In late May 1967, my mother picked up the phone in our home in Montreal to call the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever in Tel Aviv. From the screaming headlines in the three Yiddish dailies to which we subscribed, she knew that UN Secretary General U Thant had capitulated to the demand of Egypt's president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, to pull the UN Emergency Force out of Sinai. The Egyptians and Syrians were now massing their troops for war on the borders with Israel, which for all intents and purposes had been abandoned to its fate by the rest of the world. Mother offered to wire funds so that Sutzkever, his wife Freydke, and their daughter Mirele could fly to Canada for safety.

What Sutzkever said to her in reply I never learned. They had not been personally acquainted for very long—when my parents left Vilna in 1930, Sutzkever, born in 1913 and today still living in Tel Aviv, was an adolescent, and their paths had never crossed. But my mother's Montreal salon was a fixture of the Yiddish-speaking world, as well known as were her financial benefactions to Yiddish poets and artists, and in the late 1950's they had at last met. My guess is that he now laughed at her offer to help him leave Israel.

By this time, in any case, I was in Boston, in my sophomore year at Brandeis, and I was a confirmed “exilic” Jew, a disciple of George Steiner and theoretically loyal to no land, beholden to no place; or at least no living place. For me, at the cosmopolitan age of nineteen, no one could carry the mantle of Jewish moral authority, teach the authentic traditions, or speak for the sacred dead unless born and trained in the vanished Old World—a theologian like A.J. Heschel or Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, a writer like Elie Wiesel or I.B. Singer, a scholar like Brandeis's Nahum Glatzer. Or, by way of radical contrast, Herbert Marcuse, another European teaching at Brandeis and then at the height of his influence as the philosophical guru of the tear-down-the-walls young.

Along with millions of my generation, I had joined in singing hymns of protest led by one of our own, Bob Dylan (né Zimmerman). When it came to seducing girls, however, I would resort to the Yiddish I learned at my mother's knee. My most effective song by far was “Beneath the Whiteness of Your Stars,” written by Sutzkever and set to music in the Vilna ghetto during World War II. “Beneath the whiteness of your stars,” I sang, “Stretch out toward me your white hand;/All my words are turned to tears—/They long to rest within your hand.” From Mother's stories, I knew that Yiddish songs invariably worked magic, though what happened next she never taught me.

But in May 1967, aspiring cosmopolitan or no, it was for the Jewish state that I felt most deeply. I was thus doubly disappointed by my parents' response when, in the first week of June, with war in the Middle East a certainty, I asked their permission to volunteer for the Israeli home front. I lacked all practical knowledge, they counseled. Furthermore, should the war end in Israel's favor, I was already scheduled to leave in two months' time to spend my junior year abroad in Jerusalem. They were right; I stayed put. Indeed, by the time I arrived in Israel in late summer, as part of the largest group of students—some 300 strong—that the American Friends of the Hebrew University had ever flown over, a real army of Israeli kids exactly my age had routed the Arab foe and liberated the Old City of Jerusalem.

Besides taking university courses in Yiddish literature, I planned to tour the Yiddish landscape of Israel. I soon found everyone who was still alive. In the Tel Aviv phonebook alone, there were more Yiddish novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, actors, directors, thinkers, scholars, and communal leaders than I could possibly hope to meet in my ten months in the land. With telephone tokens in hand, I called up the whole Yiddish world, using the identical words of introduction: “Kh'heys Dovid Roskes. A studént fun Kanáde. Kh'volt zeyer vein zikh bakenen mit aykh.” (My name is David Roskies. I'm a student from Canada. I'd so much like to meet you.)

At the top of my list were the living legends from Vilna who had known my parents during their student years. I started with Izye Rosenshein and then moved on to Dr. Alexander Libo, the dashing captain of Vilna's Maccabi rowing team who had hidden out in an underground bunker and was the only one of my parents' inner circle to have survived the war—and who was still, in his late seventies, practicing medicine in Tel Aviv. The patients I saw in his waiting room were as old as he, and spoke every European language but Hebrew. Over a glass of Israeli grapefruit juice, a drink I was hooked on, I had already been told by Izye Rosenshein that on the day in 1944 when the Red Army liberated Vilna, what was on Mrs. Libo's mind was whether her dress would still be considered stylish by the women above ground.

I had invested more, however, in meeting Mark Dvorzhetski, another famous physician from Vilna now living on Tel Aviv's Dizengoff Square. A heavy-set man with enormous black eyebrows, completely bald, he greeted me at the door of what looked to be a fancy apartment. Younger than Dr. Libo by about two decades, he spoke the same Vilna Yiddish as the Palevskys of New York and Tevke (Ted) Sheres of Montreal—former partisans, all—with a crisp, spicy diction.

I had brought him a copy of my play, Hineni, which we had performed at Brandeis, both the English original and a Yiddish translation. In this drama about the failed 1943 uprising in the Vilna ghetto, the narrator's lines, I told Dr. Dvorzhetski, were taken verbatim from “Apologia of a Physician,” an essay he had written in Paris soon after the end of the war. “Thoughts are disquieting and memories astir,” he read, knitting his huge eyebrows. “Like my grandfathers before me, I rise at midnight to weep for the destruction of the Temple. It is the ancient ceremony of nocturnal reveries in a new form and with a new content.” He was curious to know how I had portrayed Jacob Gens, the head of the Judenrat, and did I know that Zelig Kalmanovitsh's son, Shalom Luria, was living on a kibbutz? He asked nothing about me or about how a young, Canadian-born Jew had come to speak fluent Yiddish. I had sought him out to commune with his sorrow, and that was enough.

_____________

My secret goal while in Israel was to publish the tenth issue of our Yiddish student journal, Yugntruf (“Call to Youth”), by drawing solely on local talent. For sharing such literary ambitions, there was only one address that mattered in the upscale northern part of Tel Aviv.

Rising slowly to the top floor, in an elevator car just big enough for three passengers, I pictured myself as a young provincial writer, Hebrew manuscript in hand, having made my way to Warsaw to appear at the doorstep of the great I.L. Peretz (ca. 1852-1915). Greeting me in a satin waistcoat, smoking a pipe or cigar, Peretz would determine whether my forte was lyric poetry or realistic sketches, and explain to me why it was necessary that I switch from Hebrew, read merely by thousands, to Yiddish, spoken by millions.

The voice I had heard on the intercom below could only have been Freydke's. This was the “F. Levitan” to whom the young Abraham Sutzkever had dedicated his poem, “On My Wander Flute,” when they first fell in love. “What is left to do in such an hour,” he had written, “O, my world of a thousand colors,/except/to gather into the knapsack of the wind/the red beauty/and bring it home for evening bread.” Never was a poet's wife more aptly named—Freydke, meaning joy. God, how youthful she still looked with her jet-black hair!

The inside of the apartment was cool and calm, even in the midday heat, with Chagalls and other priceless paintings on every wall. Some were portraits of Sutzkever himself at various stations of his life: here with dark-rimmed glasses, there with a shock of brown hair atop a bohemian-blue turtle-neck sweater. The coffee table was cluttered with books in Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, Polish, French, and German. Sutzkever's desk faced us as we sat on the couch, offset by a wall of books and files crammed with manuscripts and literary correspondence. This was the desk, I imagined, where he had put the finishing touches on his great epic poem, Geheymshtot, “Secret City,” about the last ten Jews living in the sewers beneath Vilna.

Sutzkever was dressed in a plaid short-sleeved shirt, open at the collar. His hair had thinned since I had seen him last at an unforgettable Hanukkah gathering in Montreal in 1963. His forehead was now like adamant, harder than flint.

Why had I walked all the way in such heat?

“Vayl ver es kumt tsu aykh iz oyle-regl,” I wanted to say: because coming here signifies an ascent. Instead I replied, referring to him in the honorific third person, “Does he not live on the top floor? If not higher?” Returning at that moment with a tall glass of grapefruit juice, Freydke laughed with pleasure at my allusion to Peretz's famous story about a saintly hasidic rabbi.

“Ach,” she said, “here, we live in an elevator building, but how sorely Abrasha misses his mailman!” When they had lived in a third-floor apartment elsewhere in Tel Aviv, said Sutzkever, taking her cue, the mailman would yell up to him from the street, in Yiddish: “Sutzkever! Leivick just sent you a manuscript!” “Sutzkever! Here's a large envelope from Opatoshu!”

It was my turn to laugh. I laughed at the invasion of a writer's privacy. I laughed at the chutzpah of a simple Jew hawking the great names of Yiddish literature for all the world to hear. I laughed at the subversiveness of an Israeli mailman yelling in Yiddish in the Hebrew city of Tel Aviv. In fact, Yiddish writers routinely used to provide their readers with their home address. But now that Jewish Warsaw was no more, now that Peretz no longer lived at Jerozolimskie 83 and Hillel Zeitlin no longer held forth at Szliska 60, Sutzkever's apartment in Tel Aviv was the one place where every Yiddish manuscript could still find a home. Someday, too—God willing—a manuscript of mine.

Like the mailman, you never came to Sutzkever empty-handed. You had to bring news of the world, preferably news about the Yiddish world. But any Jewish or literary news would do as well. So I reported to Sutzkever about Professor Khone Shmeruk, his relative by marriage with whom I was studying in Jerusalem, and about what I was hearing from home. Yes, it was true that Mother and the poet Melekh Ravitch had had a falling-out. How did I know it was for real this time? Because she ordered the bronze bust of Ravitch removed from our living room and brought down to the basement. Had I attended the funeral in New York of Uriel Weinreich (1926-1967), whose brilliant career as a scholar of Yiddish had been cut short by leukemia? No, I had not. Nor had I even met this man, who was to have trained me in the field.

Surrounded by all the books and works of art, protected from the midday heat and the unbearable humidity, seated on the couch with Sutzkever to my left and Freydke to my right, I knew that to begin talking shop, to discuss the feasibility of publishing our student magazine in Israel, would be tantamount to sacrilege. The purpose of this exchange was to create a mood, to start things rolling, to set the stage for memories while, lurking just beneath the surface of our words, hiding just beyond our circle of intimacy, were the forces of evil that only yesterday had destroyed Vilna, destroyed Yiddish, destroyed our people. Our mundane anecdotes—like Sutzkever's poetry—were holding the demons at bay.

_____________

Vilna, 1928. It was raining cats and dogs, and fifteen-year-old Abrasha Sutzkever was impossibly broke. What to do? The latest movie was playing at the Piccadilly across the street, and he was determined not to leave the spot until he had found money for a ticket. So he looked around and looked around, and there, swimming in the gutter, lay a whole zloty. With the change he bought himself an ice cream.

Vilna, 1943. Sutzkever and 39 other captive Jews were working in the building of the Yiddish Scientific Institute—YIVO—outside the ghetto as part of the Paper Brigade, charged with locating cultural treasures for the Germans to loot. He and Rokhl Krinsky were working as a team when he suddenly turned to her and said, “Rokhl, go over to that shelf and pull out the seventh volume of the shas”—the Talmud—“and I promise that you'll find American dollars hidden inside.” Rokhl, a woman long under Sutzkever's spell, knew better than to ask questions. She went over to the shelf, pulled out the seventh volume—Gittin (“Divorce”), I think it was—flipped through the huge folio pages, and found . . . $125 in cash.

I neglected to ask what they did with the money, whether they used it to buy food or arms. Did it matter? In other stories, told against the backdrop of the ghetto, or of the partisan brigades, or of Moscow at the height of the postwar Stalinist terror, the figure of Sutzkever once again prevailed over certain death by his ability to read the hieroglyphics of history. In the shadow of the Kremlin, he had said to his wife: “Freydke, you'll see. Some day there won't be enough wagons in Moscow to cart all these statues of the Little Father [Stalin] into the dump.” Freydke, with a big smile, nodded.

After the war, Sutzkever labored mightily to rescue the sheymes, the sacred fragments written by the dead. Back in Vilna, a young man named Avreml Golub ran up to him and whispered in his ear, “Gebn tsi nit gebn?” (That is, do I relinquish the archive of the Kovno ghetto to the NKVD, or not?) “Nit gebn!” proclaimed the oracle.

As I did not come to that first visit empty-handed, I did not leave empty-handed. In addition to the latest issue of Di goldene keyt (“The Golden Chain”), the Yiddish literary journal that Sutzkever had been editing since 1949, he presented me with the latest, exquisitely published volume of his verse, inscribed with a doodled self-portrait suitable for framing. Could this be in return for Mother's financial largesse? Why did she—and not she alone—support him so lavishly? Was not the glory of a poet to be measured by the poetry alone? Ach, I had much to learn.

_____________

Six weeks later, on a mild September afternoon, Sutzkever had business to attend to downtown at the Peretz publishing house on Allenby Street, and I was happy to tag along. What better opportunity to ask him whether he knew of anyone who could typeset our student journal, with all the requisite diacritical marks? To use his own typesetter, he explained as we boarded the bus, was out of the question; the press that published him was a cooperative, affiliated with Israel's labor federation, the Histadrut. Suddenly I heard the driver calling us to the front. Sutzkever had let me board ahead of him as—so I thought—an act of noblesse oblige. Actually, he had meant for me to pay his fare. Making light of my embarrassment, he promptly deposited the coins.

After all those years hobnobbing with writers and artists in my parents' home, I felt horribly inept. Far worse, I had failed the test of religious imagination, I who fancied myself exquisitely alive to manifestations of the sacred in the realm of the everyday. Sutzkever was no mere poet or raconteur. His poetry was scripture, his home a sanctuary, his person a priestly oracle. Pilgrims bring offerings, however modest, to a shrine. Was I any different?

But the afternoon was not yet over. His meeting was with the director of the publishing house, Shloyme Shvaytser, and Sutzkever's rage at this poor man, occasioned by two misprints in the latest book that had appeared under their joint imprimatur, was terrifying to behold. God help me if I were ever to be on the receiving end. But then, as if to make amends, both for the scene I had just witnessed and for my shameful performance on the bus, Sutzkever insisted that I come home with him for a light supper.

We ate in the living room, seated on the couch, and after drinking a l'khayim, he and Freydke proceeded to tell me the story I most wanted to hear.

It was the story of their miraculous 1944 airlift to freedom on the strength of his epic wartime poem, “Kol Nidrei.” The manuscript had been carried on foot all the way to Moscow by a partisan named Yurgis. After it was read aloud at a public gathering organized by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the committee's two chairmen, the writer Peretz Markish and the actor-director Shlomo Mikhoels, arranged through Justas Paleckis, the prime minister in exile of Soviet Lithuania, for a Red Army plane to be sent into the forests to rescue the great partisan-poet. By the skin of their teeth, Abrasha and Freydke made it to the landing strip on a frozen lake. In the cockpit of the tiny two-propeller machine, there was room for only the pilot and the Yiddish poet; with Freydke strapped down in the fuselage, they made their narrow escape. Speaking of bodies—Freydke interrupted Sutzkever's recitation—I should know that the male partisans in the Narocz forest were utterly indifferent to the filth and lice, but every other day, in lieu of bathing, she would roll naked in the snow.

With his austere forehead and sorrowful eyes, I thought this is how the prophet Ezekiel must have appeared to the exiles in Babylonia: Ezekiel who, if this was what it took to save the word of God, would swallow a scroll inscribed with lamentations, dirges, and woes; Ezekiel who, for the benefit of a remaining few believers, would rehearse and rehearse his transfiguring visions of punishment and salvation. How blessed I was to be numbered among them—and to have gained the confidence of Mrs. Ezekiel, too.

As Sutzkever ushered me out, I noticed hidden among the oil paintings a small tin plaque covered with rust. It read “Wilkomirski 14.”

“Oh,” I said, “that was your address in Shnípeshik, where you lived with your mother in an attic. There, just as you were laboring over your first poem for Hanukkah, she presented you with a fountain pen in its box of gopher wood.”

“You know about that?” asked Sutzkever with evident delight.

“I heard you read a poem about it—in Montreal.” “Yes,” he said after but a moment's pause. “That was a splendid evening.”

_____________

Sitting on the crosstown bus on my way back to the Tel Aviv bus terminal, I relived the evening in my mind, and suddenly everything snapped into place.

In 1963 Sutzkever had been on an extended lecture tour in the United States and Canada, with several appearances in my hometown. One was a black-tie affair at the Ritz Carlton sponsored by the Histadrut, from which I had been spared. Now it was the first night of Hanukkah, and the Vilna compatriots had invited the Sutzkevers to an intimate gathering at Montreal's Jewish Public Library. My parents were out of town, and for some reason my sister, Ruth Wisse, who had arranged his first visit to Montreal a few years earlier, was also unable to attend.¹ So I represented the family.

Except for the fact that the tea and cake were served before the program instead of afterward—which enabled me to approach Sutzkever, hand him a copy of my first Yiddish story, “The International,” and tell him about my literary plans—the evening proceeded as always. The usual suspects got up to speak: Mr. Grossman, high-pitched like a schoolmarm, and our elder statesman Melekh Ravitch, who praised the honored guest for having assumed moral responsibility for all of Yiddish literature. And then it was the turn of Mr. Rywusz.

Rywusz was no public speaker. In a heavy Russian accent, he began to reminisce about the ghetto, the round-ups, the killing field of Ponary where 35,000 were murdered, the Night of the Yellow Passes, the work brigades, the capture of Yitzhak Wittenberg, commander of the ghetto's fighting forces, the failed uprising, the flight to the forest, the encirclement, the betrayals, the miraculous airlift of Abrasha and Freydke. When he finished, Freydke got up. She was supposed to thank the assembled guests; only she couldn't, because she started to cry. Whereupon a Mr. Mandelbaum jumped up from the audience and insisted on saying a few words, insisted on reliving a Hanukkah celebration in the forest twenty years earlier with Abrasha, Freydke, and Shmerke Kaczerginski, recalling exactly how they lit the candles—in memory of the ancient miracle in the Temple, or to honor the already murdered millions?—and what words were spoken, and how later, when they smelled the German bodies burning on all the highways, it was the smell of vengeance, the vengeance they had sworn to take when they formed the brigade named Nekome, revenge. Then he too burst out crying, and his wife had to lead him out of the auditorium.

Sutzkever had the last word. Speaking as if in a trance, he went around the room, calling out the names of his old Vilna friends: Czuzhoj, the buddy he had gone swimming with on the far side of the Vilíye river; Tevke Sheres, “with a gaze so steadfast and purposeful that it could make the enemy wither away.” Sutzkever looked younger than I would ever see him again. He had been summoned back, to a time before the slaughter, and now, heeding the summons, he proceeded to celebrate yet another first night of Hanukkah.

It was 1928, he said, and he was fifteen (my age exactly), and his mother, wearing a rose-colored kerchief, walked into the freezing attic where they lived at Wilkomirski 14 in the Vilna suburb of Shnípeshik and found him writing a poem. The poem he would read to us now had been written in memory of that “first poem.”

As the bus turned left on Ibn Gabirol Street toward the terminal, I remembered how very disappointed I had been with Sutzkever that night for choosing to read this poem about his childhood, with its invocation of the gift of the pen in its gopher-wood box.

“What did you expect?,” asked my friend Khaskl, an aspiring Yiddish poet himself, when I complained to him the next day. “That he would trot out ‘The Teacher Mira’ that we memorized as schoolchildren?” Gopher wood, Khaskl reminded me, was the wood that arks are built of, to survive the mounting floodwaters.

“He should have read one of the poems that he wrote while fighting with the partisans,” I protested, “with the purple juice of berries instead of ink.”

But Khaskl, I now understood, had been right. What rescued Sutzkever from death was not the military airlift but the muse—the muse who paid him visit after visit after visit, whether in the luminescent frost of a Vilna suburb or in the enervating heat of Tel Aviv. And to ensure that this heavenly letter-carrier not get lost along the way, Sutzkever, perhaps on the day the Jews of Vilna were rounded up and marched into the ghetto, or perhaps afterward when there remained of them nothing but their ashes, had managed to salvage the tin plaque bearing his Shnípeshik address, so that decades later the muse might be led to meet her anointed poet in fiery embrace on the uppermost floor.

_____________

¹ For a thorough discussion of Sutzkever's life and work, see her essay, “The Last Great Yiddish Poet?” (COMMENTARY, November 1983).

_____________