Creator Bio
Abraham Sutzkever
1913–2010
The renowned Yiddish poet Abraham (Avrom) Sutzkever was born in Smorgon (in present-day Belarus) and spent his formative years studying and writing in Vilna, a center of Jewish intellectual life at the time. He fought in the partisan underground during the Nazi occupation of Poland, entered the Soviet Union following the war, and finally settled in Mandatory Palestine in 1947. The following year he founded the Yiddish literary quarterly Di goldene keyt. His writings have been widely translated.
Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator
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How?
How and with what will you fill
Your cup on the day you’re free?
Will you in your joy still
Hear the scream of the past
Where the skulls of chained days
Clot in bottomless pits?
Searching…
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A Load of Shoes
The cartwheels rush,
quivering.
What is their burden?
Shoes, shivering.
The cart is like
a great hall:
the shoes crushed together
as though at a ball.
A wedding? A party?
Have I gone blind?
Who…
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Green Aquarium
“Your teeth are bars of bone. Behind them, in a crystal cell, your shackled words. Remember the advice of an elder: the guilty, those that dropped poison pearls into your goblet—let them go free. In…
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Deer at the Red Sea
The sunset grew bold: it insisted on staying
In the Red Sea at night, when the innocent pink
Young fawns delicately make their way
Downhill to the palace of water to drink.
They leave their silken…
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The Funeral’s Early...
In Jewish folklore the sight of a water carrier bearing one or two full pails is an omen of good fortune; empty pails foretell bad fortune. The funeral’s early, the concert is late.I go to both (such…