The Remarkable Overlaps in the Lives of Two Poets: One Chronicled the Nakba, the Other the Holocaust

“I have a good memory because I’m too weak to forget,” wrote the Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever in his prose poem “Lupus.” Mahmoud Darwish, the acclaimed Palestinian poet, wrote in his book of prose poems, “Memory for Forgetfulness,” that he “had become a poet searching for the boy that used to be in him, whom he had left behind some place and forgotten. The poet had grown older and didn’t permit the forgotten boy to grow up.” Sutzkever (1913-2010) and Darwish (1941-2008) were from different generations, but their lives and writing overlapped for decades.

Both Sutzkever and Darwish wrote sophisticated, modernist lyrical and epic poetry and poetic prose, one in Yiddish and the other in Arabic. They both explore memory and forgetting in their literature in personal and collective terms. This is not surprising: Both poets survived the trauma of war, violence, dispossession and displacement. Sutzkever was a survivor of the Khurbn — the Yiddish term for the destruction of European Jewry during World War II, known as the Holocaust in English and the Shoah in Hebrew. Darwish was a survivor of the Nakba — the Arabic term for the catastrophe of Palestinian displacement and dispossession amid the violence of the 1948 war. It is not known whether Sutzkever and Darwish ever met or were aware of the other’s writing. And yet, when reading their prolific literary output, the many parallel lines in their poetic temperaments and thematic preoccupations are remarkable.