Following the events of October 7, I reached back to a poem I committed to memory when I first read it—a poem written when we Jews thought that the worst was already behind us. I was born in East Central Europe in 1936, and raised in Canada as a fortunate immigrant in the 1940s, and I consider it the greatest privilege of my life to have seen the establishment of the state of Israel.
But our post-Shoah enemies never stopped trying to destroy our monumental achievement, and because they fail, they try to desecrate its glory. I will never let them. In its quiet, private way this Yiddish poem by Avrom (Abraham) Sutzkever, reaffirms how much is at stake in the Jewish return to the Land of Israel.
First published in November 1948 in the weekly of the Displaced Persons camp in Munich, the poem later appeared in the author’s collected works under the title Shehekhiyonu. Many Jews recite this prayer when first arriving in the land of Israel: Blessed art thou, Lord our G-d, King of the Universe, who has kept us in life (shehekhiyonu), and preserved us (vekiymonu), and enabled us to reach this season (vehigiyonu lazman hazeh). The poet maintains the triple structure of the prayer’s three parallel verbs, but in the conditional form, through the negative possibility that he might not have made it to the Land of Israel.
By the time Sutzkever arrived in Palestine in November 1947, he was renowned in the Yiddish literary world as one of its greatest poets and bravest of survivors. Forced into the ghetto of Vilna with the rest of the Jewish population after the German invasion of June 1941, he continued to write poems and to inspire cultural resistance. He and his wife also joined the Jewish underground resistance and escaped in September 1943 to fight as partisans in the surrounding forests. He said that his subsequent life story reads like a maysele fun Tanakh—a legend of biblical proportions.
Coming to Israel months before the declaration of statehood, he experienced himself as part of both the dead left behind and the Jewish people in their resurrected homeland. This lyric blends the two. Every word in the description of Israel’s birth pangs reverberates with echoes of liturgical and traditional sources. The rhyme of akeyde with zeyde, blending biblical Hebrew with homiest Yiddish, reassures us that not only did Isaac survive G-d’s test of Abraham, but generations of Jewish sons lived to become beloved grandfathers. Every pebble of the Land of Israel is our familiar ancestry.
Speaking in his own voice, the poet expresses thankfulness for his great good fortune, haunted by the knowledge that most of his community failed to reach this destination. The word “not” appears six times in eleven lines, carrying the weight of those others. Had he not arrived, he would have expired, fargoyt—a deliberately untranslatable neologism, a word that Sutzkever creates to define a certain kind of dying, turned into a goy, dying as a member of the Jewish people. The Yiddish prefix far, which can mean “turned into,” joined to the term for gentile makes assimilation explicit. This is less a political rejection of galut than a post-war craving to be fully Jewishly at home.
Yet, this is not yet the end. An added line that requires a new rhyming scheme tells us that even had the poet not made it, his yearning would have come on its own. So powerful and sustained is the Jewish longing for Israel that even without any physical presence, the longing would have remained a metaphysical force. Supernatural power is here ascribed to the civilization that the people of Israel have forged. And the power of this longing speaks for those who have not lived to pronounce the Shehekhiyonu blessing.
By Abraham Sutzkever
If I were not at one with you,
Not breathing air of joy and pain here,
Were I not burning with the Land
Volcanic Land in throes of labor;
After my Trial, if I were not
Being resurrected with the Land
Whose ever pebble is my ancestor—
No bread would sate my hunger,
No water cool my gums,
Till Gentiled I’d expire,
And on its own my yearning would come.
This poem first appeared in the weekly of the Displaced Persons Camps, Af der vakh (On Guard), Munich, November 25, 1948. Dated 1947, the year of the poet’s arrival in Eretz Israel,,it was placed as the opening lyric of the section Shehekhiyonu in Abraham Sutzkever’s collection of poems,In fayer-vogn (In the Chariot of Fire) Tel Aviv: Di Goldene Keyt, 1952.
This article appears in the Spring/Summer 2024 issue of Lubavitch International, to subscribe to the magazine, click here.
Related Articles
Be the first to write a comment.