Avrom sutzkever biography
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Avrom Sutzkever, 1913-2010.
July 15th, 2013, marked the 100th anniversary of Avrom (Abraham) Sutzkever’s birth. His centrality for 20th-century Yiddish literature and Jewish culture cannot be overstated. Throughout the twists and turns of Sutzkever’s biography, he remained committed to publishing Yiddish poetry and bore witness to the atrocities of history when the occasion called for it. Born near Vilna, Lithuania in 1913, he was part of the Yung-Vilne cultural movement and published his first book of poems in 1937. Sutzkever spent part of the war in the Vilna Ghetto, smuggling weapons into the ghetto and smuggling weapons out of it. He immigrated to Palestine with his family in 1947. In the new state of Israel, he continued to be a force for Yiddish culture, primarily through founding and editing the literary journal Di Goldene Keyt (The Golden Chain). Sutzkever died in 2010, having seen nearly a century pass before his eyes. As he told a reporter after the war, “
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The moving figure of Avrom Sutzkever can be seen in the film which, in 1945, records his testimony at the Nuremberg trial. He was one of the few Jews who testified. On the witness stand, where he spoke after a long silence, he was presented as a survivor of the Vilnius ghetto, but he was already a great Yiddish poet – who asked himself, in one of his verses from 1943: “Am inom the gods poet left singing in Europe?” Rachel Ertel, his translator into French and a great specialist in Yiddish literature, profiles Sutzkever for K. – an immense poet who, according to her, has the stature of Celan – against the background of his relationship to Europe.
Avrom Sutzkever, on June 22, 1943, in the Vilna ghetto, asks himself this question:
“Am inom the gods poet left singing in Europe?
Am inom making song now for corpses and crows?
I’m drowning in fire, in gunk, in the swamps,
Imprisoned bygd yellow patched hours as they close.
I
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Abraham Sutzkever
Belarusian-Israeli poet
Abraham Sutzkever | |
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Abraham Sutzkever, 1950 | |
| Native name | אַבֿרהם סוצקעווער |
| Born | (1913-07-15)15 July 1913 Smorgon, Vilna Governorate, Russian Empire (now Smarhon, Belarus) |
| Died | 20 January 2010(2010-01-20) (aged 96) Tel Aviv, Israel |
| Occupation | Poet |
| Language | Yiddish |
| Nationality | Israeli |
| Notable works |
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| Notable awards | Israel Prize (1985) |
| Spouse | Freydke Sutzkever (died 2003) |
| Children | 2 |
Abraham Sutzkever (Yiddish: אַבֿרהם סוצקעווער, romanized: Avrom Sutskever; Hebrew: אברהם סוצקבר; July 15, 1913 – January 20, 2010) was an acclaimed Yiddishpoet.[1]The New York Times wrote that Sutzkever was "the greatest poet of the Holocaust."[2]
Biography
[edit]Abraham (Avrom) Sutzkever was born on July 15, 1913, in Smorgon, Vilna Governorate, Rus