Monuments of Poetry: On the Publication History of Avrom Sutzkever's Sibir

In 1937, the Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever published a long poem entitled "Shtern in shney" ["Stars in the Snow"] in Warsaw. Over a decade later, the text was revised, refined, and republished in Jerusalem, where it appeared as the stand-alone book Sibir [Siberia]. Published first in Hebrew (1952) and then Yiddish (1953), the volumes boasted original drawings by Marc Chagall. Nearly ten years later, the work was translated into English in London, this time with the support of UNESCO and alongside a new preface by Chagall and a translator's note by Jacob Sonntag. Finally, it appeared as the opening poem of Sutzkever's collected works in 1963. The work would go on to be praised across languages as the signature text of Sutzkever's career. Yet while praise for each iteration was uniform, the texts themselves diverged in form, scope, and agenda. The following article examines the relationship between these complementary and competing iterations of Sutzkever's work—referred to here collectively as "Sibir." Doing so reveals "Sibir" to be a reflection of the poet's strategic modes of self-fashioning and the vicissitudes of the publishing process that both permitted and denied Sutzkever interpretive control. The history of "Sibir," I demonstrate, is the history of multiple visions and re-visions of what it means write as, publish under, and garner fame through the name "Sutzkever"—in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English.