Between September 29 and 30, 1941, the Nazis murdered 33,771 Jews by shooting in a series of ravines outside Kiev, Ukraine called Babyn Yar. The Nazis continued killing at least 10,000 others at the site throughout the war including Roma, Ukrainians, and Soviet prisoners of war. Yet despite being the largest mass shooting of the Holocaust and arguably its most prominent symbol (and of Nazi occupation) in the Soviet Union, the site has remained un-commemorated in the physical realm for most of its history.

In his book, The Ravine of Memory, Shay Pilnik suggests that memorials of stone were replaced by monuments of literature, what he calls “the most effective memorial one could think of—albeit not one made out of stone, but rather of words—calling its memory-bearers to act rather than simply to recall, galvanizing a literary, social, and national movement to revolve around it” (8). He notes that the memory-project of Babyn Yar has often been viewed by scholars as a binary of either repressed Soviet silence or strident opposition by brave dissidents. Pilnik sets out to complicate this black and white perspective. He shows throughout the book how writing about Babyn Yar variously engaged with the place of the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War in Soviet history, the possibilities of dissent throughout the postwar period, the prevalence of Soviet antisemitism, and even what it meant to be Jewish in the USSR. The ground covered is remarkable.

Pilnik arranges his book in a roughly chronological series of studies that divides the timeline into the late Stalinist, Thaw (Nikita Khrushchev), and Stagnation (post-Khrushchev) periods, with the bulk of the focus on the latter two. After a short introductory chapter, he explores the work of Viktor Nekrasov and Evgenii Evtushenko. Here, he notes that while the Thaw did allow for some greater openness, Khrushchev’s attitude toward Babyn Yar (both in monumental and literal form) was more repressive given his own antisemitism and personal connections to Ukraine. A very interesting chapter on Dmitrii Shostakhovich’s Thirteenth Symphony (Babi Yar), which was based on the Evtushenko poem of the same name, follows. Pilnik then turns to perhaps the most well-known of Soviet Babyn Yar literature, the book by Anatoly Kuznetsov, Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel, originally published in 1966 but republished in 1970 in its uncensored form. For the remainder of the book, Pilnik turns his attention to the works of various Soviet Yiddish writers including Itzik Kipnis, Aron Vergelis, Shike Driz, Motl Talalayevsky, Dore Khaykine, and others.

Rather than engaging in hagiography, Pilnik seeks to examine these authors, warts and all, in their historical contexts. So, Evtushenko’s poem was “a multifaceted attack levelled at both Soviet doctrine and the Soviet government” (63) but also a work with a “moderate tone” (67) whose author “sought to demonstrate the virtues of Soviet society rather than its flaws” (70). Likewise, Pilnik turns some conventional wisdom on its head by pointing out that Kuznetsov’s novel is actually more about the Nazi occupation’s effects on non-Jewish Ukrainians, which “relegate[s] the Holocaust to a secondary place below the Holodomor” (105).

Pilnik’s analysis is particularly powerful when he engages with Yiddish literature, most of which appeared in the officially-sanctioned Sovetishe heymland journal. He nicely shows how Soviet Yiddish writers sought to negotiate their own understanding of Jewishness in the context of the very real ebb and flow of Soviet state repression that saw some of them sent to gulags. Indeed, according to Pilnik, “no one went to such lengths as [editor of Sovetishe heymland] Vergelis to explicitly [emphasis author’s] state that Babyn Yar’s memory was one-directional, belonging exclusively within the orbit of the Great Patriotic War” (155). Throughout his work on Yiddish, Pilnik notes that in some ways these writings represent “a modest literary memorial to the Jewish victims of Babyn Yar” (173), which is to say that they do not often directly challenge Soviet antisemitism and sometimes hew very closely to the approved “de-Judaized” Soviet views on the Holocaust by not highlighting the Jewish nature of suffering in the ravine.

This is a well-argued monograph that covers topics of interest to a variety of scholars from those interested in Holocaust memory to those looking at Soviet Jewish history. One minor quibble might be that, given the cover images that depict physical commemoration of the site, the book could have woven the history of memorialization at the site into the excellent literary analysis. Overall, The Ravine of Memory is a powerful yet nuanced study that yields important insights into how the USSR remembered (and forgot) the Holocaust, as well as how Soviet Jewish writers sought to navigate the often opposing forces of identity and repression.