Babyn Yar is one of the largest Holocaust sites. However, only in the last few years have the first scholarly books been published about the Babyn Yar massacre and the struggle of Jewish activists and liberal intelligentsia for commemoration of its victims. While the books of Martin C. Dean, Investigating Babyn Yar. Shadows from the Valley of Death (Lanham, MD, 2023) and Victoria Khiterer, Bitter War of Memory: The Babyn Yar Massacre, Aftermath, and Commemoration (West Lafayette, IN, 2025) focus on the history of the Babyn Yar massacre and its commemoration, the monograph by Shay A. Pilnik, The Ravine of Memory: Babyn Yar Between the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War discusses the Babyn Yar tragedy and its commemoration from the perspective of comparative literature and cultural history.
Pilnik analyzes early responses to the Babyn Yar massacre that appeared in Soviet Yiddish press, literature, and film. He shows that Soviet writers and poets often depicted the Babyn Yar massacre as a universal tragedy of “peaceful Soviet citizens,” rather than as part of the Holocaust and avoided talking about the Jewish victims of the massacre. So, the representation of the Babyn Yar tragedy in the literature followed the official Soviet concept of equal suffering of all Soviet people during the Great Patriotic War.
In the years of Khrushchev’s Thaw, several liberal Soviet writers raised the question why no monument had yet been built in Babyn Yar. Pilnik analyzes the essay of Viktor Nekrasov “Why Has It Not Been Done?” Nekrasov was a prominent Soviet writer, and his essay, published in Literaturnaia Gazeta in 1959, focused public attention on the topic. According to Pilnik, Nekrasov considered the Babyn Yar massacre as “a universal symbol, exceeding the context of the Jewish people’s tragedy” (50). Pilnik wrote that Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem Babi Yar (1961) provides a different approach to the Babyn Yar massacre, depicting it as a Jewish tragedy and placing it in the context of Jewish suffering over the centuries due to antisemitism. Yevtushenko protested in his poem the neglect of the commemoration of the Babyn Yar victims and the absence of a monument at the Holocaust site. Pilnik shows that Yevtushenko’s poem Babi Yar provoked heated debate among liberal and conservative circles in the Soviet Union. Liberals welcomed it, while conservatives criticized Yevtushenko for his lack of attention to the sufferings of other Soviet peoples. Translated into many languages, the poem Babi Yar made Yevtushenko a global celebrity. Dmitri Shostakovich composed his Thirteenth Symphony, subtitled Babi Yar, based on Yevtushenko’s lyrics.
Pilnik discusses Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel, originally published in a censored version in the Soviet journal Iunost’ (Youth) in 1966. The complete text of the novel was published under the pseudonym A. Anatoli in 1970 after Kuznetsov’s defection abroad. Pilnik stated that Kuznetsov linked the Babyn Yar massacre to the great famine in Ukraine, the Holodomor, rather than to the Holocaust.
Several Soviet Yiddish writers and poets described the Babyn Yar tragedy in their works. Pilnik called their works “Socialist in content, Jewish in form” (110). Many Soviet Jewish writers were arrested during Stalin’s repression in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Those who survived the concentration camps were released and rehabilitated during Khruschev’s Thaw. It is not surprising that they behaved very cautiously after their rehabilitation and followed the official state notion of the Babyn Yar massacre as a universal tragedy of the Soviet people. Pilnik pointed out that “the Kyiv Yiddish writers carefully avoided any consistent correlation between the Babyn Yar massacre and the Holocaust of European Jewry” (173). The same approach was adopted by the editor of the Soviet Yiddish journal Sovetish heymland, Aron Vergelis, who presented Babyn Yar as “merely a Great Patriotic War site” (180).
During the Leonid Brezhnev-era, Jewish activists attempted to restore the historical truth by organizing unauthorized commemorative gatherings at Babyn Yar. These meetings were dispersed by the authorities and some activists were detained. The Soviets suppressed Holocaust commemoration ceremonies at Babyn Yar until Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika years. Then, the memory of Babyn Yar was revised, and it was recognized as a major Holocaust site in the Soviet Union and independent Ukraine.
Pilnik’s book provides a complete and comprehensive analysis of major literary works about the Babyn Yar massacre and the commemoration of the tragedy. The author masterfully explains the political atmosphere in the country and the impact of political changes on the representation of the Babyn Yar massacre in literary works. Pilnik also shows how literary works about Babyn Yar influenced public opinion in the country and turned Babyn Yar into a symbol of the Holocaust. The book is very well structured and elegantly written. It brings to light many rarely cited works of Yiddish writers on the topic. The book provides a major contribution to the Holocaust Studies and Holocaust Literature fields and may be interesting for scholars, students, and the lay audience.
