Babyn Yar

The Russian missile that hit Babyn Yar in Kyiv last week brought the war home to me personally in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. Was it an accident? It’s hard to imagine what the Russians could possibly have hoped to accomplish by bombing the most sacred of all Shoah sites in Ukraine and one of the most important ones in all Europe. Was it somehow related to Vladimir Putin’s regular—and supremely grotesque—willingness to reference the Ukrainian leadership, very much including its Jewish president, as a gang of neo-Nazi thugs? But even if it was, what exactly was the message here? Was it that the Russian Army liberated Ukraine from the Nazis once and is planning to justify its occupation and (I’m assuming) eventually annexation of Ukraine by selling it to the world as a justifiable, even laudable, effort to accomplish the twenty-first century version of that same thing? It’s hard to imagine that that could be it—not because Vladimir Putin is not cynical and malevolent enough to self-justify along such lines, but because it’s hard to imagine him imagining anyone hearing that without laughing—and yet what part of the events of the last few weeks wouldn’t have reasonably been labelled “hard to imagine” just a month or two ago? So maybe this too!

We grow up incrementally, step by step, stage by stage. No one goes to sleep as a child and wakes up as an adult. I’ve written in this space about my own coming-of-age experience reading Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg’s The Black Book of Russian Jewry page by page when the ten- and eleven-year-old me found himself alone in our synagogue library for a few minutes. But that book was only the gateway to other books, some of which became so much a part of my growth to adulthood that I can remember them after all these years as though I just read them recently. André Schwarz Bart’s The Last of the Just was the foundation upon which rested my sense of my place in the world for years and years. So, of course, was Elie Wiesel’s Night. But Anatoly Kuznetsov’s  Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel was perhaps the most profound of all in terms of its effect on my sense of what it means to be a Jew…and also what it means to be a human being. (See below.) The slightly fictionalized true story of the murder of almost 34,000 Jews in Kyiv in the course of just two days in the fall of 1941, the book was beyond terrifying and disorienting to me. I grew up in a neighborhood of survivors and had friends whose parents had lived through the camps. But, of course, there simply was no one—or no one I ever met—who lived through Babi Yar. The unimaginable massacres in that place, but also in Ponary Forest (where about 70,000 Jews from Vilna were murdered in the summer of 1941) or Rumbula Forest (where 25,000 Jews from Riga were murdered in November and December 1941)—these dark European forests  were the terrible landscape of my nightmares as a boy, a dreamscape I still wander from time to time even now and which will always be part of me. As all readers know, the camps are central to my sense of self, even today. But I never dream about them.

But it was in the fall of 1973 that Babi Yar came to represent something else to me entirely. It was in the fall semester of my senior year in college. I was busy trying to gain admittance to JTS, but I was also taking my Russian seriously (just in case!) and it was in that context that I met Yevgeny Yevtushenko, at the time the best-known Russian poet in the West. How that came about is easy to explain: I met him easily because one of my teachers at Queens College, Albert C. Todd, was his American translator and invited him to visit our school and, semi-amazingly, he agreed to come. (It was a good gamble on his part too—years later, Yevtushenko himself became a CUNY distinguished professor at Queens.) Places were limited, but I was one of the first to sign up and got a ticket. I admired his writing, and particularly the poems I had read under Professor Todd’s tutelage. I eager to see what the man was like. But I had no idea how profound an encounter it was going to be.

The man began by reading one or two poems in Russian—translations had been handed out in advance at the door so you could read along while he spoke—and taking questions. (He spoke English well, it turned out.) But then he said he wished to read to us the poem that he described as his own literary Rubicon, a poem that could either have led to his ruin or to his ever-lasting fame but back from which he knew in advance there would be no turning. And the poem was, of course, “Babi Yar.”

In those days, the massacre at Babi Yar was famously commemorated yearly by the Soviet government without any reference to the fact that the victims were Jews. (Many thousands of others were murdered at Babi Yar as well, which provided the Russians with a kind of fig leaf covering their anti-Semitism. But it was the massacre of Kievan Jewry that was why Babi Yar was famous, or rather infamous, and that much was known to all.) He began by setting the scene. It was back in 1961, he explained, that the editors of the Lituraturnaya Gazyeta (then as now one of the leading Russian literary magazines) hinted to him that they would be prepared to publish his poem about the Nazi massacre, a piece of work that had to that point only circulated privately. They were clearly well aware that the poem was also about the Soviet government’s anti-Semitic persecution of its Jewish citizens and its revisionist refusal to acknowledge the site as a Jewish memorial. But they were ready to print the poem if he was willing. It was a huge gamble. This was the bad old days in the USSR, a time when people disappeared into the Gulag for far less. Yevtushenko said he considered his options. He knew the offer could not have come out of the blue and must have been pre-approved, possibly even by Brezhnev himself. Or was it a trap? Or a test? There was no way to know. Terrible things could have ensued. But there was also the possibility of advancing the USSR in a positive, liberal direction through his assent to publish. And so he agreed that they could print his poem in their next issue.

It was a huge success. No less a personality than Dmitri Shostakovich—probably the greatest Russian composer of his day—set the poem to music, then used that setting as the first movement of his Thirteenth Symphony. And the opening line of the poem, which reads “No monument stands over Babi Yar / a drop sheer as a crude gravestone” so galvanized public opinion in the Soviet Union that, finally, a memorial was established in that place that formally and unambiguously acknowledged Babi Yar as a site of Jewish martyrdom of almost unimaginable proportions.

 I was beyond enthralled. Here was a man with no Jewish blood in him at all, who understood that anti-Semitism was as much, possibly even more, about the anti-Semite as about the Jew. And when he explained that the Shoah had become the benchmark for Western morality, I was enthralled. I felt as though he were speaking to me personally when he said, almost as though this were a commonplace thought, that identifying with the dead at Babi Yar is in our day the prerequisite for thinking of yourself as a human being, as a fully human being. The end of the poem, he read slowly in Russian while I followed along in translation. “I am each old man here shot dead,” the man read out. “I am every child. Nothing in me shall ever forget! The Internationale, let it thunder when the last anti-Semite on earth is buried forever. / In me, there is no Jewish blood. / But in their callous hatred, all anti-Semites must now hate me as a Jew. / For that reason, I am a true Russian.”

Maybe you had to be there. People applauded. I myself was stunned: this was the first time I truly understood that, even more than it defined my Jewishness, the Shoah defined (and still defines) my humanity, my human-ness. It was a threshold experience for me, the kind of experience you step through and feel changed. The notion that my whole adolescent obsession with the Shoah was as much about being a part of humanity as it was about being a member of the Jewish people—that was transformational for me.

Yevtushenko died in 2017 in, of all places, Tulsa, Oklahoma. He won a million prizes. He was awarded several honorary doctorates and was made an honorary citizen of many different cities. He had an asteroid named after him! (How cool is that?) But for me he was the guide who ushered me out of the prison I had constructed for myself and helped me understand that my emotional and intellectual involvement in the history of the Shoah was as tied to my human-ness as it was to my Jewishness. And he did that not by psychoanalyzing me or dissecting my psyche, but merely by reading a poem aloud in an overheated lecture hall and managing to speak directly to me as he did so.

The story of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is still unfolding, its final dénouement still unknown. But the defiling the sacred space of Babi Yar moves the Russians’ aggression against Ukraine, at least for me, from the global to the personal. The Red Army was key in defeating the Nazis and rescuing the remnant of European Jewry still alive in 1945. Attacking Babi Yar, even if just symbolically, suggests to me that the Russians have turned their backs on their own history and have chosen to emulate not their own forebears but those forebears’ most vicious enemies.