Itshe Slutsky
Yiddish poet Itshe Slutsky (pronounced IT-shuh, SLOOT-skee) was born on April 12, 1912, in the small and impoverished Jewish community of Lakhva, in what is now Belarus but was then the Russian Empire. Slutsky was the youngest of four siblings in an Orthodox family. As a child, he was recognized as a prodigy in traditional Jewish learning and sent to study the Talmud at the prestigious Mir Yeshiva, then located in Poland. In addition to his native Yiddish, and the Hebrew and Aramaic of Jewish sacred text and liturgy, Slutsky was fluent in French, German, Polish, and Russian, and influenced by art and literature in all of these languages. Some time in the early 1930s, he was ordained as a rabbi in Kaunas, Lithuania, but soon left the world of traditional Jewish scholarship to devote himself to poetry writing, and to the study of European art and music.
From 1933 to 1934, Slutsky served in the Polish military. After his military service, he lived in Warsaw and Danzig and likely traveled to other European cities. In 1938, he attempted to emigrate to the United States, but was detained at Ellis Island due to antisemitic and nativist immigration quotas. Although he appealed his detention, and his father, who had been living in New York City, attempted to hire immigration lawyers on his behalf, Slutsky was deported back to Europe after several months of incarceration. The poems he wrote during this time remain the only poetry known to have been written by someone awaiting deportation from Ellis Island.
Slutsky returned to his hometown of Lakhva and lived there with his wife, Rokhl. His poems appeared in Yiddish literary journals, including Warsaw’s Literarishe Bletter. In the summer of 1939, he published his sole poetry collection, Inmitn [In the Midst], in Warsaw. When World War II began, he was completing a manuscript containing Yiddish translations and criticism of Hebrew poetry. This manuscript was lost in the war, as were nearly all copies of Inmitn.
Nazi forces occupied Lakhva in 1941, and in April 1942, they forced Lakhva’s Jewish residents into a small ghetto. At this time, Slutsky became a leader in Lakhva’s ghetto underground. In September of that year, he participated in the Lakhva ghetto uprising—the first armed revolt against Nazi occupation in all of Europe. Although his mother, wife, and siblings were murdered, he was able to escape the ghetto and joined a Soviet guerrilla unit operating against the Nazis. While fighting, he smuggled an open letter to his father to a Yiddish publication in Moscow; this letter was published in the Yiddish press around the world and was one of the few testaments from a Jewish resistance fighter shared with global Jewish communities while World War II was still underway.
Slutsky led a guerrilla unit against the Germans in the region of Minsk and died in the winter of 1944, at the age of thirty-two, somewhere in the Pripyat Marshes of western Belarus. Because of his untimely death, his poetic gifts were never fully realized, and one of the writers recognized to possess the greatest potential in the history of the Yiddish language left behind a lifetime of unwritten work. After World War II, Slutsky fell into almost total obscurity, although his poems were reprinted occasionally in New York’s Yiddish press.
In a 1964 essay, the only sustained piece of critical attention Slutsky received, Jacob Glatstein, a prolific Yiddish poet, translator, and critic in postwar America, described Slutsky’s untimely death as “one of the most tragic events in the history of Yiddish literature.” In his poetry, Slutsky humanizes his fellow forgotten deportees and victims of war, and insists on the necessity of literary translation as a form of resistance against historical and contemporary injustice.