Abraham Sutzkever

Nov 18, 2024 | lubavitch.com | Ruth Wisse |Abraham Sutzkever

Following the events of October 7, I reached back to a poem I committed to memory when I first read it—a poem written when we Jews thought that the worst was already behind us. I was born in East Central Europe in 1936, and raised in Canada as a fortunate immigrant in the 1940s, and I consider it the greatest privilege of my life to have seen the establishment of the state of Israel.

Apr 26, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Thaïs Miller |Akiva Schick |Stuart Schoffman |Abraham Sutzkever

The Yiddish instructor brought out a box of cutout paper letters and asked his teaching assistant to arrange them in alphabetical order inside a plastic box. The assistant struggled a bit. The instructor, whom I will call Mikołaj, turned to me and said, “You know the alphabet. Can you help us?” We were speaking to each other mostly in Yiddish with a little English when we hit a roadblock in our understanding. “Sure,” I said, wondering how he was going to use them.

Aug 7, 2023 | yiddishbookcenter.org | Abraham Sutzkever |Justin Cammy

After their escape from the Vilna ghetto on September 12, 1943, Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever and his wife Freydke spent six months in the forest among partisan fighters before they were airlifted and brought to safety in Moscow. There, Sutzkever was conscripted by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to write a chronicle of his two years in the ghetto. Sutzkever’s time in Moscow put him into contact with leading figures of Soviet-Yiddish culture.

Jul 16, 2023 | poetryfoundation.org | Abraham Sutzkever

Abraham Sutzkever was born in 1913 in what is now Belarus. He was a Yiddish-language poet whose works chronicle his childhood in Siberia, his life in the Vilna (Vilnius) ghetto during World War II, and his escape to join the Jewish partisans. In 1915 Sutzkever...