ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
From celebrated poet to resistance fighter and witness at Nuremberg Trials
SUE TURNER recommends the first ever English edition of a memoir of Abraham Sutzkever, a poet turned resistance activist in the Vilna Ghetto in Lithuania
DETERMINED: A detachment of the United Partisan Organization with its leader Abba Kovner (center, standing). Kovner was member in the socialist Zionist youth movement HaShomer HaTzair and a cousin of the Israeli Communist Party leader and anti-Zionist activist Meir Vilner. Kovner testified at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
MICK McSHANE rubs shoulders with Mod legend Steve Craddock and joins in with the joyous Glasgow choir
DENNIS BROE sifts out the ideological bias of the newest TV series offerings, and picks out what to see, and what to avoid
From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg – Memoir and Testimony
by Abraham Sutzkever
McGill-Queen’s University Press £28.50
ABRAHAM SUTZKEVER was born in 1913 to a leather dealer and raised in the rich cultural heritage of Lithuanian Jews with Vilna (Vilnius) at its core, a city of Poles, Jews, Belorussians, Lithuanians and Russians.
By the 1930s Vilna was highly regarded as a centre for secular Yiddish culture, boasting five daily Yiddish newspapers, a Yiddish education system and a research institute for the study of eastern European Jewish history and culture.
Sutzkever became a celebrated poet in international Yiddish circles, writing lyrically about beauty and nature with little interest in exploring social and political themes.
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