MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
From celebrated poet to resistance fighter and witness at Nuremberg Trials
SUE TURNER recommends the first ever English edition of a memoir of Abraham Sutzkever, a poet turned resistance activist in the Vilna Ghetto in Lithuania
DETERMINED: A detachment of the United Partisan Organization with its leader Abba Kovner (center, standing). Kovner was member in the socialist Zionist youth movement HaShomer HaTzair and a cousin of the Israeli Communist Party leader and anti-Zionist activist Meir Vilner. Kovner testified at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961
[UPO member/Wikipedia] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg – Memoir and Testimony
by Abraham Sutzkever
McGill-Queen’s University Press £28.50
ABRAHAM SUTZKEVER was born in 1913 to a leather dealer and raised in the rich cultural heritage of Lithuanian Jews with Vilna (Vilnius) at its core, a city of Poles, Jews, Belorussians, Lithuanians and Russians.
By the 1930s Vilna was highly regarded as a centre for secular Yiddish culture, boasting five daily Yiddish newspapers, a Yiddish education system and a research institute for the study of eastern European Jewish history and culture.
Sutzkever became a celebrated poet in international Yiddish circles, writing lyrically about beauty and nature with little interest in exploring social and political themes.
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SUE TURNER is appalled by the story of the only original colonising family to still own a plantation in the West Indies
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SUE TURNER is fascinated to read of another miners’ strike of the 1980s, told through the voices of women
A book whose positive message and clear-eyed sense of purpose make it an inspirational read is recommended by SUE TURNER
