DVASH SHACHOR. SHIRAT CHAYAV SHEL AVRAHAM SUTZKEVER

Between the two world wars, Sutzkever established himself as a writer in what was then Polish Vilnius. He is regarded as one of the most important contemporary poets in Yiddish, flirting with avant-gardism in the early 1930s, documenting the horrors of Nazi rule in his works after the German invasion, and saving numerous writings from annihilation. In the Vilnius Ghetto he saw his mother and son murdered. After his escape from the ghetto, he lived in Moscow and reported on the extermination of the Jews in his homeland.

In 1947 he emigrated to Israel, where he founded a literary magazine in Yiddish, a language that was marginalized in the newly founded Israel in favour of Hebrew. The current film by the Israeli cultural director Uri Barbash portrays a person who, despite all strokes of fate, finds the inner power of poetry as a tool for survival. BB

Presented in cooperation with the Jewish Film Festival Berlin and Brandenburg.