“Oh my dear brother, life is of no importance to me, what I want is to survive, that is everything.” New Sutzkever translations....

I recently published two new Sutzkever translations.

The first, an elegy for Shloyme Mikhoels, the Soviet Yiddish actor murdered by Stalin, was published in The Arkansas International. This poem uses Mikhoels’ fate and King Lear, the role he was most closely associated with, to explore Sutzkever’s feelings about Zionism.

Sutzkever and Mikhoels had become friends during the two years Sutzkever spent in Moscow after surviving the Vilna Ghetto and Naroch forest. It isn’t surprising that Sutzkever would have been thinking about Mikhoels in the 1980’s, when he wrote this poem, as it was the height of the movement to help Soviet Jewry leave the USSR. By that time, Sutzkever had spent nearly four decades as an Israeli Yiddish poet: pressured to write in Hebrew, a witness to the disdain often heaped on the Yiddish language in Israel. Yet, he was also a leader among a group of writers and artists who didn’t believe that becoming Israeli had to mean rejecting Yiddish, and a voice for Israeli readers who felt the same. He could guess what Mikhoels’ life and career might have looked like had Mikhoels immigrated to Israel.

Here is a link to the poem: https://www.arkint.org/abraham-sutzkever

The second translation was published in Waxwing: http://waxwingmag.org/items/issue19/56_Sutzkever-My-Neighbor-From-the-Ghetto.php

The editors also published an introduction, so I won’t repeat my thoughts here.

http://waxwingmag.org/items/issue19/55_Evrona-Translators-Note.php