Amputation

The poet, writer, and translator Arnold Slucki was born Aron Kreiner in Tyszowce, in Lublin province. He was active in communist circles in the 1930s and fled to the Soviet Union upon Germany’s invasion of Poland. Although his earliest works were written in Yiddish, during the war he began writing exclusively in Polish under the assumed name Arnold Slucki. In 1968, he relocated to West Berlin, after a brief stint in Israel, in response to the rising antisemitism of the Polish Communist Party. Much of his poetry was influenced by modernist and socialist realist reflections on the shtetl, Jewish folklore and mysticism, and his childhood memories.