באפריל 2017 אברהם סוצקבר, שירים: משורר יידיש; שיר ערש ירושלמי. תרגום מיידיש תמר ועמוס רודנר , באתר הארץ, 24 בספטמבר 2019 הערות שוליים

David E. Fishman, The Book Smugglers, ForeEdge, 2017, עמ' 129

הספרייה הלאומית, המשורר שחולץ במטוס מיערות הפרטיזנים

הוענק הפרס ע"ש מאנגר לפרופ' צייטלין ולמשורר א. סוצקבר , למרחב, 25 במרץ 1969

ארכיון אברהם סוצקבר

באתר הספרייה הלאומית

מ. חן, חרות עלי לוח , הד המזרח, 24 ביוני 1949.

אפרת פאיאנס, בחותם האש ובשלהבתה , מעריב, 10 ביולי 1964.

https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%90%D7%91%D7%A8%D7%94%D7%9D_%D7%A1...

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