Yiddish poet

di groyskayt fun kleynkayt

The last great Yiddish poet of the twentieth century has died at age 96. Abraham Sutzkever died January 19, 2010. Born 1913 in Czarist Russia and raised up in Vilna, Sutzkever experienced the golden period of Yiddish culture in Vilna followed by its destruction and all of Yiddish culture by the Nazis. A prolific writer, he began publishing lyric poetry in the 1930s. He is remembered for his reports from the Vilna ghetto. He was a witness at the Nuremberg trials, after which he emigrated to Israel, where he continued to write in Yiddish, a struggle in a country that eschewed the language of Eastern European Jewry.

David Hirsch wrote in 1986 "Abraham Sutzkever's a major twentieth-century poet who may never be accorded the recognition he deserves, because he writes in a language whose natural readership has been decimated by the Nazi genocide in Europe. By those who read him in Yiddish, Sutzkever is widely considered the greatest Yiddish poet of the twentieth century."

There are several collections of his poems in English on line and you can find his Yiddish works through the Open Library

A few marvelous essays published on his 90 birthday can be read here:

http://www.eilatgordinlevitan.com/vilna/vilna_pages/vilna_stories_sutzkever.html

and an obituary in Haaretz:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1144431.html

one in the NZZ:

http://www.nzz.ch/nachrichten/kultur/literatur/der_lyriker_als_zeitzeuge_1.4570021.html

David H. Hirsch, Abraham Sutzkever's Vilna Poems "Modern Language Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Winter, 1986), pp. 37-50 Available through JSTOR