The great Yiddish poet Avraham Sutzkever (1913-2010) wrote poems while confined by the Nazis to the Vilna Ghetto, where he labored tirelessly to preserve Jewish books and manuscripts before escaping to take up arms with local partisans. After World War II, he settled in Israel, where he did much to foster and encourage other Yiddish writers while composing a prodigious poetic legacy of his own. Reviewing a newly published volume of his work, translated into English by Richard Fein, James Nadel writes:

[M]any of the pieces included [by Fein] have never before been rendered into English, but others have appeared in previous collections of Sutzkever’s work. The most prominent poems of the latter category are also those closest to Fein’s heart: the Siberia series from 1952–53, which was originally published in an earlier, longer, and somewhat different form in 1937. The series reflects on Sutzkever’s childhood years when he lived near the steppe city of Omsk. . . .

The poem “Recognition,” [part of this Siberia series], features a young speaker running to the top of a mountain because his father has told him that that is where the world ends. Arriving at the summit, the poet finds not an insurmountable boundary, but a platform from which he can gaze upon an expansive world and his “little dot of a father.” The realization that the world and its natural wonders continue beyond the isolated corner of his family’s cottage transforms the speaker of the poem into an unstoppable force of nature. . . .

Indeed, the scene . . . is transposed from the mountains of Siberia to the deserts of Israel in a previously untranslated poem (“Here I Am Fated to See . . . ”), written 35 years after the original image came into being and nearly twenty years after it was published in the Siberia series. Summiting the cliffs of a wadi, Sutzkever views the landscape through a “tear,” just as he had gazed upon the snow and ice of Siberia. The fire of the wadi reminds him of the “savor” of first snow. He has the same “revelation” that he did as “a child on the mountain” at the “beginning of my beginning.” Realizing the parallels between these two moments, the poet comments, “Someone wants my soul to fall to its knees/ Before it rises brand new in humid mirrors.”

These poems have never before appeared in the same volume, in English or in Yiddish. Read in tandem, they illustrate Sutzkever’s encounter with a new natural landscape to which he can apply his developed poetic sensibility. Past, present, and future mingle in this space. The poet is resurrected, phoenix-like, in fire, but the world around him is a mirror that reflects his frozen memories. The initial image of “discovery” is transmuted into continual and cyclical reinvention.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.