The Ravine of Memory
Babyn Yar Between the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War
Abstract
The Nazis and their collaborators buried over 100,000 victims at Babyn Yar, a ravine in modern-day Ukraine. Most of the individuals were Jewish, making this area one of the most infamous mass murder sites in history. The Ravine of Memory starts when the travesty ends, telling the story of the ravine’s memory and forgetting in Soviet literature and culture—in Russian as well as in Yiddish. This book challenges the prevailing binary conceptions of Babyn Yar as exclusively a Holocaust or a “Great Patriotic War” story. It is neither the exclusive product of Soviet censorship nor individual dissidents. Babyn Yar is more than a physical space where untold horrors took place. Symbolically, it is the ultimate meeting point of so many disparate threads of Soviet culture: the state and the artist, the Jew and the non-Jew, and the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War. Ultimately, it is a place that reveals the frailty and courage of those who bear witness to atrocity.
Keywords
Babi Yar;Babyn Yar;Holocaust in the Soviet Union;dissent;Khrushchev’s Thaw;Holocaust commemoration;Soviet Jewry;massacre sites;shetidesyatniki;Cold War;Soviet Yiddish culture;documentary novel;Holocaust literature;dissidence;Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony;Yevgeny Yevtushenko;ethnic cleansing;war crimes;genocide;Jewish;comparative literatureISBN
9781626710924, 9781626710931, 9781626710955, 9781626710948Publisher
Purdue University PressPublisher website
http://www.thepress.purdue.edu/Publication date and place
2025Classification
Literature: history and criticism