While Abra­ham Sutzkev­er (1913−2010) needs no intro­duc­tion as one of his century’s great Yid­dish poets, pub­lish­ers, and polit­i­cal fig­ures, this poem reflects a cru­cial moment in his devel­op­ment. When Nazi occu­piers con­script­ed Jews in the Vil­na ghet­to to sort through their doc­u­ments and arti­facts to be shipped to Ger­many or pulped, Sutzkev­er vol­un­teered for this unit, known as the ​“Paper Brigade.” Along­side oth­er mem­bers, he risked his life to hide and save many Jew­ish cul­tur­al trea­sures, from Theodor Herzl’s diary to Chagall’s draw­ings, find­ing safe haven for some of them — and him­self — in Sovi­et Rus­sia after its alliance with Ger­many col­lapsed. This extra­or­di­nary sto­ry of the Paper Brigade has been told by David Fish­man in The Book Smug­glers (ForeEdge, 2017.) ^{1 1} James Adam Red­field, ​“Fate on Hold: Jew­ish Col­lec­tors at War,” review of The Book Smug­glers by David Fish­man and The Archive Thief by Lisa Moses Leff, The Reveal­er, 10 Sep­tem­ber, 2018. 

Nat­u­ral­ly, Sutzkever’s work with the Paper Brigade influ­enced his approach to poet­ry as well. In ​“The Lead Plates of the Broth­ers Romm” he makes bul­lets to fight the Nazis by melt­ing down plates used for the Vil­na Shas, the stan­dard print of the Tal­mud (though Nazis had already sold the plates for scrap.) ^{2 2} A trans­la­tion of the poem by Bar­bara and Ben­jamin Har­shav can be found in A. Sutzkev­er: Select­ed Poet­ry and Prose (Berke­ley: Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, 1991), 169 – 170, and anoth­er by Sey­mour Mayne, ​“The Lead­en Plates of Romm’s Print­ing Works,” in In Your Words: Trans­la­tions from the Yid­dish and the Hebrew (St. Catharines, Ontario: Ronald P. Frye & Co., 2017), 42. A resource kit for this poem was writ­ten by Han­na Pollin-Galay for the Yid­dish Book Cen­ter. I thank Mira Sutzkev­er and Rina Sutzkev­er Calderon (per­son­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion, 18 Decem­ber 2023) for per­mis­sion to trans­late this poem. I have ben­e­fit­ted from many dis­cus­sions of the poem with my col­league and friend Eleonore Stump, whose Grains of Wheat: Suf­fer­ing and Bib­li­cal Nar­ra­tives is forth­com­ing with Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press in 2025. Writ­ten in March 1943, ​“Grains of Wheat” places a mytho­log­i­cal accent on the same theme of preser­va­tion and renew­al, yet it is no less mil­i­tant. Res­cued books and papers resist the Jew­ish people’s spir­i­tu­al destruc­tion: stretch­ing time, defy­ing death. Fig­ured as infant and elder­ly, like Sutzkever’s moth­er and infant son who were both mur­dered in the ghet­to, ​“the Jew­ish word” is the life of the com­mu­ni­ty. By bury­ing these words and wait­ing for them to rise again, the com­mu­ni­ty pre­serves its own poten­tial to survive.

As Sutzkev­er rep­re­sents this strug­gle with a new poet­ic tech­nique of ​“read­ing his­to­ry against the cycles of nat­ur­al regen­er­a­tion,” his recur­ring image of the seed/​kernel/​grain func­tions as what David Roskies calls a ​“holo­graph:” a frag­ment of a shat­tered whole, from which the orig­i­nal can be reproduced. ^{3 3} David G. Roskies, Against the Apoc­a­lypse: Respons­es to Cat­a­stro­phe in Mod­ern Jew­ish Cul­ture (Syra­cuse: Syra­cuse Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 1984), 244; 250. As Roskies explains, the sur­vivor — whether a scrap of paper or the poet — can thus wit­ness the full extent of col­lec­tive destruc­tion while at the same time embody­ing the poten­tial for life beyond destruc­tion. Here Sutzkev­er returns to roman­tic indi­vid­u­al­ism in defi­ance of his his­tor­i­cal con­text. This is no retreat, how­ev­er, but a fierce reartic­u­la­tion of poet­ry as politics.

Eng­lish read­ers may know this famous poem in Bar­bara & Ben­jamin Harshav’s trans­la­tion in their stan­dard anthol­o­gy, A. Sutzkev­er: Select­ed Poet­ry and Prose (Berke­ley: Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia Press, 1991). The Har­shavs’ vivid and force­ful trans­la­tion remains faith­ful to the poem’s seman­tics and syn­tax at the cost of irreg­u­lar meter as well as half of each stanza’s end-line rhymes. This new trans­la­tion retains both the full ABAB rhyme scheme and drum­beat of the orig­i­nal: each line has 8 syl­la­bles, and the same pat­tern of alter­nat­ing stress is main­tained. Only minor vari­a­tions in stress are allowed to suit more stan­dard Eng­lish pro­nun­ci­a­tions of a few words: AMs­ter­dam [not Ams­ter­DAM], MAN­u­scripts [not man­u­SCRIPTS], MUR­der [not mur­DER], and final­ly, with­in a line in the final stan­za, trans­FORMED [not TRANS­formed]. To note anoth­er minor vari­a­tion, both the orig­i­nal and the trans­la­tion con­tain a line with only sev­en syl­la­bles. In both of these cas­es, stress pat­tern is pri­or­i­tized over syl­la­ble count.

Rather than imi­ta­tive, this close cor­re­spon­dence to the inter­nal struc­ture of the orig­i­nal aims to high­light how Sutzkever’s project of resis­tance res­onates at the lev­el of poet­ic form. As Ruth Wisse has observed, Sutzkever’s ghet­to poems are in fact excep­tion­al­ly for­mal with­in his cor­pus, using ​“clas­si­cal meter and per­fect rhyme” to pro­duce ​“tiny man-made mir­a­cles of pair­ing, as a bar­ri­er against chaos.” ^{4 4} Ruth R. Wisse, ​“Intro­duc­tion,” in Abra­ham Sutzkev­er, The Fid­dle Rose: Poems 1970 – 1972 (trans. Ruth R. Wisse, Detroit: Wayne State Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 1990), 15 – 32, at 22 – 23. For­mal­ism con­veys momen­tum and resolve, a will to reunite the sur­vivor with the col­lec­tive, in such moments as the final stan­za: grain/​stalk/​claim/​sustain/​walk. Fur­ther­more, as Wisse notes, Sutzkever’s use of rhyme often yields redemp­tive antin­o­mies, ​“forg­ing uni­ty where none has been evi­dent.” In this trans­la­tion, for exam­ple, such rhymes are word/​murder and tomb/​bloom. While Sutzkever’s images speak for them­selves, remar­ry­ing them to their order of sound and stress is cru­cial to evok­ing their power.

For­mal sym­me­try, how­ev­er, cre­ates prob­lems for anoth­er task of the trans­la­tor: seman­tics. One line was expand­ed to fit the spir­it if not the let­ter of the orig­i­nal: the clas­si­cal phrase erdishe velt (“earth­ly world” — recall­ing the poem’s cen­tral agri­cul­tur­al metaphor) became ​“the earth where we toil and sleep.” In two oth­er lines – echo­ing the ​“arms” that save ​“the Jew­ish word” ear­li­er in the poem – the image ​“hands” was added to per­son­i­fy the same idea. ​“Hands” now redis­cov­er the grains in the ninth stan­za (in the orig­i­nal, they are said to ​“be found” in the pas­sive voice). Then, two stan­zas lat­er, the grains are watered or ​“nour­ished” by the ​“hand of fate.” Again, this per­son­i­fi­ca­tion dif­fers from the original’s more gen­er­al ​“in sho in bash­ert­er” (lit­er­al­ly, ​“so-fat­ed hour”). Whether such adap­ta­tions to for­mal con­straints are over­wrought or make virtues of neces­si­ty by draw­ing under­ly­ing mean­ings from the orig­i­nal (“sleep” = death; fate as the agent of col­lec­tive sur­vival) can and should be debat­ed. By exper­i­ment­ing with new ways to strike a bal­ance among his infi­nite poet­ic vari­ables, trans­la­tors can hon­or and con­tin­ue in our own medi­um the work of preser­va­tion and renew­al that Sutzkev­er has left us.

Click here to down­load a PDF of the text and trans­la­tion. The orig­i­nal text appears in Abra­ham Sutzkev­er, Poet­ishe verk (Tel-Aviv: Yoyvl-komitet, 1963), 1:289 – 290.