Green Aquarium

Abraham Sutzkever

1956

1

“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 thanks for your generosity, they will erect your immortality. But the others, the innocent, that trill falsely like nightingales over a grave—don’t…

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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.

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