Avrom Sutzkever further developed his position as witness in a retrospective account that was originally to be part of the Black Book compiled by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vassili Grossman, but which was finally published independently: Le Ghetto de Wilno (1941–1944) (The Vilna Ghetto), translated by Gilles Rozier. From the outset, the question of the specificity of poetic testimony arises through the poet’s own terms, since he produces an alternative version of his testimony across these different vehicles. Such is the short and poignant poem entitled “Before the Nuremberg Tribunal. 1946,” which opens thus: it is said: “I demand justice for millions. forever this hour will remain, for eternity.” but the millions are no more, they are exterminated what justice can I demand?
Among many examples, I shall single out one carrying an especially dramatic biographical charge and giving rise to a complex poem, with tortured and blasphemous accents rather rare in the work of a poet famed for his crystalline images and his cult of beauty. There breaks through in it an overflow of passionate feelings, steeped in the tragedy of Jewish history, in the survivor’s guilt, the victim’s shame, and the powerless appeal to vengeance — soon to be relayed by the heroic position of the combatant and the resistance fighter.
The poem is entitled “The Circus” and is linked, by the very obviousness of autobiographical testimony, to an equivalent scene in the account of the Vilna ghetto under the title “The Germans Amuse Themselves.” Fleeing the round-ups, the young Sutzkever is arrested by the SS on the grounds that he is not wearing the star, and is dragged off, in the company of an old rabbi and a terrified young man, to an “attraction” offered to the crowd in the courtyard of the synagogue: a pyre forms the center of the scene, and the three Jews are forced to undress, to sing in Russian, and to feed the fire by throwing in scrolls of the Torah.
At the end of this “spectacle,” the victims are miraculously released. The narrative testimony is sober, dramatic, haunted by the fear of fire and death. The poem, for its part, articulates a plurality of meanings, drawing both on the feeling of individual abandonment and on a cultural symbolism layered by collective memory and religious references.
We shall keep only this short passage, articulated around the powerful image of the flight of the Torah letters profaned by the debauchery of Babel and the silence of God: “and behold! between swords and sabers resounds the voice of Eden from Babylon fly the letters sparks upon the black wood of night. farther up at the summit of the smoke-clouds rises the great I swallowing, voracious, the parchment. and nothing — he too is far away.”
This poetic meditation on the dual component of the letter, at once material and spiritual, underpinned by the talmudic memory of the martyrdom of Hanina ben Teradion in Roman times, operates the passage between factual testimony and poetic testimony, intrinsically symbolic and doubled by reflexive operation. Captured by the language of the poem, the event speaks itself through cultural reappropriation, in the language of the victims, thanks to the infinite layers of meaning sedimented by collective memory.
This guiding thread of a language naturally symbolic and eminently personal, filtered through experience and synesthesia, through the most concrete and subjective sensations and emotions, will serve us as a guide to approach the unique force of the poet’s language — one of the most innovative and ever-changing, yet remaining buttressed by the inexhaustible stock of images supplied by Jewish tradition.
Avrom Sutzkever’s poetic language possesses a real temporal amplitude, while standing almost off to one side of the contemporary idioms contextualized by the avant-gardes. Even though he is fully part of the Yung Vilne poetic group in the 1930s, he does not necessarily adopt all of its codes and remains attached to the elementary signifiers furnished by nature and to an almost Rimbaud-like apprehension of the world. The poems of the ghetto and of the partisan forests, for their part, transcribe almost in the manner of a daily chronicle the manifold perils of survival during a mass extermination, while at the same time operating a kind of sublimation of fear and death through their fantastical symbolism — the same that will be taken up again, though differently in narrative terms, by the prose poems or “short tales” of Aquarium vert (Green Aquarium) and Où gîtent les étoiles (Where the Stars Dwell). As for the poet’s creativity on the soil of Israel, it maintains the same idiosyncratic grammar reaching back to the childhood memories of Siberia, while adapting it to a new reality, entirely modernized by Israeli life and contact with the poetic groups writing in Hebrew, which influence in their own way, almost structurally, the writing in Yiddish to which the poet remains faithful.
Sutzkever’s poetic gesture is marked by its sovereignty, its radiant power of metamorphosis and penetration of the arcana of language — operator of a true genesis, at once provisional and reiterated, evanescent and timeless, like an elemental force constantly in motion. One may even speak of its cosmopoietic power, constituting and renewing itself while creating, each time, its own world, rendered through the simplest signs, most often borrowed from the natural world: these elements (grasses, granite, ants, snow… and so on to infinity) work as a language and not as mere images; they are ideograms, signifiers at once concrete and symbolic, the letters of a secret and deeply collective grammar: “Everything I feel is mine / I am in every place my word reaches” (Sylvan Songs, 1937–1939). A symbolic, cosmic genealogy joins nature and history, childhood and extermination, signs of the father and signs of the mother, the icy nature of Siberia where the father’s death occurs and the pyres of Ponar where the mother disappears.
“my father is an ice-floe on the rivers of Siberia my mother is a pyre on the bank of the Wilija” (“My Father”). Twin in poetry of Chagall, who used to grow drunk on the colors and primitive sensations of youth, in Siberia (1936) or Blonde Aurora (1936–1937), seeming to witness the “birth of worlds” as he painted them with a brush free of regret or indecision, Sutzkever becomes a soul-brother of Celan; for him, from now on grass is at once funereal, and black and white — the simple colors of childhood and of intimate mourning (the death of the father when the child is seven in Siberia) — transmute themselves into a complex play of chromatic inversions, unveiling the reality of the collective extermination.
Thus the “black brambles” on which the mother’s soul is caught: “the black brambles are today my psalms” (“Black Brambles”). Or the “black doves” inverting, without abolishing it, the flight of the white dove that accompanies the child when the father is buried: “she swept down and lifted me up to life” (“To My Father”). But the vital impulse that saves the orphaned child now turns into a cruel injunction to write, bound up with the memory of the annihilated people: “premonitions sharp peck-strokes, / struck again and again by black doves […] premonitions that terrify and command: / live, live as if day and night / the eyes of those who perished were watching over you.” (“Black Doves”)
Closer still to the Celan of Strette or Death Fugue, the lament around the mother’s disappearance during the great mass round-ups is built around a few simple motifs, like black notes on a musical score, a writing of blasphemy and piety marking the chaotic inversion of meaning: “from the day my pious mother ate the earth on Yom Kippur / ate on Yom Kippur the black earth mingled with fire, / I, the living, must eat the black earth on Yom Kippur / and I am a memorial candle lit by her fire.” (“Diary Poem 1983”) It is perhaps from Celan too that Sutzkever borrows the image of the shovel, bound at once to the quest for the dead and the quest for poetic language, always indexed to beauty: armed with a shovel I set out to look for you to dig up the earth, to disembowel every tomb.
I will ask the grasses, browse the brushwood so as to lay your shadow upon my arm, but if I cannot reach you there I will dig at the words, hollow out the syllables to give the roses their freedom back in the gloomy land where they are buried (“from the poem the three roses”). Equivalent of Celan’s “black milk of dawn,” Sutzkever’s “black hallah” evokes by counterpoint the writing of the pogroms in a Lamed Shapiro, with his “White Hallah.”
I know that of my sister nothing is left but the name I know that I am the only one who remembers her name I myself fed her with a shovel from a black hallah dug up with my shovel… (“Fallen Walls,” 1996). The poetic language in Sutzkever proceeds, as in Celan, by blocks of matter sculpting the immaterial surface of meaning, eroding or filling it like a writing with its own laws, its fixed formal and signifying associations. A certain lexical and syntactic minimalism marks a modernity that grows more pronounced with time, as the poet integrates into Israeli life and its vernacular — square, simple, geometric — while at the same time recovering the most ancient cultural symbolisms, bound up with sacred writing and with the mystique of the letters, endowed with an almost magical effectiveness: “we will dig the earth that the sun has put out / to reach the essence of our own language. With a flash of iron — a quill as a shovel / twenty-two the number of the strings on our violin.” (“Diary Poems 1984”) Transmutation of the funereal shovel into a redemptive quill, in accord with the mystical symbolism of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet.
And in the end, nothing ever disappears in Sutzkever — neither the dead, nor the words of childhood, nor the colors of long ago — eternally renewed by the poet’s language. This constant infusion of life through the poet’s language contradicts death, and struggles inch by inch with memory in ruins, symbolized by the dove who outwits murderous time and tries to escape effacement: “dove are you the same, your wings are not yet gray, is it possible? / must I build here my temple as I have built it every day of my life? / must I once more turn green, turn blue, en-chant my magic lamp? / build, build, build my temple guided by the wisdom of the sun.” (“Ode to the Dove”)
Such is Sutzkever’s modernity, like Baudelaire’s before him: the alliance of the transitory and the eternal, unafraid of confronting “the unknown” in order to find “the new.”