“An Answer to a Letter” a Short story by Avrom Sutzkever Translated by Zackary Sholem Berger from The Yiddish Published Summer 2018 / 5778 In Pakn Treger, The Magazine of The Yiddish Book Center With a Poem

 In Observation of Yom Hashoah: Holocaust Remembrance Day - April 21, 2020.

 

“An Answer to a Letter” a Short story by Avrom Sutzkever

Translated by Zackary Sholem Berger from The Yiddish

Published Summer 2018 / 5778

In Pakn Treger, The Magazine of The Yiddish Book Center 

With a Poem

You can read today’s story here.

Avrom Sutzkever 

Born: 15 July 1913, Smarhoń, Belarus

Died: 20 January 2010, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel

A detailed bio from The Yivo Encylopedia of Eastern European Jews

https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Sutzkever_Avrom

The Blade of Grass from Ponar

BY ABRAHAM SUTZKEVER

TRANSLATED BY MAIA EVRONA

I kept a letter from my hometown in Lithuania, from one

who still holds a dominion somewhere with her youthful charm.

In it she placed her sorrow and her affection:

A blade of grass from Ponar.

This blade of grass with a flickering puff of dying cloud

ignited, letter by letter, the faces of the letters.

And over letter-faces in murmuring smolder:

The blade of grass from Ponar.

This blade of grass is now my world, my miniature home,

where children play the fiddle in a line on fire.

They play the fiddle and legendary is their conductor:

The blade of grass from Ponar.

I will not separate from my hometown’s blade of grass.

My good, longed-for earth will make room for both.

And then I will bring a gift to the Lord:

The blade of grass from Ponar.

A post in Observation of Yom Hashoah: Holocaust Remembrance Day - April 21, 2020. 

“Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorates the 6 million Jews and millions of others who were killed in the Holocaust. The date is set in accordance with the Hebrew calendar, on the 27th of Nisan, so that it varies in regard to the Gregorian calendar. The date was chosen to mark the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising” - from The Holocaust Center for Humanity, Seatlle Washington.

“An Answer to a Letter”, drawing on the author’s life experiences, begins with the narrator reading a letter from a friend from long ago, from the time they were partisans hiding from the Germans in the forests of Belarus.  He and his friend were Jewish. They had saved a Roma man from freezing to death.

“In late fall 1943, when the devourer of seasons had already spread burning stained glass in the Narotsh bogs, and the wind polished and sharpened the moon-like snows on the fir branches, Kim Zelenyak (the same one who cut the cord for that woman Lucy who gave birth to a forest child) found a frozen Romani kid, barely alive, on the dog paths (that’s what the hidden partisan trails were called), wrapped in curlicues of familiar-yet-unfamiliar writing. Since Kim was a frequent guest in my earthen hut, and he understood that my ancestry had some connection with that script, he brought what he found to my dirt house.

Right away they named the little Romani “Roma.” Roma is what the Romani call themselves in the Romani language, so it’s like naming a Yid “Yudl.”

When Roma revived from his frozen state, like an ice-covered windowpane thawed by the sun, he related in sign- and blood-language how he fled naked and alone from the valley of slaughter near Kurenitz, where he was brought with a wagonload of other Gypsies. In that wagon, curled up next to his dead grandfather, were also his three sisters. Their horse died there too, standing in harness. Run-ning away from that valley of slaughter, naked in a frosty night, he wrapped him-self in those garments—sheets of parchment from a torn-up Torah scroll lying on the ground on Kurenitz alleys breathing their last.”

I can not find the date of composition of this story but it was gratifying to me to see the Jewish partisans recognizing the Roma people were also being devastated in the Holocaust and gave them the respect of not calling them “Gypsies”.

I hope you Will read this story, easily Under five minutes so i Will not tell any of The plot.

I am grateful to The Yiddish Book Center for making this valuable edition to in English Holocaust Short stories available .