From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg: Memoir and Testimony

<p><div>In 1944, the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever was airlifted to Moscow from the forest where he had spent the winter among partisan fighters. There he was encouraged by Ilya Ehrenburg, the most famous Soviet Jewish writer of his day, to write a memoir of his two years in the Vilna Ghetto. Now, seventy-five years after it appeared in Yiddish in 1946, Justin Cammy provides a full English translation of one of the earliest published memoirs of the destruction of the city known throughout the Jewish world as the Jerusalem of Lithuania. Based on his own experiences, his conversations with survivors, and his consultation with materials hidden in the ghetto and recovered after the liberation of his hometown, Sutzkever's memoir rests at the intersection of postwar Holocaust literature and history. He grappled with the responsibility to produce a document that would indict the perpetrators and provide an account of both the horrors and the resilience of Jewish life under Nazi rule. Cammy bases his translation on the two extant versions of the full text of the memoir and includes Sutzkever's diary notes and full testimony at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946. Fascinating reminiscences of leading Soviet Yiddish cultural figures Sutzkever encountered during his time in Moscow - Ehrenburg, Yiddish modernist poet Peretz Markish, and director of the State Yiddish Theatre Shloyme Mikhoels - reveal the constraints of the political environment in which the memoir was composed. Both shocking and moving in its intensity, From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg returns readers to a moment when the scale of the Holocaust was first coming into focus, through the eyes of one survivor who attempted to make sense of daily life, resistance, and death in the ghetto. A Yiddish Book Center Translation</div></p>

Biographies & Memoirs

Sutzkever, Abraham

Leaders & Notable People

McGill-Queen's University Press

Abraham Sutzkever is the greatest living poet in Yiddish, and one of the great poets of the twentieth century. Born in Smargon, near Vilna, in 1913, Sutzkever entered the world of Yiddish literature in the 1930s, with his first book, simply titled Lider (Poems). It was immediately recognized that he was a poet whose personality, world-view, and approach to image, sound and rhythm were unique and original. His poetry is full of love of nature and love of beauty; it deals too with the mystery of creation and the secrets of the cosmos. He was tempered by the fires of the Holocaust, during which he lost nearly all of his family, and during which he fought as a partisan in the forest near Vilna. he became a poetic witness to the Jewish people's suffering and destruction; his Holocaust poems are distinguished by their personal dimension and intimacy. Since his emigration to Israel in 1947, Sutzkever has become the poetic symbol of Jewish revival and the standard-bearer of Yiddish literature in Israel and the rest of the world; he is the editor of Di Goldene Keyt, the world's pre-eminent Yiddish literary journal.In the present volume, Sutzkever deals with a broad range of subjects, from childhood to mature love to the beauties of nature to the Holocaust. His unique poetic presence is clearly palpable in these poems, written in deceptively simple but highly evocative language. Though a translation never quite renders the full impact of the original, enough shines through to the English reader to provide a sense of its greatness.

Laughter Beneath the Forest: Poems from Old and Recent Manuscripts (English, Yiddish and Yiddish Edition)

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Ktav Pub & Distributors Inc

Burnt pearls: Ghetto poems of Abraham Sutzkever

Mosaic Press/Valley Editions

Ode to the Dove: A Yiddish poem by Abraham Sutzkever (Jewish Poetry Project)

Ben Yehuda Press

Wilner Getto 1941-1944: Biographische Aufzeichnungen

Literary

FISCHER, S.

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Books by Sutzkever, Abraham