Abraham Sutzkever and Czesław Miłosz belong to the same generation: Miłosz was born in 1911, in Szetejnie, a village in central Lithuania, while Sutzkever was born in 1913, in Smorgon, a town in today’s Belorussia. From a young age, both poets were exposed to local multiethnic environments, extensive traveling and prolonged living outside their parental homes. Writing of his childhood experience, Miłosz framed them with the twentieth century’s changes in mind: Throughout all my early childhood, rivers, towns and landscapes followed one another at great speed. … Such a lack of stability, the unconscious feeling that everything is temporary, cannot but affect, it seems to me, our mature judgments, and it can be the reason for taking governments and political systems lightly. History becomes fluid because it is equated with ceaseless wandering.[1]These conditions shaped an early sense of identity, exile and encounter with history for the other two poets as well. Yet, more importantly, this sense of homelessness and displacement not only increased internally, but also progressed externally. The time-space in which the poets were born and spent their childhood not only passed away, but disintegrated into the annals of history. Today, there is no more Polish-Lithuanian Szetejnie or Jewish Smorgon, nor is there much left of the city where the biographies, memories and imaginations of Sutzkever and Miłosz intersect.
In 1915, Abraham Sutzkever’s family, like many other Jewish families in the Western borderlands of the Russian Empire, was exiled to Siberia by the Tsarist authorities as potential supporters of the Germans. In Omsk, on the Irtysh River in Siberia, Sutzkever spent his early childhood and acquired his first memories of the world. In Siberia, the family endured years of political instability, wars, famines and disease outbreaks (Sutzkever’s father died in Omsk.) In 1920, after the Russian Civil War had subsided, Sutzkever’s family returned to their homeland and settled in Vilna, where the family lived for twenty years in the impoverished suburb of Snipishok. Sutzkever’s mother, the daughter of a rabbi in a small town, was a pious woman; so Abraham, who was a sickly child and could not attend yeshiva, had a private rabbi to teach him Hebrew and the Talmud. Later, Sutzkever went to a Polish-Hebrew high school, which expanded his linguistic and cultural world beyond the realms of Jewish Vilna.
Although, for Sutzkever, Litvak Yiddish was his mame-loshn, or mother tongue, he nonetheless grew up on Polish Romantic and, to some extent, Russian nineteenth-century literature. He never attended Yiddish school nor knew Yiddish poetry, but, at the age of thirteen, Sutzkever began writing poetry in Yiddish (his first poetry attempts were in Hebrew). Sutzkever soon discovered the Strashun library and the YIVO, where he studied Yiddish language and literature in depth. He attended some courses of Polish and Russian literature at the Vilna Polish University. Sutzkever started to publish his poetry in a local Yiddish daily and also published some poems in New York’s Yiddish literary journal. Just before the war, his first book was published in Warsaw. Although Sutzkever was influenced by the Modernist artistic tradition and joined the local Yiddish modernist group known as “Yung Vilna” (“Young Vilna”), he was not committed to the left-leaning social goals of the local modernist movement. His poetry was extremely personalized in its subject matter and imagery. Despite this, his second book, Valdiks (From the Forest), published in 1940 during the brief Lithuanian control of Vilna, is considered to be one of the best examples of Yiddish modernism and, perhaps, the last Yiddish poetry book printed in Europe before the Holocaust.
In the first days of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Sutzkever unsuccessfully tried to escape the German occupation of Vilna. He was trapped outside the city by the rapidly advancing German Army and was forced to return to the town. He spent the summer months of 1941 hiding from the German and Lithuanian killing squads in a crawl space under the roof of his mother’s apartment. On September 5, 1941, he was caught and taken by the Lithuanian militia to be shot in a nearby forest. He was forced to dig his own grave, but the Lithuanians shot over his head and took him to the newly created ghetto of Vilna. For two years, Sutzkever’s living environment was confined by the six narrow ghetto streets of the Old Town. In the ghetto, he lost his mother; and a year later, he lost his newborn child, who was poisoned by Germans. Subsequently, Sutzkever became actively involved in the smuggling of rare Jewish books and manuscripts into the ghetto from the YIVO, the Strashun Library and the synagogues, thus saving them from being shifted to Germany. He also joined the United Partisan Organization (F.P.O.), an armed resistance group of the ghetto. In 1943, with his wife, he escaped from the ghetto and joined the Soviet partisans in Belorussia. From there, he was taken to Moscow, where he was received as a poet-witness of the Holocaust by the Soviet political elite and media.
He returned to Vilna in July of 1944. Along with some other Jewish partisans, he created a Jewish Museum in Vilnius, which served simultaneously as a meeting place for the survivors of the Holocaust and a center for saving the remaining Jewish cultural and archival treasures. Like many Holocaust survivors, Sutzkever left Vilna and illegally reached Palestine in 1947. Within three years, the museum was closed and confiscated by the NKVD on charges of distributing Zionist propaganda. During the Nuremberg trial, Sutzkever was chosen by the Soviet state to testify as a witness to the destruction of Vilna and the Lithuanian Jews. In contrast to most Israeli Jewish writers who write in Hebrew, the official language of the state of Israel, he continued to compose poetry and works of prosein Yiddish. Sutzkever never went back to the “slaughtered city,” dying in Tel Aviv in 2010.
[1] Czeslaw Miłosz, Native Realm: A Search for Self-definition, trans. Catherine S. Leach (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 41.