No monument stands over Babi Yar.

A drop sheer as a crude gravestone.

I am afraid.

Today I am as old in years

as all the Jewish people.

Now I seem to be

a Jew.

So begins Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s heart-wrenching poem Babi Yar, published in 1961.  Written to protest antisemitism, it shames communist leaders by saying their hands are “unclean” for having erased the memory of the gunning down of over 34,000 Jews by the Nazis in Babyn Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv on September 29–30, 1941.

The poem wasn’t proscribed, but censors ensured that for 22 years, it wasn’t published in any of Yevtushenko’s collections.  Dimitri Shostakovich’s Symphony 13, inspired by the poem, suffered a similar fate: performances faced bureaucratic interference and disruptions, and the lyrics, an interlinked collage of Yevtushenko’s poems, had to be changed off and on.

But such is the irony of how human nature and memory respond to suppression that everyone came to know Yevtushenko’s poem anyway.  And Symphony 13, which resonated deeply with audiences in the Soviet Union, came to be known as the Babyn Yar symphony.  A massacre to which even a cold memorial plaque was denied thus became enshrined in collective memory through the power of art whose creators defied an authoritarian regime.

In The Ravine of Memory: Babyn Yar Between the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War, published in March this year, Shay A. Pilnik presents the story of that internal memorialization of the Babyn Yar massacre through literature.  For there were many other writers, too, who wrote essays, poems, stories, and other works about Babyn Yar.

In the introduction, Pilnik quotes James Young, author of a seminal study of Holocaust memorials: “The more memory comes to rest in its externalized forms, the less it is experienced internally….”  Then, speaking of the story his book tells, Pilnik says: “Ours is a story of the most effective memorial one could think of — albeit not........

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