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Avrom Sutzkever (1913-2010):
YIVO Planning Feb 22 Memorial
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צו די שלושים פֿון אַבֿרהם סוצקעווער
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AVROM SUTZKEVER MEMORIAL YIVO mourns the death of Avrom (Abraham) Sutzkever, who died on January 20, 2010, in Tel Aviv at the age of 96. He was considered the finest Yiddish poet of his generation. On Monday, February 22, at 6:00 PM, YIVO is cosponsoring a memorial event for the poet’s shloyshim (one-month anniversary of his death) together with the Congress for Jewish Culture, the Forward, and the Workmen’s Circle. Details of the program will be released shortly. *************** Sutzkever was born in Smargon, near Vilna, on July 15, 1913. He spent most of World War I in Siberia, about which he wrote poetry years later, and then settled in Vilna with his family after the war. He came of age poetically in the early 1930s, when he became the youngest member of the literary group Yung-Vilne (Young Vilna). What was a relatively normal life came to an end with the German invasion and occupation of Vilna in June 1941. In the wartime ghetto, Sutzkever was drafted by the Nazis to work on a team sorting books from plundered Jewish libraries, including YIVO’s; the most valuable of the books were to be shipped to an institute in Germany devoted to “Jewish studies without Jews,” the rest destroyed. He was one of the team members, nicknamed the “Paper Brigade,” who risked their lives by removing rare books from the selection and burying them. After the war, he and others returned to Vilna to dig up their cache and send much of it to YIVO in New York. Sutzkever survived the liquidation of the ghetto by fleeing to the forests near the city, where he joined the partisans. In 1946, he testified at the Nuremberg trials; shortly afterward, he immigrated to Israel. He founded the literary quarterly Di goldene keyt, the most important Yiddish publication in the postwar period, in 1949 and was its editor in chief until it ceased publication in 1995. Sutzkever is best known for his Holocaust poetry. One of his most famous works is “A Wagon of Shoes,” in which the poet sees shoes passing by and wonders why there are no feet in them. The poem reprinted here refers to Ponar, a suburb of Vilna where the Germans shot thousands of Jews and buried them in mass graves:
(translated by Cynthia Ozick) *************** Read the obituary from the New York Times Read the biography of Sutzkever from The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe The story of Sutzkever and the Paper Brigade is related in the newly revised and expanded edition of Embers Plucked from the Fire: The Rescue of Jewish Cultural Treasures in Vilna, by David E. Fishman (YIVO, 2009; in English and Yiddish); some photographs from this book are reproduced below. Copies may be purchased from the Fanya Gottesfeld Heller Bookstore at the Center for Jewish History (or call 917-606-8220). We would appreciate your support in memory of Avrom Sutzkever. Click here or call 212-246-6080. |
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Abraham Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski in the Vilna Ghetto, July 20, 1943. |
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Sorting recovered materials after the Soviet liberation of Vilna, July 1944. From right to left: Abba Kovner (commander of the United Partisan Organization), Elye Gordon (Soviet Yiddish writer, then in the Soviet army), Abraham Sutzkever (director of the newly established Jewish Museum in Vilna), E. Gershater (museum bookkeeper), Arn Kushnirov (Soviet Yiddish poet, then in the Soviet army), and Shloyme Kowarski (partisan and museum volunteer). |
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From left to right: Abraham Sutzkever, Israel Zeligman, and Gershon Abramovitsh with a wagon of recovered materials and objects, July 1944. |
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Sutzkever stands beside the ruins of the YIVO building, May 1946. |