A Load of Shoes

Abraham Sutzkever

1943

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 have these shoes
left behind?
The heels clatter
with a fearsome din,
transported from Vilna
to Berlin.
I should be still,
my tongue is like meat,
b…
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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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