When one reads the poem “Grains of Wheat” by Avrom Sutzkever (written in the ghetto of Vilna and here read and analyzed in English translation, see here for the full text) and stumble upon the line “As if protecting a baby -,/I run with the Yiddish word,” is it hard not to start associating to the poet’s firstborn child that was slaughtered in the ghetto the day after he was born; the child was just alive so long it took for the mother of the poet to forget that her grandchild was doomed to be killed from the moment he was born, the same way as Herod once “killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region that were two years old or under” (Matthew 2:16). Maybe it is during this short time, during this split second of dissonance, that the poem is written, that the poem takes place. The poet may be unable to save his Jewish child but is now trying to save the Yiddish word (and all that is written with it and within it) with his written words.
His words ooze (of course) of desperation; he is in a hurry, it is late, it is way too late – in all senses. It is about (time) to save what can be saved because someone is after not only him but also the treasures (of Jewish culture, the “words on parchment, created / over thousands of years of despair”; the testimonies of earlier disasters that have to be spared and saved from the current, ongoing disaster) that he is carrying, literarily and figuratively, with him; that is begging him to bring them with him, to carry them into safety, even the secret poems whisper “O, hide us in your labyrinth,” as he is “digging in every courtyard” so that “the [Jewish] soul may not be destroyed” (again one might want to add).
One can wonder if “the Yiddish word” also is “The Word” and therefore “The Truth,” and whether the labyrinth is a designated hiding place in the form of a physical maze or a metaphysical one rooted in Jewish mysticism, a way of hiding it – “The Word,” “The Truth” – in the plain sight: obscuring it with a veil of mysticism; it is also unclear whether the poet aims to reveal or hide something when he digs in “every courtyard”; whether he is trying to cover the “Yiddish word” for the dangers of the present or uncover it for the benefit of the future. What speaks for the latter interpretation is that even if the sacred pages are burning on the bonfire and some of them are “carried off by the smoky wind,” the poet rejoices, then he manages to save, if not the paper the word is written on, so “the essence” of it. Or, as Winston Churchill once said, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
The words’ physical vessels might be gone, but their content and meanings are not. They might be able to burn the books, but not THE BOOK (that here are not only the sacred scriptures nor only the books, but all endangered great works of Jewish literature and cultures, the treasures the poet carries and collects; the poet’s word that still sings …)
The caves need to “open up quickly” and “split apart” under the poet’s “axe” because he has a gift (the abovementioned treasures) to deposit, hand over, and hide for better future times (that might or not be coming), and he is acutely aware of that his time is running out; he urges the caves to act “before I am killed by a bullet.” The poet despairs, but he also has hope; he digs and plants “manuscripts deep,” but to convince oneself to sow a seed, one must at least be able to imagine a future where someone will reap the fruit of that seed.
Or is the poet maybe planting hope in his own heart, comforting himself with the thought that even if his child is gone, even if his lineage ends with him, the words and with them the thoughts of his (and with that his son’s) people and culture will live on? Maybe he takes comfort in the fact that they both originate from a tree with many branches and many roots in many places; he is not alone because he still possesses the significant nods of Jewish culture and scholarship; he still has “Amsterdam, Worms/Livorno, Madrid and YIVO.”
Perhaps it is late, but not too late yet. Maybe the words, just as the pharaonic “grains of wheat” that the title of the poem alludes to will blossom in “row upon row” when they are sown, even though “nine thousand years have passed.” Perhaps will the words, the works of literature and culture, the “memory/of this, our earthly world,’ that he brings to the caves as “gifts in a sack” also “live to see the light/and in the destined hour … blossom again, shining bright?” and perhaps will there still be a Jewish people whom “these words will also nourish,” to whom “these worlds will also belong … for evermore”.
Perhaps this is, in Winston Churchill’s words, “not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Öyvind Vågen