victims and educating the public about these
events. In a sense, his goal was probably not
much different than Yevtushenko’s. The differ-
ence is that when Yevtushenko created ‘‘Babii
Yar,’’ he did not create fictional victims, as did
the screenwriter. There was no need to do so;
instead, the poet sought to remember those who
died by campaigning against the anti-Semitism
that fed the hate that killed them.
The ethical issue of how the Holocaust can
and should be used as a literary subject is astutely
captured by Wiesel’s questions: ‘‘How is one to tell
a tale that cannot be—but must be—told? How is
one to protect the memory of the victims?’’ Wiesel’s
demand that Holocaust literature not be used to
trivialize the event presents a concern that Naomi
Mandel considers in an article in the journalboun-
dary 2. Mandel notes that the Holocaust is ‘‘com-
monly referred to as unspeakable, unthinkable,
inconceivable, incomprehensible, and challeng-
ing.’’ The Holocaust is an event that forces us ‘‘to
reestablish, or to rethink, or to acknowledge’’ the
limits of representation. Speech is too limited
to describe the indescribable. The Holocaust is
filled with examples of human cruelty beyond sim-
ple explanation or description. Words cannot
adequately express the unspeakable—which is
why Yevtushenko does not try to do so. ‘‘Babii
Yar’’ does not describe the details of genocide.
Instead Yevtushenko uses a few calculated words
and phrases to capture certain images, like that of
the small boy bleeding from a kick delivered by the
well-placed boot of a drunken anti-Semite. The
poet relies upon the imagination of the reader to
visualize Anne Frank being pulled from the arms
of those she loved, a teenager—a child still—sent
to her death. Just as Wiesel worries about the
appropriation of the Holocaust, Mandel also wor-
ries that using the event, even for poetry, violates
the victims, since ‘‘to speak their experience would
run the risk of understanding that experience,
with its concurrent possibilities of trivializing or
betraying it.’’
Yevtushenko uses ‘‘Babii Yar’’ to force his
readers to recognize the truth about the injustice
of the past. The expectation is that past injustices
will be recognized and not repeated. Gubar rec-
ognizes that there are stereotypes about Jews,
and as a result, she declares that the poetry of
the Holocaust must be completely honest, not
‘‘too theatrical or too theoretical, too glib or too
sanctimonious,’’ but instead it must ‘‘make the
present see the past.’’ Yevtushenko did not
experience the Holocaust. He is not Jewish, and
‘‘Babii Yar’’ is not the poetry of experience.
Nevertheless, Yevtushenko’s poetry captures
the truth of that experience. James Finn Cotter
remarks in theHudson Reviewthat ‘‘the truth of
poetry is not in reciting facts but in creating
veracity.’’ Poetry must create the truth, and this
is even more important for Holocaust poetry.
Cotter explains that he asks ‘‘a poem to be true
to itself, to convince me and to capture my atten-
tion with its thought, emotion, imagery, and
language.’’ In the long sequence of ‘‘Babii Yar’’
in which Yevtushenko imagines that he is each
old man or young child facing death there, the
imagery fulfills Cotter’s requirement that poetry
must convince the reader of an essential truth.
According to Cotter, Yevtushenko has stood for
‘‘poetry as a voice that rallies public conscious-
ness.’’ Yevtushenko demands the ‘‘freedom to
speak out in protest against human rights viola-
tions.’’ His is a worldview, according to Cotter,
‘‘that transcends nationalist boundaries’’ and
represents ‘‘the power of the individual against
bureaucracy and oppression.’’ When Yevtush-
enko, a non-Jew, imagines himself a Jew, he
does so not in a search for sympathy but in an
expectation of justice. His poem demands that
the Soviet bureaucracy acknowledge the destruc-
tion of Kiev Jewry at Babi Yar in 1941.
Wiesel adamantly states that ‘‘the Holocaust
mustbe remembered.’’ Yevtushenko’s choice to
speak of certain Holocaust events through
poetry is one way to remember. It is also a way
to honor those who died, as with his demand for
a memorial at Babi Yar. Poetry is also a way to
remind readers of the destructiveness of hate, as
Yevtushenko does when he recalls the long his-
tory of anti-Semitism. In the introduction to the
anthology of Holocaust literatureArt from the
Ashes, Lawrence L. Langer suggests, ‘‘If the Hol-
ocaust has ceased to seem an event and become
instead a theme of prose narrative, fiction, or
verse, this is not to diminish its importance, but
to alter the route by which we approach it.’’
Yevtushenko chooses to call attention to an
event that had been covered up and ignored.
His route is to remind readers of the past. Liter-
ature, regardless of the form that it takes, cannot
offer a complete picture of the Holocaust,
because as Wiesel observes, ‘‘You may think
you know how the victims lived and died, but
you do not.’’ Each experience of having lived
through the Holocaust is unique. The picture
created by literature, or even by film, cannotBabii Yar