Abraham Sutzkever

From the internet;
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)
http://www.cjh.org/about/Forward/view_Forward.cfm?Forwardid=15

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.
http://www.aeu.org/loveis/chap03.html