Sutzkever is a towering figure among Yiddish poets of all ages. He started to write in his native city of Vilna in the 1930s and endured the Nazi occupation of that city. He joined the partisans in 1943 and was called as a witness at the Nuremberg trials of 1946. He now lives in Israel, where he edits the prestigious Yiddish literary journal Di Goldene Keyt (The Golden Chain). A great master of word and image, he has found his own way of extracting beauty from the somber realities of Jewish life, and his writing eloquently expresses the tragedy and heroism of the Holocaust period.
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