Itshe Slutsky
Birth City, State, Country
Biography
Itshe Slutsky was born in the small Jewish community of Lakhva, Poland, the youngest of four siblings in a traditional Orthodox family. A recognized Talmudic prodigy, Slutsky was sent to learn at some of the most prestigious Lithuanian-style yeshivas, including the Mir Yeshiva, and was ordained as a rabbi in Kovno (Kaunas). One year, while he was visiting his hometown for the Jewish holidays, on a break from yeshiva, “the spirit of poetry rested upon him,” and he decided to devote himself to literature.
Slutsky lived in Warsaw and Danzig, and likely traveled to other European cities. He played violin, and was a serious student of European music. In 1938, he attempted to emigrate to the United States, where his father had already been living; Slutsky’s three siblings were disabled, and it was an economic necessity that their father work in America and send money back to to support the family in Europe. But Slutsky was detained at Ellis Island due to antisemitic and nativist immigration quotas and, although he appealed his detention, 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.
At age 27, in the summer of 1939, Slutsky 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.
At some point before the War, Slutsky returned to his hometown of Lakhva, where he lived with his wife, Rokhl. Nazi forces occupied Lakhva in 1941, and in April, 1942, they forced Lakhva’s Jewish residents into a small ghetto.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 in the liquidation of the Lakhva ghetto, Slutsky escaped and joined a Soviet partisan unit. 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 partisans against the Germans in the region of Minsk, and died in the winter of 1944, at the age of 32, somewhere in the Pripyat Marshes of Western Belarus. After his death, Slutsky fell into almost total obscurity. In a 1964 essay, Jacob Glatstein, arguably the most influential Yiddish poet and critic in post-war America, described Slutsky’s untimely death as “one of the most tragic events in the history of Yiddish literature,” and urged his community of Yiddish writers, readers, and publishers “to rescue the name of the poet Itshe Slutsky, and place him, living, among our great talents whose lives were cut short too soon.”
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
Much of Slutsky’s poetry grappled with his Jewish heritage, and with the traditional Jewish education he had received, including rabbinic ordination, from some of Europe’s most rigorous and respected yeshivas. In several poems, he illustrates the material poverty and spiritual desperation of isolated Jewish communities in the Pale of Settlement, and in others he describes his experiences as a yeshiva student struggling between faith and doubt, and between the demands of Lithuanian Jewish orthodoxy and a commitment to cosmopolitan art. Slutsky was also a profoundly mystical poet, who expressed his yearning for God with Yiddish poetry that incorporated the influences of both Jewish literary traditions and broader modern European culture.
Published Works
Inmitn (In the Midst), Warsaw, 1939