Avrom Sutzkever is one of the modernist poets of Yiddish literature, which flourished in all its brilliance between the start of the twentieth century — including after the Shoah, with a force tenfold in response to the extermination — until the poet’s death in 2010. This modernism took on every form that left its mark on literature the world over: expressionism, futurism, surrealism, Dadaism, proclaiming in Europe after the Great War: “Our measure is not beauty but horror.” In the United States, it took more the form of imagism, after the canons of Ezra Pound among others. Yiddish modernism became a kind of sounding box for world literature, bound up with a specificity of its own which reached back to the Bible and to the literature of the pogroms.
Sutzkever lived through multiple lives, multiple deaths, and multiple resurrections — to the point of becoming a legend.
the brand-new night is sweet and tender as the egg just laid. the milky way, so near — one could trample it with one’s foot.
the phoenix man, at his café table, would like, in his writing hand, to sink his teeth: to taste the taste of his legend.1
The period of innocence
Sutzkever was born to poetry far from the place of his biological birth, in 1913, in a small town near Vilna, then under Polish rule.
But as soon as the First World War broke out, he was deported to Siberia with his family and 500,000 Jews accused of espionage and treason in favor of Germany and Austria. It was there that he was born to poetry, at the age of seven, after the shock of his father’s death. He returned to Vilna, which was then a major center of Yiddish culture, “the Jerusalem of Lithuania,” where a circle of writers, painters, and poets had gathered under the name of Yung Vilne, publishing three almanacs under that banner — one with which Avrom Sutzkever was to identify.
“Siberia,” published in 1936, evokes the beauty and power of that dazzling whiteness which would find expression throughout his work, an ambiguous whiteness blending light and darkness, life and death, in keeping with the natural cycle of the seasons and the mourning of his father. It is there too that Sutzkever’s almost erotic relation to nature was formed, in the shape of bucolic, elegiac poems. Siberia, then, would be his first poetic inspiration, in a tonality for which he was reproached by one of the members of Yung Vilne, who told him that “the time is not of crystal but of steel” (Di tzayt iz nit fun krishtol nor fun shtol). One could speak of this period in Sutzkever as the period of innocence.
The dark years
When the Second World War broke out, the horrible reality seized Sutzkever, in his flesh and in his poetry. Circumstances turned his personal existence into destiny (Heures rapiécées, “In the lime pit,” p. 75). From then on he made himself the bard, the aède giving voice to his personal sufferings, which were those of the entire Jewish people. Yet at the same time he articulated the paradox, the carnal bond imposed between pain, suffering, and writing — a bond that finds expression in his poetic work through the oxymoron, that figure which joins two words of contrary meaning and produces that exceptional force, that explosion, that singular shock in reading his poems. Thus his wound and the blood that flows from it produce, he says, “the most beautiful sunset created by me alone” (H. R., “Lying in a coffin,” p. 71).
For Sutzkever, the word is an acting word. It is the word that created the universe, as the first twenty-nine verses of the Bible affirm.
Confronted with “bare life” (in Agamben’s expression), with abject physical, moral, and spiritual violence, the writing of the ghetto becomes a writing of the extreme, where death can come at any moment. Resistance, for its part, took various forms. Sutzkever organized literary evenings and exhibitions, as some of the inmates — especially the young — bear witness.
There is a shift of register and rhythm; the images are henceforth nourished by visions of the dying, the dead, of emaciated children and corpses. The inmates faced fire, humiliation, bestiality, devastation — which would from then on haunt most of his verses. Whether in the ghetto or, later, among the partisans, he writes every day.
The Nazis assigned him to a commando nicknamed “the paper brigade,” in which he had, with other Yiddish-speaking intellectuals, to sort the most important works for the future “museum of a vanished people,” as the Nazis called it. Sutzkever used this to divert a certain number of these works, at the risk of his life, in order to hide and save them for a hypothetical future.
Whether in the ghetto or, later, among the partisans, he writes every day, possessed by an almost biological compulsion in which he transforms himself into “heart-million of bones.” He dates each of his poems — something he would not do later — for that date might be his last day of life (“the lead of the Romm press,” p. 84).
When the ghetto is on the verge of being liquidated, Sutzkever escapes with his wife Freydke and a group of friends through the sewers, which he names the Secret City, in order to join the partisans. The small group of fugitives wades through wastewater, through marshes. Here too poetry is saving. Sutzkever evokes the crossing of a minefield where the mines do not explode, because, he says, he recites poetry all along his march. The word acts.
From then on his legend reached as far as the Soviet Union. Ehrenburg arranged for him to be airlifted out of the partisan forests in 1944, to Moscow, where he remained until 1946. Yet another form of resistance: he took part in the work of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and in the gathering of survivors’ testimonies for the Black Book with Ehrenburg and Vassili Grossman.
He also speaks his personal suffering: the annihilation of millions of beings, among them his mother and his newborn child (“to my child,” p. 95). He testifies at the Nuremberg Trials as a Jew, in Russian and not in Yiddish as he had wished, and writes that same day a poem that speaks his powerlessness. He spends a year wandering across this European land, the largest Jewish graveyard.
Spiritual land
His last resurrection corresponds to his arrival in Eretz-Israel in 1947, a year before the creation of the State. He is there during the War of Independence. He shares its anxieties and hopes. His collection In the Chariot of Fire opens with a poem entitled “Shekheyonu,” “Blessing” (H. R., p. 161). In it he expresses at once his joy, his unshakable attachment to his country, his inability to live without it. From then on the bulk of the poems is devoted to the various geographical and symbolic sites of this land that his blessing has sanctified.
But his relation to the State of Israel is not simple. A year later, in 1948, a poem appears bearing the title “Yiddish.” This language, reduced to ashes together with its speakers by the Shoah, is also banished in Israel, which imposes Hebrew as the national language, persecuting Yiddish in various, often petty, ways. It is between these two poles that the poet is torn. A rumor circulates of a meeting between Sutzkever and Ben-Gurion in which the latter urged the poet to choose Hebrew. The poem “Yiddish” was, it is said, his answer to the State’s Prime Minister. In fidelity to this burned language and to those who had carried it through the diaspora since the eleventh century, he joins Mount Sinai and the Mountain of the Exterminated and roars like a lion (H. R., p. 167).
He would continue writing in Yiddish until his death, founding the journal Di Goldene Keyt (The Golden Chain, symbol of the continuity of the Jewish people, link after link linked together). He would publish some 150 issues containing what the poet considered the best works in Yiddish, written in Israel and in the diaspora. He would gather around him a circle of young authors (Yung Yisroel, in memory of Yung Vilne) who would also produce in this language.
The master of the word
After the war a new relation to God, and a new relation to writing in general, takes shape in Sutzkever — one in which writing comes to occupy a singular place.
He establishes a dialogue of equal to equal with the figure of God, reproaching Him for His cruelty, His absence during the Extermination, while God reproaches him for his unbelief: “once you used to pray to me.” That “once” is essential. It means that this is no longer the case… For Sutzkever, the poet is a demiurge. He wants to be in God’s image: “take the all-creator for your example.” The word is always acting.
Sutzkever is the master of this acting word, as the Greek root of the word poet makes plain.
Unlike other poets of annihilation, such as Itzhak Katzenelson, Jacob Glatstein, or Chaim Grade — whose writing rages, fulminates, blasphemes, invectives, vituperates like the biblical prophets — Sutzkever expresses his anger and his pain in a more interiorized, more intimate form which runs through the whole of his work without losing anything of its power.
The bard of annihilation
During his ghetto years, he joined resistance and writing together. He wrote painful poems which he nonetheless paired with evocations of nature, lyrical and elegiac. But always carried by a subtext: that of annihilation.
His faith in poetry remains unshakable, and stands in for God, who becomes a literary figure, the only one commensurate with Annihilation, with Extermination.
After the war, many poets, Yiddish or not, question the legitimacy of their writing — a “questioning” that recalls Adorno’s — “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric” — even though the philosopher later qualified that view. After the question of the legitimacy of poetry, another feeling arises, a feeling of guilt that gnaws at most of these poets. This feeling makes the mystic Aaron Tzeitlin say, in one of his poems, that God died with each murdered Jew — that is, six million times — and he turns on himself: “cursed be my hands that write.”
In some poets, this “guilt of writing” pushes them to ask whether they are not necrophages, feeding on, and feeding their writings on, the flesh of the exterminated.
Sutzkever, for his part, would never call into question the unavoidable, indispensable role of poetry in saying everything — horror as well as beauty, but a beauty beneath which lurks the subtext of Annihilation. A double sanctification: Mount Sinai and the mount formed by “the skeletons of the ghettos and of the Treblinkas” (H. R., “In the desert of Sinai,” pp. 216–217). At the heart of this writing stands the question of bearing witness through poetry.
An insoluble question. The survivors have borne witness through their accounts, oral and written; the historians, through their research, through their publications.
And yet I believe that their testimonies manage to convey only the materiality of the genocide. But that is an abstract knowledge. Only poetry, or art, in all their forms, allow one to approach not the factuality, the veracity of the khurbn (the Extermination), but, for the survivors, its lived experience, its felt life, its truth, which will remain forever an enigma. The imperative — and the impossibility — of bearing witness, as Robert Antelme, Elie Wiesel, Nelly Sachs, Paul Celan, and Avrom Sutzkever all say (H. R., “The witness,” p. 340): since as witness I saw a match extinguish a synagogue of old men and children, faster than in the sunset a swallow is extinguished, and there remained after them only a “yisgadal veiskadash,” a parchment of ashes with sparks of letters, a parchment of ashes that shines for the wind, alone able to read it, since then I cannot enter any house of prayer.
It seems to me that I, the witness, will be recognized by the ashes.
It seems to me: I will enter and, God forbid, I will not be burned.
The page numbers in parentheses refer to the pages on which the poem in question appears in Heures Rapiécées (Patched Hours).↩︎