The Ravine of Memory

"Shay Pilnik has written a masterful analysis of the role Babyn Yar has played in the Soviet Union, the tension between the Holocaust narrative—Babyn Yar is the place where some 33,771 Jews of Kiev were murdered in the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur 1941 in the largest two-day mass murder atrocity of the Shoah—and its incorporation into the master Soviet narrative of the Great Patriotic War. Pilnik traverses music, poetry, politics, literature, and history, whether in Russian or Yiddish, seemingly with ease. His analysis is illuminating, his writing crisp and moving. We learn of the political epochs in post-World War II Soviet history from Stalinism to the thaw, from the great stagnation to glasnost even into the years of freedom, and of the ways Jews coped, survived, endured, assimilated, advanced, collaborated, and dissented under Soviet rule. Looming over it all is the haunting memory not only of what happened at Babyn Yar, but also how what happened is remembered by whom and for what purpose." —Michael Berenbaum, distinguished professor of Jewish studies and director of the Sigi Ziering Holocaust Institute, American Jewish University

"Through a careful analysis of the Soviet literary works produced in response to the massacres perpetrated during the Holocaust at the ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv, Shay Pilnik has written a powerful account of Babyn Yar's evolution as a literary lieu de mémoire. By exploring together, for the first time, the novels and poems that famous and lesser-known authors penned in Russian and Yiddish from the end of World War II through the early 1970s, Pilnik has crafted a comprehensive literary history of the Babyn Yar ravine, the symbol of the Soviet experience of Nazi atrocities. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the cultural history of the Final Solution in the Soviet Union, as well as the intricate relationship between Jewish and Soviet literary memories of the Shoah and the Great Patriotic War." —Elissa Bemporad, Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets