How?

Abraham Sutzkever

1943

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 hopelessly
For the keys to jammed locks,
You’ll chew pavement like bread
And think it was better before,
And time will gnaw your hand gently
Like a cricket…
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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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