Sutzkever Essential Prose

Through Zackary Sholem Berger's translations, Sutzkever Essential Prose brings to light for English readers the largely unknown prose of a seminal Yiddish poet. In these works, Avrom Sutzkever blurs the lines between fiction, memoir, and poetry; between real and imagined; between memory and metaphor. He offers haunting scenes drawn from a vast imagination and from the unique life he lived—his youth in Siberia and Vilna, his trauma as a partisan and a survivor, and his post-war life as a Yiddish poet in Israel.

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.

Avrom Sutzkever (1913-2010) spent his childhood in Siberia and emerged as a writer in the burgeoning literary circles of Jewish Vilna. In the Vilna Ghetto, he wrote poetry as a means of survival. As a member of what became known as the Paper Brigade, he helped to save Jewish cultural treasures from Nazi destruction. After the war, he became an influential advocate and activist for Yiddish culture, as well as a symbol of resistance through acts such as his testimony at the Nuremberg trials. He founded the Yiddish literary journal Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain) and in 1985 received the Israel Prize for Yiddish literature.