Who will remain?

This is the title of perhaps the most famous poem by the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever, who died last week in Tel Aviv at the age of 96.

Who will remain, what will remain? A wind will stay,

the blindness of the blind man who has gone away,

a string of foam, the sign of the sea,

a little cloud entangled in a tree.

Who will remain, what will remain?

A primeval seed will sprout again

A fiddle-rose honoring herself will live.

Seven blades of grass will know what's hers to give.

Of all the stars due north of here,

the one that landed in a tear will stay.

There will always be a drop of wine left over in its jug.

Who will stay? God will stay. Isn't that enough?

(You can hear Sutzkever recite the poem in the original Yiddish here.)

I am compelled to dedicate an entry to Sutzkever for two reasons. First, he was one of the main reasons that I fell in love with Yiddish. And second, he was not only one of the greatest Yiddish poets but also one of the greatest Israeli poets, even if he remains largely unknown in this country due to his commitment to a language long repressed and derided as a vestige if the "exilic" Jewish past.

Sutzkever was an extraordinary poet who lived an extraordinary life. Born in Smorgon, near Vilna, in 1913, he spent his early childhood years during WWI in exile in Siberia. During WWII, he survived the Vilna Ghetto. In 1941, he was appointed by the Nazis to a diabolical mission. He and several other writers and intellectuals, including the Hebrew poet Abba Kovner, were forced to congregate at YIVO (The Institute for Jewish Research) to assemble Jewish books and documents that would be displayed in a perverse exhibition called Wissenschaft des Judentums ohne Juden ("The Science of Judaism without Jews"). The exhibit would be erected in Frankfurt once Hitler's "Final Solution" was complete and the world was, indeed, "without Jews." Documents deemed unfit for display were to be sent to a paper mill, where they would be destroyed. Risking his own life, Sutzkever smuggled hundreds of books, drawings (including some by his close friend Marc Chagall) and unpublished documents into the ghetto, where he buried them. In 1943, he and his wife Freydke snuck out of the ghetto into the surrounding forests, where they joined the Soviet partisans in resisting the Nazis. Throughout all of these experiences, Sutzkever never stopped writing poems.

After the war, he returned with Kovner to Vilna to dig up the treasures they had buried as members of the so-called "paper brigade." These treasures were eventually sent to YIVO in New York and Jerusalem. He recalled those days as follows:

“I felt that I must be the witness of all those events, that I was destined to be the witness. I entered a spectacle someone staged, I thought I played a role in it. Who staged the spectacle, I don’t know. Who needed it? What for? In those years of destruction, I always felt I was a witness to an immense earthly and cosmic play. I felt a divine sense of messianic mission, those were the most elevated moments of my life.”

Following a few years in Moscow and Paris, Sutzkever arrived in Palestine in 1947. Almost immediately, he established the Yiddish journal di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain) with funds from the Histadrut (Israeli Trade Union), which he edited for nearly 40 years (1948-1984), producing a total of 130 volumes. This was an extraordinary feat, considering Yiddish was barely tolerated in Israel. In fact, it was the second of two nearly impossible tasks that Sutzkever fulfilled: the first was rescuing Yiddish literature from the Vilna ghetto, and the second was sustaining Yiddish culture in Israel, where is was believed to have no future. Although he received the Israel Prize in the 1980s, and although he was a committed Zionist, Sutzkever has always remained obscure in Israel (and worldwide) simply because he wrote in Yiddish.

Sutzkever's poetry has an almost mystical quality, expressing the beauty inherent in creation and respect for the power of the Jewish word to discipline chaos. And yet, it is clearly the work of a "Litvak" (Lithuanian Jew), as evidenced by its frequent wordplay and quick-witted questions. The scholar Ruth Wisse suggests that Sutzkever's almost pantheistic approach to nature remained a constant thematic thread in his poetry, though he and his work traveled between locations as disparate as Siberia and Sinai:

“In the vastness of the Negev and the Sinai he found something akin to the stretches of Siberia, space where a solitary observer could once again take his bearings in the scheme of things. The landscape might no longer elicit the joys of virgin discovery, but the lasting imprints of the past that one found everywhere in the desert gave solace to a survivor of lost civilizations" (Ruth Wisse, “The Last Great Yiddish Poet?” in Commentary, 76, November 1983: 41-48).

Unfortunately, I don't have many of Sutzkever's poems at my fingertips (since my library is currently packed into boxes in Chicago), but I did a quick search in my computer and found a rough translation of my own. I don't think it does justice to the original, but perhaps it can offer you a bit of a taste. Plus, it seems fitting, because the poet speaks beyond the grave...

From Lider fun togbukh (“Poems from a Diary,” 1976)

Trees are made into wonderful paper. And I – the reverse:

I transform paper into trees, into the tree of life.

I root myself in it, till the song of

Birds ascends.

The birds bloom and bud the first

Blessed sounds. Unmatched, unique is my mission:

I transform the transformations into their source,

Transform myself into the protoplasm of my dream.

Transform the clumps of clay into their human face,

Transform precious stones into a living goldsmith.

And solitary mysteries, miles away from words,

I transform into a ray that reaches the bed of tears.

I dip my seal-ring in the sun and stand it in the dark

To watch over the transformations. My future heir,

The cosmic poet, will seek it and will find,

And my bones will smile.