Conversation with Justin Cammy

Smith professor on Yung-Vilne translates a wartime memoir from Yiddish to English

BY STACEY DRESNER

NORTHAMPTON -- From the time Justin Cammy first read the work of Abraham Sutzkever, he became fascinated with the Yiddish poet and the community of Yiddish writers in the interwar literary group, Yung-Vilne (Young Vilna).

Now a leading authority on Yung-Vilne, Cammy, professor of Jewish Studies and of World Literatures, and chair of the Program in Jewish Studies at Smith College, has translated Abraham Sustzkever’s wartime memoir, From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg from Yiddish to English.

Sustzkever spent two years fighting to stay alive in the Vilna ghetto, along with many of Vilna’s other young writers and artists, all the while observing “daily life, resistance and death in the ghetto.”

After he and his wife escaped to the forest to fight with the partisans, Sutzkever was airlifted in 1944 to Moscow where he met with Jewish Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg and other antifascists who encouraged him to write a memoir of his time in the ghetto.

He later gave testimony about his experiences in the Vilna Ghetto during the Nuremberg trials.

Cammy’s book, published this month by McGill-Queen’s University Press, includes not only the translation of Sutzkever’s memoir, but also his diary notes, his Nuremberg testimony, and photos of Sutzkever that have never been seen before.

Justin Cammy is a literary and cultural historian with research and teaching interests in Yiddish literature, Eastern European Jewish history, Zionism, and contemporary Israel. He holds appointments in Jewish studies, World Literatures, Middle Eastern studies, and Russian and East European studies at Smith and is adjunct professor graduate faculty in German studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

His publications range from essays on Yiddish literary history to scholarly translations of Yiddish literature to introductions to new editions of works by Yiddish writers and memoirists. He serves on the faculty of the Steiner Yiddish summer program at the Yiddish Book Center, the Naomi Prawer Kadar International Yiddish summer program at Tel Aviv University, and Camp Yavneh in New Hampshire. In 2006, Cammy was awarded Smith College’s Sherrerd Prize for Distinguished Teaching.

Professor Cammy spoke to the Jewish Ledger about his new translation and the life of Abraham Sutzkever earlier this month just after the 75th anniversary of the closing of the Nuremberg Trials on Oct. 1.

JEWISH LEDGER: YOU SAY IN THE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS IN YOUR BOOK THAT YOU FIRST READ ABRAHAM SUTZKEVER IN A RUTH WISSE CLASS IN COLLEGE. HAD YOU EVER HEARD OF HIM BEFORE THAT?

Justin Cammy: No. I hadn’t heard of any Yiddish literature before college. I mean, maybe I had heard of Sholem Aleichem. But I did not come from that background. So, it was sort of an eye opener to take classes on modern Jewish literature and Yiddish writers. Then I took a seminar where Sutzkever was introduced by the teacher and I have sort of been working on him, or on the literary group surrounding him ever since, and certainly on Vilna, his hometown.

JL: WHAT WAS IT ABOUT ABRAHAM SUTZKEVER THAT INTERESTED YOU SO MUCH?

JC: Three things, I would say. He starts out as a poet in the 1930s. So to me, he challenges this myth of Yiddish being old. He represents a moment that in my next book after this I call, “When Yiddish was Young” – sort of a moment when it was the language of everyday society, including radicals, revolutionaries, progressives – and all of their politics was done in that world. So, he was part of that world of Yiddish modernist poetry that both spoke to Jewish readers but also spoke to the world. Then when you move to a different period, he’s arguably the most important, if not one of the top three most important Yiddish writers of the ghettos and of the Holocaust. He wrote almost entirely during the war, without stop, and his poems and epic works of that period are sort of classic pieces. What really amazed me was that those two periods were only through his mid- 30s. Then he has to pick up this life and decides that the future of a Jewish writer is in a Jewish country. And unlike many other Yiddish writers who find themselves in New York but with, with a declining readership, or in other places, he decides that he wants to be surrounded by the alef beis – in Israel – and if that is now a Hebrew speaking country, he’s going to go and establish the most important Yiddish journal Di Goldene Keyt (the Golden Chain) there and create connections between this new state and the rest of the Yiddish reading world. Most of his career takes place as an Israeli Jewish writer. So that’s the background – someone who’s engaged in the world with all the major moments in Jewish history, engaged with the building of a state and not willing to buy the common idea that there’s no place within Zionism and within Hebrew for a Yiddish writer.

What brought me to the text is the fact that you have such a famous writer, such an important Yiddish writer, who only writes one memoir his whole life, and it’s never been translated into English, in part because he was such a great poet. Early on there was a fear that everything he really had to say was in his poetry and that reading this and then translating this in some way perhaps would be a diminishment in what was accomplished artistically in the poetry.

JL: HIS POETRY HAS BEEN TRANSLATED INTO OTHER LANGUAGES BESIDES YIDDISH?

JC: Oh yes, his poetry has been translated into Hebrew, English, many other languages. The memoir itself was translated into Hebrew early on, soon after publication, but then sort of went dormant. He never talked about it. I think that probably the Soviet context of its composition he wanted to distance himself from. It was only just

Vol. 22 No. 10

JHL Ledger LLC Publisher Henry M. Zachs Managing Partner Leslie Iarusso Associate Publisher Judie Jacobson Editor judiej@jewishledger.com • x3024 Hillary Sarrasin Digital Media Manager hillaryp@jewishledger.com

EDITORIAL Stacey Dresner Massachusetts Editor staceyd@jewishledger.com • x3008 Tim Knecht Proofreader

ADVERTISING Donna Edelstein Senior Account Executive Non-Profit & JHL Ledger LLC Media Marketing donnae@jewishledger.com • x3028 Joyce Cohen Senior Account Executive joycec@jewishledger.com • (860) 836-9195 Trudy Goldstein Account Executive trudyg@jewishledger.com • x3007 Amy Oved Mass Account Executive amyo@jewishledger.com • x3030

PRODUCTION Elisa S. Wagner Creative Director elisaw@jewishledger.com Christopher D. Bonito Graphic Designer chrisb@jewishledger.com

ADMINISTRATIVE Judy Yung Accounting Manager judyy@jewishledger.com • x3016 Howard Meyerowitz Office Manager howardm@jewishledger.com • x3035

Samuel Neusner, Founder (1929-1960) Rabbi Abraham J. Feldman, Co-Founder and Editor (1929-1977) Berthold Gaster, Editor (1977-1992) N. Richard Greenfield, Publisher (1994-2014)

PUBLISHER’S STATEMENT JHL Ledger LLC 40 Woodland Street Hartford, CT 06105 Phone (860) 231-2424 Fax (860) 231-2485

Editorial Email: staceyd@jewishledger.com

Production Email: production@jewishledger.com

Editorial deadline: All public and social announcements must be received by Tuesday 5 p.m. 10 days prior to publication.

Advertising deadline: Thursday noon one week prior to issue. Advertisers should check ad on publication.

JHL Ledger LLC and Jewish Ledger shall not be liable for failure to publish an ad for typographical error or errors in the publication except to the extent of the cost of the space which the actual error appeared in the first insertion. Publishers reserve the right to refuse advertising for any reason and to alter advertising copy or graphics deemed unacceptable. The publishers cannot warrant, nor assume responsibility for, the legitimacy, reputability or legality of any products or services offered in advertisements in any of its publications. The entire contents of the Jewish Ledger are copyright © 2020. No portion may be reproduced without written permission of the publishers. JHL Ledger LLC also publishes the Connecticut Jewish Ledger, All Things Jewish CT, and All Things Jewish MA.

www.majewishledger.com