It was bound to happen. Abraham Sutzkever, born July 15, 1913, in Smorgon, Lithuania, one of the great poets of the twentieth century and the last towering figure of modern Yiddish literature, died this Wednesday, January 20, in Tel Aviv, where he had lived since 1947. A descendant of rabbis, Sutzkever applied to the writing of poetry the standards of refinement that his ancestors had practiced in obedience to Jewish law. During World War II, when he was herded into the ghetto with the rest of Vilna Jewry, he determinedly continued composing, persuaded that "the angel of poetry" protects the creator of timeless-but only of truly timeless—work.

Sutzkever was already a living legend when he made his first visit to North America in 1959. Yiddish poets traveled from distant cities to pay homage, and thousands thronged to hear him read the poetry he had written during the ghetto years.  When he recited, his vibrant voice belied the devastation that his poems evoked, giving assurance that Jewish life endured. Between poems, he spoke of the many forms of resistance he had witnessed, from the teachers who had persisted in educating their dwindling classes of children, to the young partisans who had escaped to the forests to fight. In Montreal where I lived and attended college, I had heard many poets—Stephen Spender, Dylan Thomas, local figures like Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen. None of their readings was remotely like Sutzkever's, which seemed single-handedly, or single-voicedly, to defy history's verdict on the murdered Jewish civilization of Europe.     

For these emotionally charged public appearances, Sutzkever chose poems with rhetorical and dramatic impact. A quiet poem on the death of his mother ended with her unspoken words:

If you remain
I will still be alive
as the pit of the plum
contains in itself the tree,
the nest and the bird
and all else besides.

     (trans. Seymour Mayne)

A number of his selections included similar images of organic regeneration, bringing assurance that what was once animate would yet find its way back into life. But more defiant verses challenged the fate that had churned a proud people to dust:

Last hour, when you come, bring strength enough
For me to see a palace in ruined masonry,
To drive my final moments to their given end,
To tap a message to my prisoner soul: Be free!

         (trans. C.K. Williams)

No one who heard this prophet of consolation could have imagined that before the war he had started out writing verse so intensely subjective that he stood accused by his colleagues of aesthetic escapism. In truth, from the moment he had begun to write in Vilna in the mid-1930's, Sutzkever had been crafting a legend of himself as a poet—but, at first, a poet of a very different kind. The legend began with his childhood in Siberia, to which his parents had fled during World War I. As against the usual association of that frozen land with penal servitude and climactic hardship, Sutzkever retrospectively cast it as a chaste, snowy wonder-world, and his young self as its "Abraham." His first major poem, "Siberia," charts a child's discovery of his interdependence with nature, whose splendors he will uncover even as they awaken his own creative powers. Whereas most of his fellow Yiddish poets and writers in interwar Poland were engaged in some form of social protest, Sutzkever reached beyond local anxieties to the rediscovery of God's grandeur. Siberia was later issued in book form with illustrations by Marc Chagall, a kindred spirit who likewise found in art a way of transcending "mere" history. 

Misread as escapism, Sutzkever's idea of poetry as an earthly attempt to fathom Creation helped to insulate him from the humiliations of Jewish existence in interwar and wartime Europe. His pact with the "angel of poetry" took precedence over the German assault, and sustained him in its aftermath. With his wife he joined the Jewish fighting underground organization, escaped to the forests, and was airlifted to Moscow where he befriended leading members of the Yiddish intelligentsia before they were liquidated by Stalin. As Polish refugees, the Sutzkevers were allowed to leave the Soviet Union. As if destined to be in the heart of Jewish experience at both nadir and crest, they made their way to the Land of Israel shortly before the Jewish state declared its independence.  In a poem of homecoming, he wrote that had he not reached the Land, he would have expired, fargoyt, a word of the poet's own invention meaning "Gentiled," lost himself as a Jew.

Immediately upon his arrival in Israel, Sutzkever campaigned for and received government support for a Yiddish literary quarterly, Di goldene keyt, which he edited for the next fifty years. Its title, "The Golden Chain," alludes to the chain of transmission that had transposed religious Jewish culture into worldlier forms without snapping under the strain. His poems, which appeared regularly in the magazine's pages, were no less passionate than the verse of his ghetto years. An enthusiastic traveler, he enjoyed most of all his visits to Africa, which included meeting the leader of the Zulus and studying the physiognomy of elephants.

Most students of Sutzkever agree that the finest exemplars of his work are the Tel Aviv poems of his ripest years. Like most of his verse, they are classical in form, as though struggling to control their yearning for the worlds that were lost to him. Nominated more than once for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Sutzkever won his share of recognition, but the damaged condition of Yiddish made him increasingly dependent on translation.

English volumes of his work include Siberia, translated by Jacob Sonntag; Benjamin and Barbara Harshav's A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose; Ruth Whitman's The Fiddle Rose: Poems 1970-1972; and Burnt Pearls: Ghetto Poems, translated by Seymour Mayne. Among his translators into English have been Cynthia Ozick, C.K. Williams, Chana Bloch, Richard Fein, Joseph Leftwich, Neal Kozodoy. A recording of Sutzkever reading his poetry on Folkway Records, made in Montreal in 1959, is available from the Smithsonian Museum. The Israeli scholar Abraham Nowersztern prepared a bibliography in 1976; Nowersztern's bilingual Yiddish and Hebrew catalogue for the Hebrew University and National Library Exhibition on the occasion of Sutzkever's seventieth birthday remains the finest introduction to his life and work.

It was because of Sutzkever that I decided to study and teach Yiddish literature. I was fortunate to have known the language from an early age, though hardly at a level that prepared me for his work. Sutzkever is a master of precisely the kind of wordplay that defies translation, and of a wit that exploits the singularity of a language whose elements are ingeniously fused. Would it be worth learning the language to read Sutzkever? Kitchen Yiddish alone will not do the trick, but those, whether Jew or Gentile, who have made and are presently making the effort gain independent access to the golden chain.

Sutzkever fell silent some years ago. According to his rigorous standards, therefore, he was owed nothing more by the "angel of poetry." Borukh dayen emes, he might have said upon the occasion of his own death: blessed be the true Judge. His mourners will have a harder time accepting the loss.

Ruth R. Wisse is the Martin Peretz professor of Yiddish and professor of comparative literature at Harvard.