English and Yiddish on facing pages.

Abraham Sutzkever (July 15, 1913 - ) is a Yiddish poet and Second World War partisan.


Sutzkever uses the metaphor of the fiddle to symbolize the poet and the music of poetry struggling to survive death, the Holocaust, and the pain and tragedy of the modern world. The poems are presented in their original Yiddish and in English translation.


Abraham Sutzkever (July 15, 1913 - ) is a Yiddish poet and Second World War partisan.

(Alternate English spellings: Avrom Sutzkever, Avrohom Sutzkever,[1], Avrom Sutskever [used by Encyclopaedia Britannica])

Sutzkever was born in Smorgon, Poland [2] (now Smarhon, Belarus). During the First World War his family fled to seek refuge in Siberia, then in 1922 migrated to Vilna (at that time, Wilno, Poland. He studied in cheder and attended gymnasium (academic high school), and in 1930 joined the Bee Yiddish scouting movement.

Sutzkever was among the Modernist writers and artists in the "Young Vilna" group in the early 1930s. He published his first poem in 1934 in a literary journal.

Under the Nazi occupation beginning in June 1941, Sutzkever survived the first period of violent persecutions of Jews, between June 25 and July 20 1941, by the Lithuanian militia, hidden in the chimney of its own house. He wrote then a poem about these days titled The Pest. Manuscript of this poem survived until 1990, hidden in the house.

Later as all Jews, Sutzkever was interned in the Vilna Ghetto. On September 12, 1943, along with his wife, he escaped to the forests, and together with fellow Yiddish poet Shmerke Kaczerginsky, fought against the Nazis as a partisan. During the Nazi era, Sutzkever wrote over 80 poems, whose manuscripts he managed to save for postwar publication.

After the war he lived in Moscow, then Lódz, and emigrated to Israel. He now resides in Tel Aviv.