Avrom Sutzkever: Ten Poems

·1 hr 15 min·5 clips

A hidden notebook of ten poems by Avrom Sutzkever, written in the Vilna Ghetto in 1943, was discovered in Lithuania's National Library.

A manuscript anchors the conversation. Jonathan Brent presents the event as an act of recovery across borders, connecting audiences in the United States, Lithuania, and elsewhere with YIVO's work alongside scholars, institutions, and government officials. The institutional history gets real attention. YIVO was founded in Vilnius in 1925, then reestablished in New York after Max Weinreich reached the city in 1940. The celebration has grief running through it. Brent notes that many documents and books stayed in Lithuania, hidden in different places, before later recovery and presentation work brought them back into view. From there, the episode narrows in. The speaker asks what it means that Sutzkever's Ten Poems was handwritten, copied for a future reader, and apparently concealed. The physical details do a lot of work: paper, ink blots, reused pages, crossed-out words, underlinings, and the switch from blue to black pen all show things a reproduced volume would flatten. The Yiddish script slants down the page, and that tilt gives the object a feeling of haste, pressure, and live composition. The title page gets the same close look. Its confident title, nearly unreadable signature, and sharp Lamed make the page feel almost defiant. Then the date shifts everything. Because Sutzkever dates the manuscript to May 1943, the guest turns to Vilnius and the conditions around the writing. The discussion places him in the Paper Brigade, sorting books and archives as forced labor while ghetto defense planning was underway. A remembered assignment at the Vilnius train station near the Smolensk Museum brings manuscript, biography, and historical pressure into the same frame. The episode ends with access, pointing listeners to the Edward Blank YIVO online collections project and its larger digitization effort, due for completion on December 19th, 2021.

As heard by us

A May 1943 manuscript becomes a record of pressure, memory, and the marks that carry literary history.

Sutzkever: Ten Poems considers what the survival of a manuscript can bring to the poems themselves. It follows the May 1943 date, Sutzkever's work in the Paper Brigade, and the FPO's plans to defend the ghetto, then settles into the page: blue ink giving way to black,…

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Why you'd press play

You want to see how blue ink, crossed-out words, reused paper, and a hurried hand can change how a poem keeps speaking.

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