Avrom Sutzkever, witness

Annette Wieviorka, preface to Le Ghetto de Wilno (1941–1944) (The Vilna Ghetto) Heures rapiécées (Patched Hours), poems in verse and prose — translated from Yiddish and prefaced by Rachel Ertel”: such is the title of an imposing (530 pp.) volume of poems (introduced by a foreword from Patricia Farazzi) which has just appeared from Éditions de l’Éclat. It will stand as a historic-poetic event.

This much is known: in their unleashed destructive frenzies, the Yiddish language and culture were driven to the brink of annihilation. And yet it is from the depths of these extreme circumstances that Sutzkever’s poetry became what remains for us one of the most astounding manifestations of survival, of creative life, and, in the testimony itself, of poetic generosity.

Sutzkever’s poetic work — clearly one of the most powerful of the twentieth century — unfolded from 1936 to 1996. It will have opened from within those years in which history itself was “out of joint”: years of mass violence let loose and at the same time systematically organized.

Through its own tenacity and amplitude, Rachel Ertel’s work (essays, translations, retranslations) is an answer to that of Sutzkever’s œuvre.

Already, thanks to earlier translations by Rachel Ertel, one could read in French some of the poems Sutzkever wrote in the time of the crushing he endured in the Vilna ghetto, and then in the struggle in which he managed to reach the partisans.

The volume Heures rapiécées, indomitably deployed, allows the French reader to access the successive stages of Sutzkever’s poetic work — as it found, so early on, its own power in the years 1936–39 (with the sets entitled “Siberia” and “Blonde Aurora”); as it did not give up in the time when Nazi ferocity was given free rein; and finally as it continued, always in Yiddish, to bring itself into being (after two years of residence in Moscow and a year of wandering in Europe) once the poet had settled in Palestine in 1947 (a year before the creation of the State of Israel)¹.

Avrom Sutzkever died in 2010 in Tel Aviv.

• It was thus across several successive situations, and by bringing himself into being in various registers, that Sutzkever had to and did manage to make himself a “witness.”

We, French-language readers, discover or rediscover tirelessly in the manifold unfolding of his writings — poems or prose — a plurality of speaking positions intertwined with situations lived through the chaos ferociously organized by the Nazis (in which Sutzkever’s mother² and his child³ disappeared), and then in the times that followed.

In 1988 there had been published, in the “Yiddish Domain” collection at Éditions du Seuil, the collection Où gîtent les étoiles (Where the Stars Dwell). Works in verse and prose translated from Yiddish by Charles Dobzynski, Rachel Ertel, and the translators’ collective of Université Paris VII.

My mother had forgotten Murer’s laws, according to which babies born in the ghetto were to be killed. The day after my return, the child was already no longer of this world: Murer’s orders had been carried out.”

In French, only in 1995 was it possible to read Le Livre noir, Textes et témoignages réunis par Ilya Ehrenbourg et Vassili Grossman (The Black Book, Texts and Testimonies Gathered by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vassili Grossman)⁴. This collective work — including, then, a text by Sutzkever — had its own historic fate, subject to the crushing vagaries of Stalinist politics.

Also in French translation, in 2013, came Le Ghetto de Wilno 1941-1944 (The Vilna Ghetto, 1941–1944)⁵ with two ample and indispensable prefaces, one by Annette Wieviorka and the other by Gilles Rozier. The historian recalls that “the origin of this text written very quickly, like many testimonies of the postwar period, is probably Ilya Ehrenburg’s request for a contribution to the Black Book.” Yet here, she adds, is “a more personal text, freer in its expression, with flashes of writing, than the truncated one intended for the Black Book.”

• It was in yet another way, and to other exacting demands, that Sutzkever came to bear witness: in the strictly instituted, formalized framework of the Nuremberg trial.

In issue 796–797 (August–September 1995) of the journal Europe, one could read, translated from Yiddish by Gilles Rozier, Sutzkever’s notes — a brief journal — all bearing dates, from “Moscow, 16 February 1946” to “6 March 1946” (the day Sutzkever left Moscow).

“I want (Sutzkever writes on 17 February) to speak in Yiddish. No question of any other language. I have told this to Ehrenburg, to the prosecutor Smirnov, and to all the others. I want to speak in the language of the people whom the accused tried to exterminate. Let our mameloshn be heard. Let it ring out, and let Alfred Rosenberg collapse. Let my language triumph at Nuremberg as a symbol of permanence!”

“I want…”? Yet this is precisely what was not granted him. In the note of 25 February one reads: “Hey! A moment ago, the prosecutor Smirnov came to see me! I am to testify tomorrow, but in Russian!” On 27 February, in a very long note dated “Nuremberg, at the tribunal, 12:45 p.m.,” he finally writes: “My testimony at the Nuremberg trial is over. On my lips still burn the words I shouted to the face of the world and for future generations. I am shaken to the very depths. It is undoubtedly the most intense experience of my last thirty years.

I spoke for thirty-eight minutes (including the questions from the prosecutor, Colonel Smirnov). It is clear that Providence itself ordained Russian in my mouth.”

• Should one set Sutzkever’s speaking positions one against the other, across decades of historical upheaval in which, threatened with disintegration, they had constantly to form and re-form themselves?

Obvious variations of address will, all along Sutzkever’s path, have contributed to differentiating his various registers of writing — without disjoining them, but rather creating, within them or between them, sometimes unforeseen, but always unavoidable, tensions.

The most controlled address — since it had to bow to institutional demands, while seeking to preserve itself from any hijacking — could obviously only be that of the testimony at Nuremberg.

To address one’s written testimony to a Soviet publication like the Black Book was another adventure: Sutzkever’s contribution, no less than the collection as a whole, was delivered up to the cynical reversals of Stalin’s politics.

To take up again, as Sutzkever did, his account of the Vilna ghetto and turn it into an entire, autonomous volume was to give his testimony the full force to affirm what Sutzkever already wished to set free in his words even when they were held within a judicial frame: “the ardent, intense feeling — he writes in his notes — that our people lives, that it has survived its executioners and that no power of darkness has the means to annihilate us.”

• And the specific address of the poems?

It will have been self-evident — as sure as it was wholly open — with its free suspensions, and it imposes itself on the slightest reading of Sutzkever’s poetry.

Will it not, with all its lifting force, have sustained every other address?

Already in the poems which, written before the time of the ghetto, were to be gathered in the collection Siberia⁶, it is a free power of welcome — be it, or especially be it, for elementary self-evidences: spaces stepping out of themselves, snowy expanses, unforeseeable clarities — that sought itself out… and that, in each poem, came into being.

Sutzkever’s poetry (whose upheavals and dancing reversals found their answer in the pictorial work with which Chagall accompanied the poems in the collection Siberia, produced shortly after the war), as it was taking shape then, was it not induced and sustained by a gesture itself elementary, or “elemental,” of “address” — an address to… whoever, and always held in suspense?

(In “On the Interlocutor,” a brief and early essay (dated 1905), Mandelstam asserted that “to address a concrete interlocutor clips the wings of the poem, deprives it of air, of flight.” Léon Robel’s translation of this essay, published in issue 35 of the journal Po&sie, was accompanied by a text by Martine Broda, which she titled: “‘To no one addressed’: Paul Celan reader of The Interlocutor,” and in which, among other quotations from Celan, one could read: “I won, I lost (…) I cast / everything into the hand of no one.”)

• How was it engendered, how did it manage to perpetuate itself (and to irrigate Sutzkever’s other writings) — the generosity of Sutzkever’s poetry?

Within it, even in the depths of the most atrocious situations — and even as it had to defend its very language, Yiddish — there never ceased to re-engender itself the possibility of giving (oneself).