JAMIE BRITTON recommends that we all buy at least two copies of a remarkable book of poems
From celebrated poet to resistance fighter and witness at Nuremberg Trials
SUE TURNER recommends the first ever English edition of a memoir of Abraham Sutzkever, a poet turned resistance activist in the Vilna Ghetto in Lithuania
DETERMINED: A detachment of the United Partisan Organization with its leader Abba Kovner (center, standing). Kovner was member in the socialist Zionist youth movement HaShomer HaTzair and a cousin of the Israeli Communist Party leader and anti-Zionist activist Meir Vilner. Kovner testified at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961
[UPO member/Wikipedia]
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MATTHEW HAWKINS explores the initiatives proposed by HEALING ARTS SCOTLAND
ALEX HALL welcomes an analysis of how modern capitalism is deeply intertwined with emotions, and their manipulation
From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg – Memoir and Testimony
by Abraham Sutzkever
McGill-Queen’s University Press £28.50
ABRAHAM SUTZKEVER was born in 1913 to a leather dealer and raised in the rich cultural heritage of Lithuanian Jews with Vilna (Vilnius) at its core, a city of Poles, Jews, Belorussians, Lithuanians and Russians.
By the 1930s Vilna was highly regarded as a centre for secular Yiddish culture, boasting five daily Yiddish newspapers, a Yiddish education system and a research institute for the study of eastern European Jewish history and culture.
Sutzkever became a celebrated poet in international Yiddish circles, writing lyrically about beauty and nature with little interest in exploring social and political themes.
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