by Allan Nadler, Jewish Review of Books, Winter 2023
The Yiddish literary elite’s response to the announcement, in 1978, that Isaac Bashevis Singer was that year’s Nobel Laureate for Literature was a quintessentially Yiddish one: kvetching drowned out celebration. Singer was viewed by a great many old-school Yiddishists as a sellout who published his books in English translation before the originals in Yiddish appeared, if they did at all. Many Yiddish readers, particularly Holocaust survivors, found Singer’s depictions of Jewish criminals, demons, dybbuks, perverts, pimps, and prostitutes to be a desecration of the sacred memory of the Yiddish civilization of their murdered parents, children, and siblings. And the reaction in Singer’s dwindling community of fellow Yiddish writers was an especially pointed case of life imitating art: Cynthia Ozick’s satirical novella Envy; or, Yiddish in America, published a full decade earlier, depicted the bitter resentments of an obscure, untranslated Yiddish writer toward his world-famous Singer-like colleague. The real-life bitterness was especially acute since it was understood that this would likely be the first and last Nobel Prize awarded to a Yiddish writer.
I can still vividly recall Chaim Grade’s reaction just two days after Singer’s Nobel Prize was announced. When I mentioned those who were arguing that Grade, himself a revered Yiddish poet and novelist, was more deserving of the Nobel, he barked at me that it was his lifelong friend Abraham Sutzkever who deserved the prize. What earned Grade and Sutzkever the reverence of many Yiddish readers was that each devoted his postwar work to memorializing, indeed sanctifying, their Vilna Yiddish world destroyed by the Nazis.
In 1978, almost nothing of Sutzkever’s work was available in any language other than Yiddish, while Singer was already widely available in nearly ten languages. Over the subsequent years, the great Vilna poet has, thankfully, become far more widely recognized, translated, and celebrated. The past decade alone has witnessed an unprecedented surge of English translations and scholarly studies of Sutzkever’s work, as well as two fine feature-length documentaries. The Israeli literary scholar Dan Miron recently proclaimed that Sutzkever was the greatest poet in the history of the Jewish state, surpassing more famous Hebrew-language colleagues. Yet in Israel, where Sutzkever spent the last half century of his life, he remained almost entirely unknown, and his funeral in 2010 was attended by no more than a few dozen people. … [To read the full article, click here]