GREEN AQUARIUM (Griner akvarium)

Poems by Abraham Sutzkever, 1972

These prose poems, written by Abraham Sutzkever in Israel between 1953 and 1954 and published originally as Griner akvarium in 1972, deal with the poet's experience of life in the Vilna (Vilnius) ghetto. The English translation appeared in 1982. The text deals with the very last days of the ghetto, when the few survivors were being rounded up and murdered. Evocative in style, each poem is quite brief and self-contained, with an emphasis firmly on the personal rather than the historical. If there is a theme it is that of the value of life in the midst of death and the importance of regarding each moment of life as significant. The Germans appear by proxy as the agents of death and capture; they are never personalized, and thus they are made to seem omnipotent. God is completely absent from the text in one sense, yet in another sense the whole world—including animals and inanimate objects—is imbued with transcendental meaning. Poetry itself is seen to embody the forces of salvation because it serves as a witness to the strength of those few human actions during the violence that represent the ability of life to reassert itself and to deny the overwhelming influence of death and destruction.

The title poem's image of a green aquarium as the environment in which the participants of the Holocaust were living is interesting. Green has two meanings here: it represents not only the stagnant atmosphere of ghetto life but also the possibility of rebirth and growth. It is an image that Sutzkever also used in The First Night in the Ghetto (1971), where the gliverdike gufim (stiff bodies), the corpses lying on the ground, are described as grine (green) twice, contrasting with the black poison, the forces of death. It is important to emphasize the secular character of Sutzkever's verse, which suggests that the power of survival and redemption has to lie, if anywhere, in nature itself, in the ability of the natural and the human world to resist and ultimately triumph against the apparently omnipotent forces of death.

Nature itself becomes a source of poetry in this collection and plays an important role in putting the horrors of the destruction of the Vilna Jewish community into a context where they can be discussed by the Angel of Poetry, who appears throughout the collection as the antagonist of the Angel of Death. Sutzkever seemed to yearn to use classical forms of poetic expression, but the pressure of real-life events intervened and made those forms no longer appropriate. Since Sutzkever was determined not to return to the images and beliefs of religion, except as a historical source of ideas, the only other place that he could look to for poetic stimulation and artistic allusion was nature; and it is the ability of nature to regenerate itself, to have a spring come after winter, that provided the only hope he could find in the events of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, the poems also suggest that nature is a weak repository for memories. Although the world will continue, it does not continue in a way that can give the survivors or the dead any serious consolation. Once the world of Vilna Jewry is smashed and destroyed, it is as impossible to reconstitute as a smashed aquarium. On the other hand, what pours out of the aquarium may continue as part of nature, albeit in a radically changed form. The tightness of Sutzkever's style neatly replicates what he sees as the fragility of what has been destroyed.

—Oliver Leaman