Avrom Sutzkever, one of the greatest poets of Yiddish literature and probably one of the greatest of this century’s European poetry, died on January 27, 2010, in obscurity and indifference. His passing marks the end of a world.
The work of Avrom Sutzkever is a monumental work in every sense of the term. It is impossible to embrace it in its entirety, even when one has read the whole of it many times over. But every poetic creation may be read according to diverse planes or configurations, bound at once to the author and to the reader. Sutzkever’s work — labored over, polished, chiseled down to the least detail, in its themes, its musicality, its symbols, its images, its metaphors, its rhythms, its metrics — aims at nothing less than perfection. From his very first lines, he seems to find his way: a poetics of beauty and musicality whose object is the entire universe. A universe that he floods with his inner light, a universe radiant and iridescent with a quasi-erotic pantheism. It is of the light and the shadow in his poetry that I should like to speak.
It was in seeing in Le Monde the photograph of Avrom Sutzkever, a photograph I had not known, that I was struck, in a flash, by the vision of the poet as a being of light, a being of transparency.
In the constellation of the Yiddish modernisms, Avrom Sutzkever and the Yung Vilne group are latecomers, a quarter of a century after Bergelson, Der Nister, Markish, Uri Zvi Grinberg, Mani-Leyb, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, Leivick, Kulbak, Glatshteyn, Leyeles, Minkoff, Meylekh Ravitch, and so many others, born in the 1880s and publishing their modernist works in 1905 and beyond.
The historical context of their youth is also very different. The modernism of the poets I have just mentioned bursts forth in the violence of the pogroms of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, and in the Apocalypse of the First World War, even if some of them were already in the United States.
The first issue of the review Yung Vilne appeared in 1935, and Avrom Sutzkever’s first two volumes, Lider (Songs), in Warsaw in 1937, and Valdiks (Of the Forest) in Vilno in 1940, a fateful date — but the poems had been written before.
The aesthetic of Avrom Sutzkever is inscribed within the poetic avant-garde, but paradoxically in a relationship not of similarity but of rupture with his immediate surroundings — surroundings of poverty for all, of piety for Khayim Grade, of left-wing political commitment for most of the others, each one nonetheless keeping, as in all the modernist groups, his own singularity.
Avrom Sutzkever, while belonging to Yung Vilne and subsequently becoming its standard-bearer through the diversity, the sumptuousness, the perfection of his work, holds within it a place apart, set aside, in an isolation and an inwardness that make of him a solitary man, unique. Inspired by the Polish Romantics, such as Norwid, and very close to the New York Inzikhistn, themselves later (1920) than the Yunge (1905), he found himself consecrated and raised to the pinnacle from his very first volumes.
Sutzkever then appears in the literature as the child of the sun, of light, of color, the Ariel of Yiddish poetry in the Tempest that his predecessors had lived through. Born on July 15, 1913, he cannot know what the folds of history conceal, nor that this is the beacon year of modernism in Europe, nor that it is already pregnant with the butchery of the war, which he did not know. Displaced with his family, like five hundred thousand other Jews, to the far depths of Russia, in conditions that were most often atrocious — described, for example, by Lamed Shapiro or by Sholem Asch — Siberia is for him a dazzlement of light, and it is thus that he will bring it into Yiddish poetry, with his shimmering poem, Sibir (Siberia), written in 1936 and later illustrated by Chagall.
In the hut of snow Setting sun, paths that the frost turns blue. Soft colors of drowsiness within my soul. From a hut in the vale a pale gleam shines, Beneath its snow the evening of flames entombs it. At the windows the forests-of-wonders come tumbling Magical sleighs go jingling in a carousel, In the corner of the loft the doves are cooing Their song traces my face. Beneath the frost striped by crystals whose points blaze forth, almost unreal the Irtysh knots itself, throbbing. Beneath cupolas of silence and of cold this universe flowers: a child of seven years1.
One would need the time (which I do not have) to gather up in this poem all the figures, the images, the metaphors bound to the sun, to the rays, to the iridescence of the crystals of snow.
This shimmering, this radiance, this glittering will implant in this child, this “world of seven years,” a quasi-mystical pantheism, the sole source of life and, later, the sole savior. In 1940, he seeks not only to sing nature, but to capture it, to make it his own, to merge into it.
what else remains to be done at such an hour, o world of mine of a thousand colors? save to gather into the wind’s knapsack the crimson beauty, to carry it home like a feast. 2
All the senses mingle in this encounter of his body with the body of the earth. It is literally an erotic relationship that the poet evokes: “Breast against earth/face buried in the grass.” This union opens onto an identification between the poet and nature: “I see my body in the whiteness of the birch/I hear my blood flowing in the rose in bloom…”
The poet steeps himself in beauty. Each sound and each silence contributes to the vast harmony of the universe. The auditory, tactile, olfactory, visual sensations collaborate in this devouring of the world: “the fluid gold of the oranges poured out upon the sea: wakens to life all the extinguished glimmers.”
In his lines there unfold the occult science, the secret fusion, the mystical and philosophical speculations of the alchemists of old:
in the forge of incandescent thoughts priceless treasures lie buried gems sparkle, glow, shimmer and like mobile rainbows undulate in the entombed darkness mystic forms sleep.3
From his earliest writings, in his very lines, Avrom Sutzkever applies himself to elaborating a metapoetics, revealing to us some of the keys to his writing process. Thus one of his most emblematic and one of his most recurrent metaphors is the oxymoron. In a poem of 1935, he presents the poet’s very body, as well as his creation, as the site of a fusion of jouissance and pain: “And here I am, blossomed in all my grandeur/darted with songs as with bees of fire.” A redoubled oxymoron in 1974 in La Rose-Violon (The Rose-Violin): “(…) a bee whose honey is bitter/but sweet the sting…”
The oxymoron is a complex figure, contradictory, twisted, and sly. Should one see in this recurrence a poetic, rhetorical figure, or perhaps, beyond that, an inescapable fusion, in man, in the poet, and in the world, of happiness and unhappiness, of pleasure and pain, of the beautiful and the ugly, of good and evil?
But History will take it upon itself to impose it concretely.
The dazzlement of the world, its radiance, its blaze, its eroticism, the feast of the senses, were the essence of his poetry, but for a short while. Ariel will encounter and confront Caliban, cross through horror, dread, the valley of death, and all along that night seek nonetheless to make light spring forth. The Jewish people, like its solar poet, find themselves prisoners of the densest darkness. After the Soviets, the Nazis occupy Vilno, and on September 6, 1941, the Gestapo gives the Jews thirty minutes to prepare to be transferred to the ghetto, as the librarian Herman Kruk reports in his diary.
Covered in rags, the body lacerated we go to the ghetto. The streets file past the houses form an escort for an eternal farewell, receiving petrified each sentence of death. Crowned with phylacteries go the old men a calf accompanies a Jew from the countryside a woman embraces the rigid body of a dying man a man drags faggots in a cart. …the Jewish street barred by a gate its wood a living body still warm like a sluice swept away by the floods its leaves open onto bottomless abysses. (Vilno 1943)
In the abominable promiscuity, famine, morbidity, humiliation that it is unfortunately no longer useful to evoke, the ghetto tries not only to survive, but to live, as Herman Kruk attests with meticulousness, and for an unforeseeable future:
Life overcomes everything. Life in the Vilno ghetto beats with a new force. A new life awakens in the shadow of Ponar… The concerts that were once disdained break attendance records. The halls are filled to bursting, and at the evenings organized by the literary association the crowd is such that not everyone finds a place inside. 4
A pedagogical committee draws up a program that includes courses in Yiddish, Hebrew, mathematics, sciences, geography, Jewish history, Latin, German, religious subjects, and an instruction in music and song.
The day after the day on which Sutzkever’s mother was shot, the young director Viskind came to see him about the creation of a theater.
A clandestine resistance forms. Sutzkever is part of the “paper brigade” that seeks to save the writings and works of the Strashun library.
Sutzkever’s poetics is the opposite of that of Y. Katzenelson. It is not a matter of comparing the respective quality of the works, but the approach of the poets. Sutzkever refuses to be a witness-poet. His testimony belongs to another discourse — at Nuremberg, or in a prose booklet: “Vilner ghetto.” But he refuses to contaminate his poetry with the horror and the sordid reality of the events. Never does he raise the question of the legitimacy of poetic writing in these circumstances. There exists an indissoluble unity between the psychic, the biological, and the poetic word:
When the sun itself, it seemed, had turned to ashes, I believed with an absolute faith: as long as song does not leave me, the lead will not annihilate me; as long as within the circle of death I live poetry, pain will find its meaning and its redemption. “5
As once the sting of the bee, now the bite of the bullet:
Deep within me a stray bullet has lodged itself — charged with song. And when the fever gnaws at me by night its heat at fusion-pitch carries the poison. And I love this bullet. Its warm breath melts the world and in the molten flow I knead my truth. As the infant kneads its planet from crystalline nothingness (Vilno 1940)
Death, omnipresent, ceaselessly evoked, is always so through metaphors that, even in this darkness, attempt to introduce the light. The poet, torn apart by the SS dogs, writes:
and from my body flow in liquid rubies drops, streams, in sinuous verses, in songs. And rooting in the lime the rosy smile of a setting sun. The lime pit — my precious good. In it, I dream: now I shall not cease to contemplate until night, until night, the most beautiful of sunsets, created by me alone.
To write, the poet offers his body to the word, to the image, to the line. The poet’s body is a palimpsest, and more than that, his flesh becomes matter-poetry:
Every hour, every day is no longer hour, no longer day is a pyre ablaze within your body where every thing seen is engulfed, every thing felt and you write even as you devour your own body. (Vilno, May 27, 1943)
Sutzkever wrote very few poems of testimony, of struggle, of anger, of invective. He elaborated, in the darkest hours, a poetics of silence, of the intimate, a poetics that was born not of the circumstances but of the imperative to write. When one looks at his ghetto manuscripts, one is struck with stupefaction by the corrections, the additions, the transformations, the variants, as though these lines were due to leave the next day for the printer.
Lines the most personal, the most intimate. Lines to live by and to die by. For if there exists a collective life, there exists no collective death. Each one dies for himself. Each one dies alone, leaving the survivors orphaned of their children, of their parents, of God, whom a worn-out shoe dethrones from his holiness. Recognizing in a transport of shoes those of his mother, Sutzkever proclaims: “Since then, my conscience is a twisted shoe/And I address my prayer to it as once to God.” (Poetry, p. 27)
Avrom Sutzkever is in general the poet of brief forms, even if one finds exceptions, such as L’Enfant-tombeau (The Tomb-Child) (a dramatic chronicle), Kol-nidre, even when he gathers them into ensembles such as Di festung (The Fortress), Geheymshtot (Secret City), or Di yidishe gas (The Jewish Street), which are vignettes meant to bring to life that which will never live again. For the works written in the ghetto, one never knew what one would be able to finish, or what the final full stop would be — death.
The horror of the genocide weighs upon Jewish life and Jewish History with a weight that will be transmitted no one knows to what generation. Strangely, the more time passes, the closer it seems. No one knows whether its presence will fade with time or whether, on the contrary, like a volcano, it will one day spew forth its flames and its lava into the memory of men, nor in what circumstances nor in what form.
The major part of Avrom Sutzkever’s work is written after the Khurbn (the genocide), in Israel, where he settled as early as 1947. He celebrates this union with the land of Israel by dedicating to it a poem entitled Shehecheyanu — the blessing over what is new and festive.
Had I not been united with you had I not breathed your sorrow, your joy, had I not burned with you Volcano-land in the pains of birthing Had I now, after the sacrifice and the pyre, Had I not come to be reborn upon the earth where every stone is my grandfather, bread would never have sated me, water would never have been able to slake my thirst I would have died among the nations a stranger and only my longing would have found you.6
From these Israeli years on, Sutzkever’s poetry becomes more and more complex, subtle, diverse, and at times hermetic. For life goes on, and memory is polymorphous, unforeseeable, and often takes mysterious forms that ask to be deciphered. In luminous lyric poems, memory comes to braid “to the golden hair of Margarete, the ashen hair of Shulamith,” as in Celan in “Death Fugue.”
And yet a few works form a unique whole, and in particular the only ensemble whose poems take on an amplitude unusual for Sutzkever, which are found in Geheymshtot (Secret City), which is the evocation, published in 1948, of the flight from the ghetto through the sewers. A poem of exorcism and of askesis (three thousand lines written in an iambic rhythm, with cross rhymes), a narrative, descriptive, epic, meditative poem, whose tonalities mingle and entangle. A poem that is the equivalent of the Exodus in this century, perhaps the bloodiest in the History of humanity. It is not a matter of crossing the Red Sea dry-shod but of wading through the sticky waters, the refuse, the excrement, the stench. And even in this cesspit, Sutzkever still seeks to find beauty in order to attenuate the dread of his companions, who ask of him: […] “make the sun shine on our sadness/with your songs […].”
He then makes the harmony of the universe spring forth through a symphony of rats:
instead of nightingales — packs of rats in torrents pour from their holes in carefree bounds, they frolic beneath the grate.
He must capture the light at the bottom of these shadows:
Far off beneath the grate the dance goes on, in the new brightness woven by the moon. the new moon little by little dissolves into blue pillars of light, newborn. Seraphim fill the air with their wings of silver plunge into the water where their reflections glimmer.7
In daily life, the European earth with its often veiled sun, the crystalline snow, the quickening rain, the Belorussian chernozem, its towns and, obsessively, Vilno, the cradle of his poetry, are replaced by the ochre of the Israeli rocks and deserts, the honey-colored walls of Jerusalem or the white of Tel Aviv, built by the Bauhaus. The glittering ochre of the grains of damp sand and the dazzlement of the sea that comes to lay down its undertow and its waves at the foot of the beaches and the surrounding buildings.
And yet in Sutzkever’s poems the purely Israeli motifs are relatively few, with the exception precisely of the landscapes — of the Negev, of the Dead Sea, of Ein Gedi, of the Sinai desert, of the incandescent sabras. Apart from Jerusalem, evoked a few times and often mingling with Vilno, the cities are absent. The everyday reality drowns in memory. The rivers, the green meadows, the murmuring woods, the violin-trees, the Jewish street are not Israeli. Its lanes, its synagogue, its schools, its inhabitants, its simpletons, its poets — aerial beings like himself — are of Vilno; the lost friends, the living and the vanished of the Slavic lands, the murdered, the hanged, the burned, the persecuted inhabit his Israeli poetry and burst into it, phantoms that haunt the ochre and the luminous blue of his adopted country. In Ode à la colombe (Ode to the Dove), for example, which is set on a sea shore where the poet finds again the dancer, his youthful love, who calls to him:
My body is frozen. And my limbs set ablaze by love will be extinguished forever — soothe my lips with a kiss! I will leave you a memento: my three last drops of blood before the moon became the white tomb of my death. I am the lava of snow, the white birch, the mirror I am the echo of the silence that, in the enchanted circle encloses you. Gather the sounds, the images, the hunger that sets your land ablaze Give them life, give them breath, give them form! that was our farewell. (Tel Aviv, 1955)
Even in the holy of holies, the Sinai Desert, where each grain of sand is sacred and where one must take off one’s shoes to be allowed to set foot, we find again these lines:
Of twelve tribes — a whole community frozen still. the tribes have dissolved into tribes. Your children have changed their destiny. You breathe your breath into dried-up bones. in the red sands swim cities and lands. A child. A mother. Pyres in flames. And like the air without shadow, without texture, transparent is time for all the times. In the desert of Sinai, your unprecedented people Your Law upon leaves of rock — with its fingers of fire engraves the chronicle of the ghettos, of Belzec, of Treblinka.8
The whole of Sutzkever’s Israeli poetry interweaves the landscapes of the Orient and those of the Slavic lands, the white, green, or muted lights of Belorussia and the dazzling colors of the “prickly pears in bloom. Red breath/The air is rose with a pricking shimmer.” And above all those whom he sings in his poems are less the pioneers than the exterminated, the annihilated. And this will to unite the dead and the living appears even in the form he gives to the editions of his books, where, most often, “Old and new manuscripts” mingle. Light and shadow stand side by side and blend together. Never does he renounce the dawn of his first books, never does he renounce the darkness of the annihilation.
And when memory proves powerless to imprison time, he has recourse to other stratagems. He finds new symbolic and metric networks within the prosodic forms already tried and tested, and invents a poetic genre that belongs to no established category. Beginning in 1953-54, with Aquarium vert (Green Aquarium), Sutzkever begins to invent a prose poetry utterly unheard-of for telling the annihilation. The encounter of the poet and a skull opens onto an image that no Western poetry has dared. A dialogue is established between the poet and the skull. Confusing this skull with that of his father, he hears:
No, this is not your father, this is not how he was. And again he took the skull in his two hands, and like a dog under the whip, howled:
— What is your name? Then the man heard his own name… And he felt that the head he had carried on his shoulders for so many years was not his own. And so he placed the skull on his head and, holding it with both hands, covered in the paper garments sewn with the leaves of sacred books, he went off through the dead city to the encounter with salvation.9
Golden light, black light — Sutzkever has sometimes dissociated them, most often fused them. Sutzkever’s work, evolving in successive circles, having as its fixed center the self and the inalterable poetic instant, even if history weighs upon them. Through the poetic instant, hard as the diamond, in fusion like a white-hot metal, Sutzkever never ceased to strain toward a poetry of the limits: limits of the dream when the dream was possible, limits of the nightmare when the nightmare imposes itself, most of the time the two welded together, inseparable, in coalescence.
But Sutzkever’s work is an enchanted circle that, after having circumscribed light and shadow, after having celebrated or erotically consumed the world in its diversity, after having plunged into the blackest night, ends in 1992, in one of his last poems, “Bread and Salt,” by bequeathing to the world as an ultimate gift the shimmering of the sun and, stealing it from his cycle of prose poems Aquarium vert (Green Aquarium), the silence “where the dead live.”
BREAD AND SALT
The sun is for all — but it gives itself to me alone.
The roots of darkness for others. I am child-sun.
I am life itself the trace of the silver fox upon the snow is my memory.
The axe that will come to uproot me, submissive, will pledge me its allegiance.
I am the silence: I am its bread and salt. 10
Notes
Avrom Sutzkever, Œuvres poétiques (Poetishe Verk) (Poetic Works), Tel Aviv, Di goldene Keyt, 1963, vol. I p. 9, in Charles Dobzynski, Le miroir d’un peuple (The Mirror of a People), Paris, Gallimard, 1971, p. 452. The other translations, unless otherwise indicated, are by the author of the article.↩︎
Avrom Sutzkever, Ibid., p. 31.↩︎
“Breath of marble,” in Pierreries (Gems), Ibid., p. 141.↩︎
Herman Kruk, Journal du ghetto de Vilno (Diary of the Vilno Ghetto), New York, YIVO, pp. 62-63.↩︎
Accompanying note to the Poèmes de la mer morte (Lider fun yam-hamoves) (Poems of the Dead Sea), Tel Aviv, New York, Bergen-Belsen Ed., 1968.↩︎
Dans le Char de feu (In the Chariot of Fire), Tel Aviv, 1952, Ibid. vol. II, p. 7.↩︎
La Ville secrète (Geheymshtot) (Secret City), Tel Aviv, 1948.↩︎
Dans le désert du Sinaï (In midbar Sinai) (In the Sinai Desert), Tel Aviv, I. L. Peretz-Bibliothèque Ed., 1957, with drawings by P. Sher.↩︎
“The rosewood casket,” Aquarium vert (Griner Akvarium) (Green Aquarium), Tel Aviv, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Committee for Yiddish Culture, 1975.↩︎
Murs vacillants (Vaklendike vent) (Swaying Walls), Tel Aviv, 1996.↩︎