Smith’s Justin Cammy said Sutzkever saw the Nazis could not destroy a “perfectly executed poem.”
Justin D. Cammy, assistant professor of Jewish Studies at Smith College in Northampton, poses with some of the works of the legendary Yiddish poet and Holocaust survivor Abraham Sutzkever, who died on Jan 20, at the age of 96 in Tel Aviv.
In observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day on April 11, The Republican Newspaper in Education editor Anne-Gerard Flynn interviewed Justin D. Cammy, assistant professor of Jewish studies, and member of the programs in comparative literature, Middle East studies and American studies at Smith College in Northampton, about the life and contributions of the recently deceased Yiddish poet and Holocaust survivor Abraham (Avrom) Sutzkever.
Cammy had once visited with Sutzkever in Tel Aviv.
How well known is he among not only the general public and students and why isn’t he better known?
Among native readers of Yiddish and students of Yiddish literature, the name Avrom Sutzkever is more than the name of poet. He is a Yiddish legend, a cultural hero.
Prior to the Second World War, when he was still in his 20s, he was one of the guiding creative forces of the last of the major interwar Yiddish poetic groups – Yung-Vilne.
His early volumes brought him acclaim not only in Poland but also in the United States, where he was published in the leading journal of American Yiddish modernism.
During World War II, he again served as a guiding cultural force, this time as a ghetto poet (he won first prize in the ghetto’s poetry competition), as an organizer of literary evenings, as a member of the partisan underground forces, and as a member of “the Paper Brigade,” a group of writers and intellectuals who smuggled documents away from the clutches of the Nazis and buried them in the Vilna Ghetto.
Though almost all of Vilna Jewry was annihilated (including his mother, his infant child and many of his colleagues in Yung-Vilne), Sutzkever managed to escape from the ghetto during its liquidation. He spent months fighting with partisan forces in the forests of Polish Lithuania.
By then, some of his ghetto poems had made it to the Soviet Union, where they were translated and published, making him something of a symbol of Jewish fate and Jewish resistance.
A daring mission rescued Sutzkever and his wife from their hiding in the forest and brought them to Moscow. As soon as Vilna was liberated, Sutzkever returned to the devastated city to dig up and retrieve the cultural treasures that he and his comrades had buried.
Having survived one brutal dictatorship, he was ill inclined to trust the intention of Stalin, so he arranged for the buried archive to be secretly transferred to New York where they exist today at the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO), part of the Center for Jewish History.
Sutzkever went on to testify as a witness at the Nuremberg trials on behalf of East European Jewry.
Though the judge repeatedly asked him to sit during his testimony, he refused, insisting that he would deliver his testimony standing as a gesture of respect to the dead.
Sutzkever understood that a Jewish poet needed a Jewish environment and atmosphere in order to inspire his creativity.
Rather than remain behind in the USSR (where most Yiddish poets were murdered in Stalinist purges in 1952) or move to the United States, he boarded an illegal immigrant ship for Palestine, where he managed to evade the British blockade of Jewish immigration and arrive just in time for the proclamation of the first independent Jewish state in almost 2,000 years.
From 1949 until his retirement in 1996, Sutzkever — almost single-handedly — created an address for the Yiddish world with his journal “Di goldene keyt” (The Golden Chain).
The title was symbolic; it was both a borrowing from the title of a play by one of the classical founders of modern Yiddish fiction, and a statement that despite the recent horrors the chain of Jewish culture had not and would not be broken.
Though Yiddish is often considered a diasporic language, Sutzkever wrote about the natural landscape of Israel with the same neoclassical precision and sense of wonder with which he had celebrated the Polish landscape in his early years as a poet.
In 1985, the Government of Israel awarded him the Israel Prize, the highest civilian honor, for his work in Yiddish culture.
Sutzkever is not better known for several reasons:
He was born as a poet into a language that was regarded as marginal, both in the non-Jewish, Western world (where high culture was synonymous with works produced in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Polish, and English) and even within the post-war Jewish world.
With the annihilation of two-thirds of European Jewry, so too were the masses of Yiddish speakers annihilated.
Those who managed to survive either came to the United States (where they found the pressure to assimilate into English very pronounced) or immigrated to Israel, which was trying to consolidate a new country of Jewish refugees from Europe and the Arab countries around a single national language, Hebrew.
He is also not as well known because he shunned ideology in his writing. Sutzkver was a transcendent poet, reveling in form, musicality and neologism. He was not interested in the politics of street, and shunned the leftism than dominated Yiddish writing in the 30s.
Despite this, Sutzkever remains the most important Yiddish poet of the Holocaust, and perhaps the most important poet in any language of the Holocaust.
While Hebrew readers might look to Dan Pagis and German readers might look to Paul Celan, Sutzkever’s Holocaust oeuvre is deeper and vaster than either.
During this period he wrote epic works, metapoetic works about the function of art in extremis, works of witnessing, works designed to construct collective myth and a memoir of the Vilna ghetto. At the same time, he was not aloof from the community but actively engaged with it as both a fighter and cultural organizer.
If most of the Jewish victims of World War II were Yiddish speakers, then it goes to reason that the national poet of the Holocaust ought to be in Yiddish. Sutzkever was that voice.
What forces shaped him as a writer?
Apart from the historical forces mentioned above — the progressive politics of the 1930s, the destruction of European Jewry, the creation of the state of Israel — Sutzkever was also influenced by his childhood in Siberia where his family fled to escape World War I.
It was there that he first came into sustained contact with the wonders of nature and also with loss when he witnessed his father’s death of a heart attack as a young boy. In Sutzkever’s imaginative universe, both poetry and nature were regenerative force, able to withstand the traumas of history.
Sutzkever was also shaped by his contact with Polish romanticism. In the interwar period, Vilna was part of Poland and it was Polish literature — especially Cyprian Norwid — that influenced his poetic philosophy.
As he was maturing as a writer, Vilna was also a major Jewish center of Yiddish culture.
One third of the city’s inhabitants were Jews, and they had built a network of Yiddish schools, scouting groups, choirs, theaters, newspapers and the famed YIVO (Yiddish Scientific Institute) that transformed the city into the cultural capital of the imagined homeland of Yiddishland.
Sutzkever grew up in a world where Yiddish was natural and part of the cultural environment. He was able to drink from its sources, and also mine its traditions.
What did Vilna mean to him and many Jews prior to the Nazis?
Vilna was known as the Jerusalem of Lithuania, a center of rabbinic culture going back to the early modern period, a center of Jewish political awakening (the socialist Bund was founded there), a center of Hebrew and Yiddish literary publishing. Since the Jews lacked a political homeland of their own, the city symbolized a cultural homeland.
What role did writing poetry play in helping him endure in the ghetto and what is significant about his poems. Would you quote one of your favorites?
From the very earliest days in the ghetto, Sutzkever saw his mission to give poetic testimony. If prior to the war he was seen as something of an aesthete who composed art for art’s sake, once the liquidation of Vilna Jewry began and the ghetto was created, he understood the importance of yoking his talents to the historical moment.
Yet never once did he lower his poetic standards. It seems as if the extreme conditions only heightened his literary powers.
During the first days of the ghetto, he hid in an attic crawlspace, punching a hole in the roof in order to provide him with a beam of light so that he could write.
With death always around him, Sutzkever believed that the last category of existence that the Nazis could not corrupt or destroy was a perfectly executed poem. Poetry could transcend destruction.
One of my favorite moments in his writing occurs in the symbolic prose series “Green Aquarium,” which he wrote several years after the war.
In its opening pages, we see the responsibility he places on himself to get things right: “Walk through words as through a minefield: one false step, one false move and all the words you strung in a lifetime on your veins will be blown apart with you.”
A similar motif appeared in autobiographical poem he wrote in the ghetto when he turned 30:
“I have a red violin:
See, I tear my veins
And play on them my melody!
Among my favorites of his ghetto poems is a work called “Grains of Wheat.”
It is a poeticization of his secret work as part of the Paper Brigade, which set the task for itself of rescuing the city’s Jewish archives and hiding the most important documents in their clothes and smuggling them back into the ghetto where they could be buried and hopefully retrieved after the war.
There is something remarkable about a poet risking his life to smuggle diaries, poems, letters and manuscripts under his shirt or in his boots.
While others tried to smuggle food necessary for physical survival or arms for Jewish self-defense, here we have a man who places just as much importance on “cultural resistance.”
His smuggling was designed to provide future generations of Jews with an inheritance so that this period of Eastern European Jewish history would not be lost:
Caves, gape open,
Split open under my ax!
Before the bullet hits me-
I bring you gifts in sacks.
Old, blue pages,
Purple traces on silver hair,
Words on parchment, created
Through thousands of years in despair.
As if protecting a baby
I run, bearing Jewish words,
I grope in every courtyard:
The spirit won’t be murdered by the hordes.
How tormented am I by a page
Carried off by the smoke and the winds!
Hidden poems come and choke me:
-Hide us in your labyrinth!
And I dig and plant manuscripts,
And if by despair I am beat
My mind recalls: Egypt,
A tale about grains of wheat.
And I tell the tale to the stars:
Once, a king at the Nile
Built a pyramid – to rule
After his death, in style.
Let them pour into my golden coffin,
Thus an order he hurled,
Grains of wheat – a memory
For this, the earthly world.
For nine thousand years have suns
Changed in the desert their gait,
Until the grains in the pyramid
Were found after endless wait.
Nine thousand years have passed!
But when the grains were sown-
They blossomed in sunny stalks
Row after row, full grown.
Perhaps these words will endure,
And live to see the light loom-
And in the destine hour
Will unexpectedly bloom?
And like the primeval grain
That turned into a stalk-
The words will nourish,
The words will belong,
To the people, in its eternal walk.
Vilna ghetto, march 1943
Sutzkever’s experience as a partisan fighter also provided him, especially in the years immediately after the war, with the rawness of memory and a warning about the perils of forgetfulness:
And if you paint over the image of the Jewish street
With a brush dipped in your new, sunny palette-
Know: the fresh colors will peel
Someday, the old image will attack you with an ax
And wound you so the new will never heal.
How did you develop your own interest in him and are you planning to write a book?
I enrolled in an undergraduate seminar at McGill University in 1993 on Yiddish literature where I first encountered his writing.
It was that seminar that guided me to enter into graduate studies in Yiddish, and eventually to become a professor of modern Yiddish literature and culture.
In 1994, I actually met Sutzkever while researching in Tel Aviv. He was already 81, but graciously welcomed me into his apartment, graced with original paintings and sketches by his good friend Marc Chagall, and stacked floor to ceiling with books.
What was so interesting was Sutzkever’s expectation that it was natural for students to be interested in Yiddish. He understood its value. This is almost the opposite of the attitude among those I encounter in academe, who seem to look upon my specialization as something of a curiosity.
After all, what is the value in studying Yiddish literature, of all things? Such questions seem to deny the importance of literature as lubricants for the soul.
Nobody would question the value of someone studying English literature or Chinese literature.
Does the fact that Yiddish literature was a smaller literature make it any less valuable?
I would argue that it makes it more valuable, because it carries with it the perspective of the margins and the independence of knowing that what was produced in it was not done for the sake of international fame but rather for the sake of the language itself and its readers.
I am now putting the finishing touches on a book called “When Yiddish Was Young,” one of whose chapters will explore Sutzkever’s earliest years as a poet prior to World War I.
The title is designed, in some ways, to reorient our perspective.
We tend to think of Yiddish today as a language that is dead or dying or that was murdered. But there was a time, in the not so distant past, when it was the language of young lovers, of school choirs, and political engagement.
Did he write in both English and Yiddish?
Sutzkever did not write in English, or in Hebrew or Polish. He was a Yiddish poet, and remained married to that language as his poetic medium.
The best translation of his collected works was done by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav, “A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose” (University of California Press).
What is most lost in translation are one of his poetic trademarks — his use of neologism (the invention of new words).
The Smithsonian also produced a recording of Sutzkever reading his poetry, followed by translations. “The Poetry of Abraham Sutzkever, The Vilno Poet, Reading in Yiddish,” Ruth Wisse, editor, The Smithsonian Institution, Folkways Records 9947, 1991.
Why did some people feel he should have been awarded the Nobel Prize? What can we learn from reading him today and any book would you recommend?
Many felt that Sutzkever ought to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature because of the depth, richness, and symbolic importance of his life’s work.
Here is a poet who published 26 volumes of poetry, several volumes of symbolic prose, a Holocaust memoir, an edited volume of Soviet Yiddish poetry, and for almost 50 years edited the preeminent journal of Yiddish literature and culture in the world.
He was the most accomplished, the most refined poet to ever publish in Yiddish.
He also gave poetic witness to almost the entire experience of Jewry in the 20th century: the dislocation and destruction of World War I; the tensions between cultural nationalism and assimilation of the interwar period; the destruction of European Jewry; the disappearance of Soviet Jewry behind an iron curtain; the rise and flourishing of the State of Israel.
There are many who felt that Sutzkever’s poetic refinement was a more appropriate representative of the accomplishments of Yiddish in the 20th century than Isaac Bashevis Singer, who did win the Nobel Prize for his tales of Jewish demons and sexual and ethical perversion.
If Singer provided us with insight into the corruptibility of the human spirit, Sutzkever — despite witnessing the horrors that Bashevis could only imagine from the comforts of New York City — maintained a poetic voice of moral poise, always seeking out beauty and what is eternal about the human spirit. Singer gave voice to the Yiddish perverse; Sutzkever to the Yiddish transcendent.
When I read or teach Sutzkever today, he is a refreshing anachronism. In a world where we have taught to be cynical about everything, and at a literary moment where post-modernism suggests that everything is relative, Sutzkever – whose experiences would give him every right to be cynical – remains the sunniest of Jewish writers who is uncompromising in his search for truth and beauty.
For instance, the mature series “Poems from My Diary” (1974-1985)
Who will remain, what will remain? A wind will stay behind
The blindness will remain, the blindness of the blind.
A film of foam, perhaps, a vestige of the sea,
A flimsy cloud, perhaps, entangled in a tree.
Who will remain, what will remain? One syllable will stay,
To sprout the grass of Genesis as on a new First Day.
A fiddle-rose, perhaps, for its own sake will stand
And seven blades of grass perhaps will understand.
Of all the stars from way out north to here,
That one star will remain that fell into a tear.
A drop of wine remaining in a jar, a drop of dew.
Who will remain, God will remain, is that enough for you?
I love this poem because it accepts the impermanence of things, yet it is not nihilistic.
It shows the questions of an introspective man, one for whom mortality is evident.
Most of the things that he mentions in the poem are so ephemeral – the wind, foam on a wave, a drop of wine – yet he endows them with a permanence.
After a century of blood and destruction, he manages to offer up a poem about grass and flowers and the power of creation — a new Genesis. But the poem is also very playful.
After all, Sutzkever was known to be a secular poet. So readers are really prodded into wondering whether we are supposed to take this last line seriously. Is he being ironic, playful? Is God simply a metaphor?
In that same mature series, he has a wonderful poem that shows his self-confidence as a poet, a sense of the poetic self. He inverts a process that we all know about — the making of a tree into paper, and instead discusses his poetic process as akin to transforming what is inanimate (paper) back into the living, animated sphere.
Trees are made into wonderful paper. And I – the reverse:
I transform paper into a tree, the tree of life.
I’ll graft myself onto its roots – till the dawn
Of its birdsong.
In ruminating about the fate of Yiddish in 1948, shortly after his arrival in Hebrew-speaking Israel, he touches directly on the cruel fate of being born into a language whose readers were murdered:
Shall I start from the beginning?
Shall I, a brother,
Like Abraham
Smash all the idols?
Shall I let myself be translated alive?
Shall I plant my tongue
And wait
Till it transforms
Into our forefathers’
Raisins and almonds?
What kind of joke
Preaches
My poetry brother with whiskers,
That soon, my mother tongue will set forever?
This kind of steadfast defense of Yiddish in no way diminished from Sutzkever’s amazement at his good fortune of being alive at a time when he, as a Jew, could live out the dreams of millennia by returning to the Jewish homeland.
For instance, in his “Poems of the Negev” about his journey’s through Israel’s southern desert, he writes:
Here you are at the workshop of all creation.
Hire yourself out, an apprentice-
Eternity will pay you
With its currency, if your work is good.
All excerpts are from Benjamin and Barbara Harshav, translators, “A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose” (U of California Press, 1991).
Works of Abraham Sutzkever available in English include “The Golden Peacock: A Worldwide Treasure of Yiddish Poetry,” “A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry,” “Burnt Pearls: Ghetto Poems of Abraham Sutzkever,” “The Penquin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse,” “A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose” and “An Anthology of Modern Yiddish Poetry.”
Editor's note: Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed both in the United States and in Israel.
It remembers both the victims of the Holocaust and the underground resistance movement against the Nazi deportation of all the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto.
On the day of the observance on April 11 at 7 p.m., there will be a reading of “The Shoah Scroll,” a presentation of prayer, poetry, and prose accompanied by music, at Sinai Temple, 1100 Dickinson St. in Springfield. The public is invited.
There will also be a Yom HaShoah commemoration at the Jewish Community of Amherst on April 11 from 6 to 9 p.m. at 742 Main St. Amherst.
The event will include the showing of the 2009 movie, “Definance,” about Jewish resistance during World War II.
Useful links:
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.ushmm.org/
Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, www.yadvashem.org
Hatikvah Holocaust Education Center, www.hatikvah-center.org
National Yiddish Book Center, yiddishbookcenter.org