Few mastered the intricacies of Yiddish with the passion and aplomb of the last great poet of the language, Abraham Sutzkever, who has died aged 96. Sutzkever's work, which focused on his experiences of the Holocaust, was translated into 30 languages. He rescued Yiddish texts during the second world war, and for six decades battled to revive a Yiddish literary tradition when most of its European speakers had perished.
Sutzkever felt himself "stung with song by a fiery bee" in his youth. He was born in Smorgon, an industrial town in Tsarist-ruled White Russia. Jews suffered pogroms as the town passed between Russian and German control during the first world war. Sutzkever's father, a rabbi by training, moved the family to Omsk, in Siberia, and re-established his leather-crafting business, but died at 30. His father's death coloured the budding poet's early verse.
By 1921, Sutzkever had moved to Vilna (now Vilnius, capital of an independent Lithuania). His exposure to Polish poetry at high school profoundly influenced his earlier work. Vilna had now blossomed into the hub of a vibrant secular Yiddish cultural renaissance.
Siberia inspired his 1936 epic poem, Sibir, full of child's-eye-view imagery, of stars blown by the wind, moonshine and icy rivers, and the fire ceremonies of the Kyrgyz people, whose language he learned. Marc Chagall, a friend, illustrated a 1953 edition of Sibir, his etchings mirroring Sutzkever's words. In 1936, the visiting Austrian novelist Joseph Roth "discovered" Sutzkever, and the next year the Yiddish Pen Club published his first volume of poetry, Blond Dawn. The titles of his verse, such as In the Knapsack of the Wind and Gypsy Autumn, reflect his transcendental love of nature.
In June 1941, the Nazis overran Vilna, killed 5,000 Jews and corralled survivors into two ghettos. They murdered Sutzkever's mother, and on Yom Kippur liquidated the smaller ghetto, an atrocity Sutzkever witnessed while hiding. He wrote in one poem: "I lie in this coffin/The way I would lie/In a suit made of wood,/A bark/Tossed on treacherous waves, /A cradle, an ark."
Following the Vilna Ghetto collection of 1944, more ghetto poems appeared in Sutzkever's 1945 volume, Di Festung (The Fortress). Sutzkever's wife, Freydke, whom he had married the day before war broke out, gave birth during this period, but German guards killed their son. Poignant poems describe dolls without children, shoes without feet, "sounds glimmering like burnt pearls" and "midnight's black flour".
The Nazis forced Sutzkever to catalogue Jewish treasures for a projected museum of an extinct race. Meanwhile he hid "books and tatters of texts more eternal than marble". (After the war he helped unearth etchings by Chagall and the diary of Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism.) Sutzkever and a fellow poet, Shmerke Kaczerginski, smuggled in guns and conducted play readings. Writing poetry, he later noted, became his weapon against death. On 12 September 1943, just before the ghetto's final destruction, Sutzkever, Freydke and Kaczerginski escaped through sewers. Only a few hundred of the ghettos' 40,000 survived.
Sutzkever's 1943 narrative poem, Kol Nidre, reached Soviet Jewish writers, including Ilya Ehrenburg and Boris Pasternak, and the exiled future president of Soviet Lithuania, Justas Paleckis. They implored the Kremlin to rescue him. So an aircraft located Sutzkever and Freydke in March 1944, and flew them to Moscow, where their daughter, Rina, was born. In February 1946, Sutzkever gave testimony at the Nuremberg trials. He then left Russia for Paris – before leading Soviet proponents of Yiddish were purged and executed.
In 1947, his family arrived in Tel Aviv. Within two years Sutzkever founded Di Goldene Keyt (The Golden Chain), Israel's only Yiddish literary quarterly, which he edited until its demise in 1995. Sutzkever resuscitated the careers of Yiddish writers from Europe, the Americas, the Soviet Union and Israel. Official Zionism, however, dismissed Yiddish as a defeatist diaspora argot. "They will not uproot my tongue," he retorted. "I shall wake all generations with my roar."
Belatedly, in 1985 Sutzkever became the first Yiddish writer to win the prestigious Israel prize for his literature. An English compendium appeared in 1991.
Sutzkever was a keen traveller, touring South American jungles and African savannahs, where the sight of elephants and the song of a Basotho chief inspired more Yiddish verse.
In the 1970s he became a favourite on the academic lecture circuit, as young Jews rediscovered the language of their grandparents. In 2003, the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research honoured the poet with a retrospective exhibition. Sutzkever once said: "If you carry your childhood with you, you never age." Surely the best epitaph for a poet who affirmed life, even during unspeakable sufferings.
Freydke died in 2003. Rina and another daughter, Mira, survive him, along with two grandchildren.