Абрахам Суцкевер: Белорусский израильский поэт Холокоста

Belarusian Israeli poet

Abraham Sutzkever (; ; 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."

Abraham (Avrom) Sutzkever was born on July 15, 1913, in Smorgon, Vilna Governorate, Russian Empire, now Smarhon, Belarus. During World War I, his family moved to Omsk, Siberia, where his father, Hertz Sutzkever, died. In 1921, his mother, Rayne (née Fainberg), moved the family to Vilnius, where Sutzkever attended cheder. Sutzkever attended the Polish Jewish high school Herzliah, audited university classes in Polish literature, and was introduced by a friend to Russian poetry. His earliest poems were written in Hebrew. In 1930 Sutzkever joined the Jewish scouting organization, Bin ("Bee"), in whose magazine he published his first piece. There he also met his wife Freydke. In 1933, he became part of the writers’ and artists’ group Yung Vilne, along with fellow poets Shmerke Kaczerginski, Chaim Grade, and Leyzer Volf. He married Freydke in 1939, a day before the start of World War II. In 1941, following the Nazi occupation of Vilnius, Sutzkever and his wife were sent to the Vilna Ghetto. Sutzkever and his friends hid a diary by Theodor Herzl, drawings by Marc Chagall and Alexander Bogen, and other treasured works behind plaster and brick walls in the ghetto. Sutzkever joined a Jewish unit and was smuggled into the Soviet Union. 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 emigrated to Mandatory Palestine, arriving in Tel Aviv in 1947. Rina and another daughter, Mira, survive him, along with two grandchildren. In 1949, Sutzkever founded the Yiddish literary quarterly Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain), Israel's only Yiddish literary quarterly, which he edited until its demise in 1995. Sutzkever resuscitated the careers of Yiddish writers from Europe, the Americas, the Soviet Union and Israel. Many in the Zionist movement, however, dismissed Yiddish as a defeatist diaspora argot. "They will not uproot my tongue," he retorted. "I shall wake all generations with my roar."

In 1969, Sutzkever was awarded the Itzik Manger Prize for Yiddish literature. In 1985, Sutzkever was awarded the Israel Prize for Yiddish literature. Sutkever's poems have been translated into 30 languages.

"The Twin Sisters" "Der Tsvilingl", music by Daniel Galay, text by Avrum Sutzkever. Narrator (Yiddish) Michael Ben Avraham, The Israeli String Quartet for Contemporary Music (Violin, Viola, Cello), percussion, piano. First performance: Tel Aviv 2/10/2003 on the 90th birthday of Avrum Sutzkever. "The Seed of Dream", music by Lori Laitman, based on poems by Abraham Sutzkever as translated by C. K. Williams and Leonard Wolf. Commissioned by The Music of Remembrance organization in Seattle. First performed in May 2005 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle by baritone Erich Parce, pianist Mina Miller, and cellist Amos Yang. Recent performance on January 28, 2008, by the Chamber Music Society of Southwest Florida by mezzo soprano Janelle McCoy, cellist Adam Satinsky and pianist Bella Gutshtein of the Russian Music Salon. Sutzkever's poem "Poezye" was set to music by composer Alex Weiser as a part of his song cycle "and all the days were purple."