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Page Count

276

Language

English

Description

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.

ISBN

9781626710955

Publication Date

Spring 3-15-2025

Publisher

Purdue University Press

City

West Lafayette

Keywords

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, dissent, dissidence, Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, genocide, Jewish, comparative literature

Disciplines

European Languages and Societies | History | Holocaust and Genocide Studies | Jewish Studies | Political History | Social History

Comments

Open access publication of this title is supported by Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies.

The Ravine of Memory: Babyn Yar Between the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War

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