Abraham Sutzkever: The Power in Poetry

For Samson’s riddle — Out of the strong came something sweet — the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever substituted a riddle of his own: the power that emerges from rhyme and the permanence from what appears to be transitory. Sutzkever came of age in Vilna in the 1920s and '30s when Yiddish poetry was the favored creative outlet of its Jewish youth. For him, poetry — but only if good enough — was more than self-expression, more than beauty and truth: it was the endurance that is manifest in nature and in the Jewish people. In this talk, acclaimed literary scholar Ruth Wisse puts Sutzkever’s poetry to his own test. Professor David Roskies (Jewish Theological Seminary) delivers introductory remarks.