Babi Yar in poetry explained

Poems about Babi Yar commemorate the massacres committed by the Nazi Einsatzgruppe during World War II at Babi Yar, in a ravine located within the present-day Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. In just one of these atrocitiestaking place over September 29–30, 194133,771 Jewish men, women and children were killed in a single Einsatzgruppe operation.

Background

On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa.[1] The German army crossed the 1939 former Polish-Soviet border soon thereafter and arrived in Kiev on September 19, 1941.[2] Ten days later, following an explosion at the German army headquarters, Jews were rounded up,[3] marched out of town, made to strip naked and massacred; they were stacked up, layer upon layer, at Babi Yar (literally, a "grandmother's ravine.")[4]

For decades after World War II, Soviet authorities were unwilling to acknowledge that the mass murder of Jews at Babi Yar was part of the Holocaust.[5] The victims were generalized as Soviet; mention of their Jewish identity was impermissible, even though their deaths were every bit as much a consequence of the Nazi's genocidal Final Solution as the death camps of occupied Poland (Ehrenburg, Pravda 1944).[6] [7] In order to make the connection the Soviets worked so hard to suppress, Holocaust scholars have come to call events such as the massacres at Babi Yar "the Holocaust by bullet."

By November 1941, the number of Jews shot dead at Babi Yar exceeded 75,000, according to an official report written by SS commander Paul Blobel.[8] But Babi Yar remained the site of mass executions for two more years after the murder of most of Kiev's Jewish community in the fall of 1941. Later victims included prisoners of war, Soviet partisans, Ukrainian nationalists and Gypsies.[9] Over 100,000 more people died there. The deaths of these non-Jewish victims facilitated the Soviet Union's postwar efforts to suppress recognition of Babi Yar's place in the history of the Holocaust, especially in the aftermath of the 1952 executions of prominent Jewish intellectuals dubbed the "Night of the Murdered Poets."[10]

Authors

The atrocity was first remembered by the Jews of Kiev through a manuscript poem by Ilya Selvinsky, called I Saw It!. Even though it wasn't written specifically about Babi Yar, it was broadly received as such. Poems by Holovanivskyi, Ozerov, Ilya Ehrenburg and Pavel Antokolsky (Death Camp) soon followed, but the Jewish identity of the victims was revealed only through "coded" references.

Lyudmila TitovaPossibly the first known poem on the subject was written in Russian the same year the massacres took place, by Liudmila Titova, a young Jewish-Ukrainian poet from Kiev and an eyewitness to the events. Her poem, Babi Yar, was discovered only in the 1990s.[11]
Mykola BazhanMykola Bazhan wrote a poem called Babi Yar in 1943,[12] explicitly depicting the massacres in the ravine. Bazhan was nominated for the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Party forced him to decline the nomination.[13] [14]
Yevgeny Yevtushenko

In 1961, Yevgeny Yevtushenko published his poem Babi Yar in a leading Russian periodical, in part to protest the Soviet Union's refusal to recognize Babi Yar as a Holocaust site. The poem's first line is "Nad Babim Yarom pamyatnikov nyet" ("There are no monuments over Babi Yar"). The anniversary of the massacre had been observed in the context of the "Great Patriotic War" throughout the 1950s and 60s; the code of silence about what it meant for the Jews was broken only in 1961, with the publication of Yevtushenko's Babi Yar, in Literaturnaya Gazeta.[15] The poet denounced both Soviet historical revisionism and still-common anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union of 1961. "[I]t spoke not only of the Nazi atrocities, but also of the Soviet government's own persecution of Jewish people."[16] Babi Yar first circulated as samizdat (unofficial publications without state sanction).[17] After its publication in Literaturnaya Gazeta, Dmitri Shostakovich set it to music, as the first movement of his Thirteenth Symphony, subtitled Babi Yar.[18]

Moysey FishbeynAn important Babi Yar poem was written by Moysey Fishbein in Ukrainian in 1974. It was translated into English by Roman Turovsky.[19]
Ilya Ehrenburg

Ehrenburg penned six poems about the Holocaust that first appeared without titles (identified only by numbers) in 1945-46. They were published in three magazines based in Moscow: Novy Mir (New World), Znamya (The Banner) and Oktyabr' (October) (Russian: Октябрь). In one, he wrote of the "grandmother's ravine" through the repetitive use of words: Now, every ravine is my utterance, And every ravine is my home.[20] The actual title of the poem, Babi Yar, was restored only in a 1959 collection of his work.

Other authors

In 1943, Sava Holovanivskyi wrote Avraam (Abraham) about Babi Yar, and Kievan poet Olga Anstei wrote (Kirillov Ravines, another name for Babi Yar.) She and her husband, poet Ivan Elagin,[21] defected from the Soviet Union to the West that year.[22]

Undated poems about Babi Yar were written by Leonid Pervomayskiy, In Babi Yar, and Leonid Vysheslavsky, Cross of Olena Teliha.[23] In 1944, Ilya Ehrenburg wrote his Babi Yar, reprinted in 1959, and in 1946 Lev Ozerov wrote and published his long poem Babi Yar.

Lev Ozerov's long poem titled Babi Yar first appeared in Oktyabr' magazine's March–April 1946 issue. Again, many references were "coded": The Fascists and the policemen Stand at each house, at every fence. Forget about turning back. Their identities are abstracted even at the pits: A Fascist struck mulishly with the shovel The soil turned wet...[24] The shovel-wielding assailants are not identified.

Any further publications about the subject were prohibited, along with the Black Book project of 1947 by Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman,[25] as part of the official Soviet rootless cosmopolitan campaign.

A song, "Babi Yar", was created by Natella Boltyanskaya.[26]

In 2017,[27] Marianna Kiyanovska published a poetry book titled The Voices of Babyn Yar, for which she was awarded the Shevchenko National Prize in 2020.[28] In the poems, she lent her voice to the Jewish victims of the Babi Yar massacre.

See also

External links

Notes and References

  1. Book: Rossino, Alexander B.. Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 16: Focusing on Jewish Popular Culture and Its Afterlife. 2003-11-01. The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. 978-1-909821-67-5. Steinlauf. Michael C.. 431–452. “Polish ‘Neighbours’ and German Invaders: Anti-Jewish Violence in the Białystok District during the Opening Weeks of Operation Barbarossa.”. 10.2307/j.ctv1rmk6w.30. j.ctv1rmk6w. Polonsky. Antony.
  2. Web site: Babi Yar, symbol of Jewish suffering . YIVO Institute for Jewish Research . Babi Yar . 2010 . February 20, 2013 . Yaacov Ro'i.
  3. Web site: Massacre at Babi Yar . The Holocaust Chronicle . 1941: Mass Murder . 2009 . February 21, 2013 . Publications International . https://web.archive.org/web/20131029193800/http://www.holocaustchronicle.org/staticpages/270.html . October 29, 2013 . dead .
  4. Web site: Yom Kippur — The 70th Anniversary of Babi Yar . The Jewish United Fund / Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago . October 5, 2011 . February 21, 2013 . Rabbi Yehiel E. Poupko.
  5. Book: Babi Yar Massacre . Indiana University Press . The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization by Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower. May 28, 2008 . February 23, 2013 . Karel C. Berkhoff . 292 . Google book preview . 978-0253001597.
  6. Web site: Poets Bearing Witness to the Shoah . Boston College . 2010 . February 20, 2013 . Maxim D. Shrayer . 78 (Section II) . https://web.archive.org/web/20131029202017/http://fmwww.bc.edu/SL-V/ShrayerJRPoetsBologna2011.pdf . October 29, 2013 . dead .
  7. Book: Just Soldiers . The SS: Hitler's Instrument Of Terror . February 21, 2013 . Gordon Williamson . 2004 . 230 . MBI Publishing Company LLC . Google books preview . 0760319332 .
  8. Web site: The Transformations of Babi Yar . Research Institute of International Change, Columbia University . Report to the National Council for Soviet and East European Research . February 26, 2013 . Richard Sheldon . 7–51 (1–43 in the document) . PDF file, direct download 638 KB.
  9. Book: Nazi policies toward ethnic Ukrainians . University of Toronto Press . History of Ukraine - 2nd, Revised Edition: The Land and Its Peoples . June 19, 2010 . February 24, 2013 . Paul Robert Magocsi . 978-1442698796 . Google book preview.
  10. Web site: . August 25, 1997 . The Night of the Murdered Poets . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20070827145945/http://www.joshuarubenstein.com/stalinsecret/intro.html . August 27, 2007 . February 24, 2013 . Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee . Article from the New Republic.
  11. Web site: Первые стихи о Бабьем Яре. Людмила Титова. . Babiy-Yar.Livejournal.com . October 4, 2012 . February 23, 2013 . dead . https://archive.today/20130407021913/http://babiy-yar.livejournal.com/4786.html . April 7, 2013 .
  12. Web site: Babi Yar.
  13. Book: A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army . Random House . Beevor, Antony . Antony Beevor . 2011 . 978-0307363787.
  14. Lev Fridman, in Odessa Review, October/November 2016
  15. Literaturnaya Gazeta, September 19, 1961.
  16. Patterson, Donald, Renowned Poet to Visit City, Greensboro News & Record, April 8, 1999. Retrieved March 29, 2013.
  17. McLaughlin, Daniel, West awakes to Yevtushenko: One of the greatest poets alive will perform at the Galway Arts Festival, but he is not without his critics, The Irish Times, July 17, 2004. Retrieved March 29, 2013.
  18. Blokker, Roy, and Robert Dearling, The Music of Dmitri Shostakovich: The Symphonies, The Tantivy Press, London (1979). .
  19. Web site: The Ravine.
  20. Original in Russian by Ilya Ehrenburg (1944): "Теперь мне каждый яр знаком, И каждый яр теперь мне дом." (Maxim D. Shrayer 2010, ibidem.)
  21. Book: Book Reviews: Berega featuring Olga Anstei and Ivan Elagin . M.E. Sharpe . The American Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies for 1994 . July 1, 1999 . March 31, 2013 . Maria Gorecki Nowak . 469 . 1563247518.
  22. Web site: Literature and Music (see: Ol'ga Anstei) . JewishGen Kehilalinks . Kiev Gubernia, Ukraine ??? --> . July 10, 2012 . February 21, 2013.
  23. Web site: ВIДЛУННЯ БАБИНОГО ЯРУ . ГАЗЕТА КОНГРЕСУ ЛІТЕРАТОРІВ УКРАЇНИ . Література та життя . 2007 . March 10, 2013 . Юрій КАПЛАН . 6 . uk.
  24. Original in Russian by Lev Ozerov (Oktyabr 3/4, 1946: pp. 160-163): "Фашисты и полицаи Стоят у каждого дома, у каждого палисада. Назад повернуть — не думай" From the following stanza: "Фашист ударил лопатой упрямо. Земля стала мокрой," (Maxim D. Shrayer 2010, ibidem.)
  25. Book: The Postwar Years . Yale University Press . Stalin's Secret Pogrom . 2005 . February 24, 2013 . Joshua S. Rubenstein, Vladimir Pavlovič Naumov . 25– . Google book preview . 0300104529.
  26. http://www.svoboda.org/a/24249973.html Alphabet of dissent. Babi Yar, part II
  27. Web site: The Voices of Babyn Yar in the Poetry of Marianna Kiyanovska . 2022-02-26 . Poetry International Online . en-US.
  28. Web site: HURI Books . 2022-02-26 . Harvard Ukrainian Studies . en.

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