Abraham Sutzkever, the Yiddish poet whose themes have spanned his experiences in pre-war Vilna, in the Vilna ghetto, with the partisans and through three decades of modern Israel, has been named winner of the 1979 B’nai B’rith International Literary Award.
The prize of $1000 — made possible by a grant from the Joseph Meyerhoff Foundation will be presented to Sutzkever in a public meeting Feb. 18. It will take place in conjunction with the annual meeting of B’nai B’rith’s Commission on Adult Jewish Education in New York City.
Sutzkever, who was born near Vilna in 1913, a descendant of rabbinic and Hasidic families, had his first works published in 1933. During World War II, he managed to escape the Vilna ghetto, joining the partisans who roamed the woods nearby. When Vilna was liberated, he returned and helped to rescue a large number of valuable documents of YIVO.
In 1945, he published “Di Festung” (“Fortress”), a volume of poems whose best lyrics were about his mother, who died in the Holocaust. The following year, “Lider fun Ge to” (“Songs of the Ghetto”) and “Fun Vilner Ge to” (“From the Vilna Ghetto”), a volume of prose, appeared. Sutzkever then emigrated to Palestine where he continued to write. In 1949 he became editor of “Di Goldene Keyt” (“The Golden Chain”).
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
