Essential Prose

by Abraham Sutzkever, Zackary Sholem Berger (Translation)

Through Zachary Sholem Berger's translations, 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.

Every page of this book - marvelously translated by Zackary Sholem Berger - trembles with smoldering vitality, and every page persuades us that the angel of prose confided in Sutzkever as faithfully as the angel of poetry. Readers of this book will not fail to appreciate how Sutzkever's unconquered past - in Siberia, in Vilna during what he calls 'the time of slaughter' and in Tel Aviv - bears on our present.
Benjamin Balint

This book is a revelation, even for those who know Sutzkever as one of the great poets of the twentieth century, because it shows Sutzkever, for the first time in English, as a true master of prose. These riveting short stories, in Berger's beautiful translation, cover vast territories from Siberia to Vilna to Israel and beyond, into the worlds of memory, imagination, myth, and legend.
Shachar Pinsker

Genres: Judaism

282 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2020

About the author

Abraham (Avrom) Sutzkever was one of the tiny percentage of creative artists who lived through and survived the devastation. He was one of fewer still who lived through it as a writer, producing between 1941 and 1945 some of his finest poems. The works of those years, written not in retrospect, and not at a distance, but during the daily wretchedness of ghetto life and under constant threat of death, constitute an exceptional instance in the history of art. Sutzkever knew that the writing of Yiddish verse could satisfy the demands of art. His ghetto poems are the more significant because they are not only expressions of the will to resist, but in their subtlety and power, obdurate proofs of survival in a body of work that stands beyond circumstance and time.
Ruth R. Wisse

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