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Description
Translated by Zackary Sholem Berger. Introduction by Heather Valencia. 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.
About the Author
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.Zackary Sholem Berger writes and translates in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English. He was a Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow in 2013 and has published four collections of original poetry--Not in the Same Breath (Yiddish House, 2011), One Nation Taken Out of Another (Apprentice House, 2014), All the Holes Line Up (Ben Yehuda Press, 2019), and Vi Lebt Zikh Dortn (self-published, 2019). His translation of Avrom Sutzkever's prose poetry, Essential Prose, was published in 2020 by White Goat Press, and his illustrated bilingual edition of Sutzkever's Ode to the Dove was published in 2023 by Ben Yehuda Press. His best known Yiddish literary work is likely his translation of Dr. Seuss's The Cat in the Hat (Di Kats der Payats, 2003). A mild-mannered physician by day, he lives with his Yiddish-speaking family in Baltimore, Maryland.