Abraham Sutzkever

Abraham Sutzkever was born in 1913 in Smarhon

Sutzkever was born in 1913 in Smarhon, then in the Russian Empire. During World War I his family moved to Omsk in Siberia, where his father Hertz died. His mother Rayne later took the family to Vilnius.

In Vilnius he studied at a religious Jewish school and then at a Polish Jewish high school. He first wrote poems in Hebrew and later moved to Yiddish. In 1930 he joined the Jewish scout group Bin, where he published his first piece and met his future wife Freydke.

He joined the Yung Vilne group of writers and artists, and his first Yiddish book, Lider, appeared in 1937. In 1941 he and his wife were sent to the Vilna Ghetto, where the Nazis murdered his newborn son and his mother. From 1942 he led the Paper Brigade, which hid Jewish cultural treasures from the Nazis.

In September 1943 he escaped to the forests and fought as a partisan. In March 1944 a Soviet plane flew him and his wife to Moscow, and in 1946 he testified at the Nuremberg trials. In 1947 he reached the Land of Israel and settled in Tel Aviv.

In 1949 he founded Di goldene keyt and edited it for decades. In 1985 he became the first Yiddish writer to receive the Israel Prize. He died in Tel Aviv in 2010.