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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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