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Justin D. Cammy, editor and translator of From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg: Memoir and Testimony, will discuss the prose works of poet and partisan Avrom Sutzkever – from his memoirs of the Vilna Ghetto and testimony at the Nuremberg Trials to memoirs of his years in Soviet Russia: a lifetime of prose works collected in his newly published volume of translations. The event is hosted by the Chicago Yivo Society.
Abraham Sutzkever (1913-2010) was an acclaimed Yiddish poet. He achieved international fame/recognition as a young writer in interwar Poland, and then settled in Tel-Aviv where he became a link between the fate of European Jewry and the rebuilding of Jewish life in Israel.
Justin D. Cammy is professor of Jewish studies and world literatures at Smith College.
In 1944, the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever was airlifted to Moscow from the forest where he had spent the winter among partisan fighters. There he was encouraged by Ilya Ehrenburg, the most famous Soviet Jewish writer of his day, to write a memoir of his two years in the Vilna Ghetto. Now, seventy-five years after it appeared in Yiddish in 1946, Justin Cammy provides a full English translation of one of the earliest published memoirs of the destruction of the city known throughout the Jewish world as the Jerusalem of Lithuania.
Based on his own experiences, his conversations with survivors, and his consultation with materials hidden in the ghetto and recovered after the liberation of his hometown, Sutzkever’s memoir rests at the intersection of postwar Holocaust literature and history. Both shocking and moving in its intensity, From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg returns readers to a moment when the scale of the Holocaust was first coming into focus, through the eyes of one survivor who attempted to make sense of daily life, resistance, and death in the ghetto.