Evgeny EVlushenko
BABY YAR
There are no memorials at Baby Yar–
The steep slope
is
the only gravestone.
I am afraid.
Today I am as old as the Jewish people.
It
seems to me now that I am a Jew.
And now, crucified on the cross, I die
And even now I bear the marks of the nails.
I t seems to me that I am Dreyfus.
The worthy citizenry denounces me and judges me.
I am behind prison bars.
I am trapped, hunted, spat upon, reviled
And good ladies
in
dresses flounced with Brussels lace
Shrieking, poke umbrellas in my face.
It
seems to me that I am a boy in Byelostok,
Blood flows and spreads across the floor.
Reeking of onion and vodka.
The leading lights of the saloon
Are on the rampage.
The Nazis' wartime massacre of Jews in the USSR is scarcely more popular
a subject in the Soviet press than present-day antisemitism which is not ac–
knowledged at all. The publication of
Baby Yar
(after the ravine near Kiev
where 96,000 Jews were shot by the Nazis in 1941) has opened the first polemic
on these inflammatory questions. The 28 year-old Evtushenko, the most popular
of the younger Soviet poets, was denounced for over-concern with Jews, for
singling out Jews as particular victims of Nazi genocide policy, and for slandering
the Soviet people. These attacks appear to have made a hero of Evtushenko
among young Soviet intellectuals who wildly and pointedly cheered him when he
appeared at a mass gathering of young people in Moscow. The commotion
provoked by
Baby Yar
caused Evtushenko to comment, in a poem published in
December, that "posterity will burn with shame" when it recalls "these strange
times when common honesty was called courage."-PATRICIA BLAKE
(This poem, together with other new material, will be included along with
the contents of
Dissonant Voices in Soviet Literature
(PR 3-4, 1961), in a
volume to be published this spring by Pantheon Books, edited by Patricia Blake
and Max Hayward.)
