Avraham Sutzkever,the important Yiddish poet who died last week in Tel Aviv, wrote with a prophet's purity and greatness of heart. He was born in Belarus, but World War I broke out and his parents fled to Siberia for safety thinking no one would follow them there. Father dies 1941, mother and children go to Vilna. Young Avraham joins "Young Vilna,"group of young geniuses. Vilna, a vibrant cultural center, is the "Jerusalem of Lithuania." He has many writer friends. Artists, too. Writes poems. Celebrates creation. Bees buzz in his brain and he hears singing, he hears your
voice singing in the dawn and it is the voice of the wind and he wakes up
refreshed and rushes to you through night and dust and sweat.
But the "golden age" of Yiddish artists and writers came to an end in Vilna in June 1941, according to the New York Times. The Nazis marched East. Sutzkever and 60,000 others were interred in the Vilna Ghetto. He wrote poems in the ghetto. He believed in poetry the way a Jew believes in the Messiah. In theory it was simple. You wrote or you died. "If a worm will never succumb to the cut, / can you say you are less than a worm?" Every dawn brought melted rubies: "I shall not cease to be amazed / at the loveliest sunset my eyes can invent." With his wife he and some Partisan friends escaped the ghetto, were airlifted to Moscow, went to Poland then Paris, testified at Nuremberg where he confronted the murderer of his mother and his son, settled at last in Israel where he kept the ancient language alive by writing poems in Yiddish and editing a Yiddish literary journal, Di Goldene Keyt.
"O not to mourn for you, I come, city of my song," he wrote (in "Farewell"). Vilna was gone. Poems were burnt pearls, stars that died, leaving the illusion of white. You are my first love, he wrote. Every other city is an image of you. "And if no more Jews remain in my city —
If some time someone should find pearls
threaded on a blood-red string of silk
which, near the throat, runs all the thinner
like life’s own path until it’s gone
somewhere in a fog and can’t be seen—
If someone should find these pearls
let him know how—cool, aloof—they lit up
the eighteen-year-old, impatient heart
of the
dancing girl, Marie.
Now, dragged through unknown
I’m throwing my pearls through the grate.
If they’re found by a young man—
let these pearls adorn his girlfriend.
If they’re found by a girl—
let her wear them; they belong to her.
And if they’re found by an old man—
let him, for these pearls, recite a prayer.