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Avrom Sutzkever's Art of Testimony

Witnessing with the Poet in the Wartime Soviet Union

Bibliographic Data

ID2747658
AuthorsPollin-Galay, Pollin-Galay Pollin-Galay (corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume21
Issue2
Pages1
Publication date2016-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJewish Social Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-6704 • E-ISSN: 1527-2028
PublisherIndiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2979/jewisocistud.21.2.01
OpenAlexW2352200118
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited1

In the spring of 1944, the Yiddish poet and partisan Avrom Sutzkever was airlifted into the unoccupied Soviet Union. With him he brought more than new information about the Holocaust. He brought a distinct approach to witnessing, one that summoned Soviet Jews, and refugees especially, to tell him their stories in response. Sutzkever’s testimony differed from other important testimonial publications that appeared in the Soviet media at the time. In the latter, we find a stylistic and conceptual separation between the voice of Jewish victim and Jewish advocate, observer and interpreter of catastrophe. By contrast, Sutzkever’s work, the epic poem “Kol nidre” in particular, emphasizes dialogue and reciprocity among different witness perspectives. His writing also ascribes dignity and poetic beauty to the voice of the Jewish victim from Poland-Lithuania. In this essay, these observations about Sutzkever’s writing are set in conversation with epistolary responses to the author from Soviet Jewish refugees

Art · Dignity · Judaism · Linguistics · Literature · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Refugee · Soviet union · The Holocaust · Ukrainian · Witness · Hermeneutics and Narrative Identity · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy · Polish-Jewish Holocaust Memory Studies

  • A Poetics of the Holocaust? Three Exemplary Poets

    Open Access•Efraim Sicher•Narracje o Zagładzie•2020

  • The Witness of Poetry

    Open Access•Hermione Frankel, Hazel Frankel•Journal of Literary Studies•2021

  • The Epic Demands of Postwar Yiddish

    Hannah Pollin-Galay•East European Jewish Affairs•2018

  • Call It Jewspeak

    David G Roskies•Poetics Today•2014

Unique citing works3
Citations per year0,38
Citation span2018 - 2021 (4)
Citation velocityhistorical
Highly citedNo
Citation typesNeutral: 3

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