In September, 2021, I attended a zoom memorial for Babyn Yar. Eighty years earlier, tens of thousands of Jews (along with Roma, Tatars, and communists) were shot into a mass grave on the outskirts of Nazi-occupied Kyiv. Several poets read tributes. I had been studying Ukrainian poetry about Babyn Yar, but when I mentioned this phenomenon, the American poets were surprised it existed. Ostap Kin and John Hennessy's bilingual volume, Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond, corrects this lacuna.
Babyn Yar has played an increasing role in Ukrainian collective memory since the 2013–14 “Revolution of Dignity,” and especially since Russia's 2022 full-scale invasion. When a Russian missile fell near Babyn Yar, killing five civilians, President Zelensky addressed the nation: “We all died again in Babyn Yar.” Ironically, as the Kremlin has justified its attacks on Ukrainian civilians by accusing Ukrainians of nationalism, Ukrainians have engaged in difficult discussions about the Holocaust. “I live between Babyn Yar and the Syrets concentration camp,” Iya Kiva wrote in a 2016 poem about family memory (“Vozvrashchaius domoi,” in Chital'nyi zal, N. 1, 2017, https://reading-hall.ru/publication.php?id=18243). Marianna Kiyanovska's book-length poetic cycle, Babyn Yar: Holosamy (Kyiv, 2017), has won numerous awards. For a discussion of this book in the context of Ukrainian approaches to competitive memory, see Amelia Glaser, “Mine from ’33; yours from ’41”: Translating Tragedy in Post-Soviet Ukrainian Poetry,” Comparative Literature 75:2, 207–26.
Sergei Loznitsa's 2021 film, “Babi Yar: Context” poses difficult questions about Ukrainian complicity in war crimes. The Ukrainian rock-star and politician, Sviatoslav (Slava) Vakarchuk, has called Babyn Yar a “foundation stone that can lead us to inter-ethnic dialogue,” (“Pam'iat’ pro Babyn Iar—tse narizhnyi kamin,’” New Voice, September 29, 2016, https://nv.ua/ukr/opinion/pam-jat-pro-babin-jar-tse-narizhnij-kamin-231923.html).
Babyn Yar provides a poetic history of Ukrainian-Jewish inter-ethnic relations dating back to the Holocaust. During the Soviet Union, when ethnically-specific commemoration was dangerous, writers sometimes recognized that they must, at least, describe other nations’ tragedies. The (non-Jewish) Ukrainian modernist Mykola Bazhan described, in his 1943 poem, “Ravine,” a “child's shoe covered in blood” and “the broken lens of an old man's glasses.” Bazhan's poem doesn't mention Jews, but readers recognized the bridge he was building. The history of the Jewish/Ukrainian alliance includes Soviet performances of friendship among nations. Volodymyr Sosiura wrote, in 1942, “We'll drive the beast together into the abyss, . . . because Stalin is leading us forward into battle.”
Ostap Kin and John Hennessey skillfully render diverse poetic voices from the original Ukrainian into English. Kin's insightful introduction sheds light on how Babyn Yar poems figured into Ukrainian traditions. When, in the 1960s, Soviet doctrine linked Babyn Yar commemoration to Zionism, some Ukrainian writers like Ivan Dziuba and Ivan Drach reached out to the Jewish community in anti-Soviet solidarity. Dmitry Pavlychko, in a 1976 poem, describes the cognitive dissonance between a seemingly peaceful walk near Babyn Yar, and the horror that the place conjures: “There I died from a bullet and was resurrected, / But the roar of heaven remained in my soul.”
What does it mean to write about Babyn Yar, and who gets to assign it meaning? This question, and its wildly varied answers by Jewish and non-Jewish poets alike, haunts and informs the project. Valeriia Bohuslavskaya, in a recent poem addressed to Marianna Kiyanovska, writes, “And now you've become Miriam, not Marianna,” suggesting that Babyn Yar does not belong to ethnic Ukrainians. This is the same assumption the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko famously made when he wrote, in his 1961 “Babi Yar,” “I am Dreyfus.” And can a poet's experience of trauma confer identity? One recalls the Russian modernist Marina Tsvetaeva's hypothesis that “all poets are Jews.” Babyn Yar, by this logic, makes those who remember it, metaphysically, part of a Jewish tradition. Kiyanovska, however, is not writing about identity, but about awareness. Far from “becoming “Miriam,” she has corrected readers who assume she is Jewish.
Other poems in the volume emphasize the culpability of those who assisted in the mass killing. Leonid Chereviatenko writes in 2010: “They were brave, energetic, experienced guys, / . . . They rolled an old Jewish woman / In a wheelchair to the edge of the ravine.” Cherevatenko asks the reader to identify with the perpetrators, rather than console themselves by identifying with the victims.
Some of the most affecting texts in Babyn Yar confer no identity whatsoever, but force us to simply observe the tragedy of a lost individual. In his 1974 “Yar” (Pit), Moisei Fishbein walks backward from the massacre to the time when “Rokhele still sleeps / with no hole in her temple.” Perhaps we can only truly understand loss by recalling the child who once was whole.
