Description
Sutzkever Essential Prose is the first volume in English solely devoted to the prose fiction of the poet laureate of postwar Yiddish literature. Encompassing the collections Green Aquarium, Messiah's Diary, Where the Stars Spend the Night, and The Prophecy of the Inner Eye, Zackary Sholem Berger's translations open a new doorway into Sutzkever's fantastic and poignant imagination as well as his harrowing Holocaust experiences. The early stories in this collection are ripe with surreal images and dark fairy-tale motifs, while the later works are more concretely grounded in episodes from real life: Sutzkever's youth in Siberia and Vilna, the war years, and his life in post-war Israel. Everywhere, Sutzkever blurs the lines between real and imagined, between memory and metaphor, forging an idiosyncratic and spellbinding prose.