Previous... Also see What is Yiddish? and A Revival of Yiddish?

A lost world: Clowning in Vilna, Lithuania, in 1928, during a visit by the Vilna Troupe, a theater ensemble. Masha Roskies, Ruth Wisse's mother, is the second person from the right.

Learning in such a school and living in such a home led Wisse with a certain inevitability to a life in Jewish scholarship. Thus, it is with a little discomfiture, even now, that she recounts the "point of reference" in her life. She had graduated from McGill in 1957, taking first honors in English literature, had married, and was working for the Canadian Jewish Congress as press officer. As part of her job, she arranged a Canadian speaking tour for one of the greatest poets in modern Yiddish, Abraham Sutzkever, survivor and poet-witness of the destruction of Vilna.

"I was thinking of going back to school for a master's degree," she recalls, "and my plan was to study English again. At this critical juncture, Sutzkever said to me, 'Why don't you study Yiddish?' In my astonishment, I laughed and I said, 'What would I do, teach Sholom Aleichem?' Even as the words issued from my mouth, I was shocked at what I was saying. Here I had been raised and cultivated on Yiddish literature! But the idea that I should study it in university, this seemed to me astonishing. He was angry, and I was ashamed at what I said. A few days later, I applied to the only place where I could study Yiddish for a higher degree: Columbia."

Commuting from Montreal (and her husband), she completed the course in a year and a half, studying with her great mentor, the linguist Max Weinreich, a founder of YIVO--the Yiddish acronym for the Institute for Jewish Research in Vilna; his son Uriel, chairman of Columbia's department of linguistics (and author of the Modern English-Yiddish, Yiddish-English Dictionary referred to earlier); Richard Chase; Salo Baron; and other luminaries. Her thesis, fittingly, was on Green Aquarium, a cycle of 15 prose poems by Abraham Sutzkever.

Sutzkever represented for Wisse, and does still, the paradigm of all that is highest and most remarkable in Jewish poetry. As a voice of Vilna, benchmark of Jewish scholarship and civility, Sutzkever's own odyssey of suffering--forced childhood exile in Siberia, the unspeakable Vilna ghetto, the terrors of life as a partisan, hiding deep in a freezing river, in a sewer, in a coffin--reads like a tableau almost iconic in its scenes of prodigious endurance.

But the miracle for Wisse is not only the poet's survival, but his transcending, and in some instances transforming, the inhuman degradation:

From his beginnings as an artist, Sutzkever was fascinated by the regenerative powers of poetry--another threatened species of our time....In sharp contrast to those for whom silence is the appropriate human response to the barbarism we have borne in our century, Sutzkever has identified poetry as the reliable counterforce to all that destroys. Particularly during the Holocaust, when every known moral scruple was crushed beyond recognition, the reality of a good poem remained beyond anyone's destructive perversity. In a private reckoning, Sutzkever has even attributed his very life to his literary faith: "As if the Angel of Poetry had confided to me: 'The choice lies in your hands. If your poem inspires me, I will protect you with a flaming sword. If not--don't complain. My conscience will be clean.'"

"The power of art," she continues, "cannot ultimately be proved by its practical effects, but it is worth knowing about a poet who believes that poetry saves lives."

Wisse is not wholly of the party that celebrates poetry as antidote to history. "Who lasts?" writes Sutzkever in his Lider fun togbukh [Poems from a diary]. "God abides--isn't that enough?" It is not quite enough for Wisse, but what does abide is her love for Sutzkever and his poetry.

Back in Montreal after her studies at Columbia, Wisse began her family, and her doctorate at McGill. Her field of study was English literature, there being no such thing then as a doctorate in Yiddish. The department, however, allowed her to do her dissertation on a comparative topic. Thus was born "The Schlemiel as Hero in Yiddish and American Fiction," later published as The Schlemiel as Modern Hero. And born too, in 1969--along with her youngest child--was the department of Jewish studies: "I was teaching the usual English courses as an assistant professor," she recalls, "but I asked whether I might introduce Yiddish lit in the English department. I had to prepare a lengthy rationale, but ultimately they agreed. This was a first for Canada, and a breakthrough for McGill."

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