From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg: Memoir and Testimony

by Abraham Sutzkever, Justin D. Cammy (Editor), Avraham Novershtern (Afterword)

2022 LEVIANT MEMORIAL PRIZE IN YIDDISH STUDIES, MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION

2022 FINESTONE PRIZE FOR THE BEST TRANSLATION OF A BOOK ON A JEWISH THEME, J.I. SEGAL AWARDS         
                                                                 
2022 CANADIAN JEWISH LITERARY AWARD 

HIGHLIGHTED ON CBS's 60 MINUTES  (Paper Brigade)

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. He grappled with the responsibility to produce a document that would indict the perpetrators and provide an account of both the horrors and the resilience of Jewish life under Nazi rule. Cammy bases his translation on the two extant versions of the full text of the memoir and includes Sutzkever's diary notes and full testimony at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946. Fascinating reminiscences of leading Soviet Yiddish cultural figures Sutzkever encountered during his time in Moscow - Ehrenburg, Yiddish modernist poet Peretz Markish, and director of the State Yiddish Theatre Shloyme Mikhoels - reveal the constraints of the political environment in which the memoir was composed. 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. A Yiddish Book Center Translation.

488 pages, Paperback

Published October 6, 2021

About the author

Abraham (Avrom) Sutzkever was one of the tiny percentage of creative artists who lived through and survived the devastation. He was one of fewer still who lived through it as a writer, producing between 1941 and 1945 some of his finest poems. The works of those years, written not in retrospect, and not at a distance, but during the daily wretchedness of ghetto life and under constant threat of death, constitute an exceptional instance in the history of art. Sutzkever knew that the writing of Yiddish verse could satisfy the demands of art. His ghetto poems are the more significant because they are not only expressions of the will to resist, but in their subtlety and power, obdurate proofs of survival in a body of work that stands beyond circumstance and time.
Ruth R. Wisse

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