Abraham Sutzkever (1913–2010)

Abraham Sutzkever, born to a Jewish family in Vilnius, Lithuania, is considered a towering figure among Yiddish poets. He spent part of his childhood in Russia. He started to write as a young man in the 1930s and became part of the Modernist writers and artists' group Yung-Vilne (Young Vilna). Following the Nazi occupation in 1941 in World War II, he and his family were sent to the Vilna Ghetto, where his mother and newborn son were murdered. Sutzkever helped hide treasures such as etchings by Marc Chagall and the diary of Theodor Herzl, and smuggled guns with his friend and fellow poet Shmerke Kaczerginski. In September 1943, when the Ghetto was being liquidated, he, along with his wife Freydke and Kaczerginski, escaped through the sewers to join the partisans. Russian Jewish writers persuaded the Soviets to send a plane to rescue the Sutzkevers in March 1944, and they flew to Moscow. Sutzkever was a witness at the Nuremberg war crimes trials in 1946. He then left for Paris, and later emigrated to Israel, where he edited the Yiddish literary journal Di Goldene Keyt (The Golden Chain) from 1949 to 1996. In the 1970s, as Yiddish was being revived by a new generation, he became a popular speaker on the academic lecture circuit. In 1985, he became the first Yiddish writer to win the Israel Prize. Some of his works have been published in English translation, including Burnt Pearls: Ghetto Poems of Abraham Sutzkever (1981).