Tel Aviv Diary: Karen Alkalay-Gut

Because I’m working on a computer smaller than my fingernails, I tend to skip over even the most important details of my life as a Tel Avivian. Most of the time it doesn’t matter, but suddenly I realized I have not put into writing the deep mourning I’ve felt for the loss of Avraham Sutzkever. When his daughter told me last month that he was not doing well at all, a number of twinges went through me. After all, although we’d spoken on the phone and I promised to visit him, I always put off the obeisance I meant to pay him as the greatest Yiddish poet I’d ever read. And he was in his nineties then. And he was a partisan like my aunt and probably had stories of her to tell me. And such a nice, kind, intelligent person! So it’s not surprising that my guilt at not having visited him would come out in my ignoring the great loss last week at his death. May his works at last get the credit they so richly deserve.