Island Living 24: Scratch a Good American by A. D. Coleman

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From the daily press, the radio, the tv and the Internet comes the constant updating of changes in eastern Europe: disintegration, upheaval, power structures collapsing and reforming, old boundaries coming down, new ones going up. And, underneath it all, an ominously familiar drone: a steady rise in the incidence of anti-Semitism in the former Soviet Union and in the reunified Germany.

One does not need either a highly-developed sense of irony or a tendency toward paranoia to conclude that, just as "the Jews" were blamed by both Soviet Communists and Nazis for everything that happened prior to World War II, the decimated and powerless Jewish community that survived the Holocaust, the Stalinist purges and the subsequent repressions will end up accused of being responsible for everything wrong in the eastern bloc and both Germanies for the past forty-five years. The impulse to scapegoat, though rooted deep in the human psyche, is nonetheless never far from the surface, and the predictions of imminent pogroms are not to be discounted so long as there are large crowds of angry people looking for some easy target to hold accountable for their problems.

But, comfortable though it may be to think so, not all the anti-Semitism in the eastern bloc is home-grown; some is imported. It is, after all, an international commodity, traded freely, respecting no borderlines. During a trip to what was still the Soviet Union over a decade ago, I had a chance to observe two Americans who trafficked in it -- to the dismay of their Soviet host.

According to my notebooks, it was June 13, 1988. Along with almost two hundred other Americans, I was on a people-to-people peace cruise along the Dneiper River in the Ukraine, a trip sponsored by a coalition of U.S. peace groups (primarily the Gray Panthers and SANE/Freeze), in conjunction with their Soviet counterparts. Finally, at the end of our river voyage, we had reached Kiev.

That morning, during our official tour of the city, we had stopped at Babii Yar, site of a mass grave for 200,000 Kievites -- roughly one-quarter of them Jewish -- slaughtered by the Nazis during their two-year occupation of the city. The monument, only a few years old, is stark and powerful: a crowd of men trying bravely but in vain to defend a nursing mother who gives her infant a farewell kiss. The monument is surrounded by a man-made ravine, intended to evoke the natural ravine nearby that the Nazis used as a dumping site for the bodies of their victims.

The construction of the monument took place only a few years ago. Indeed, the site was not commemorated until well after the war -- and then only after Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Russian poet, wrote a poem declaring himself to be one with the martyred dead there. Written during the Khrushchev era, published in the Soviet journal Literaturnaya Gazeta on September 29, 1961 -- the eve of the Jewish Day of Atonement -- "Babii Yar" begins like this:

It ends:

(full text of poem)

The poem became, overnight, the center of a firestorm, raising the issue of Soviet anti-Semitism both past and present. Its publication and the furious public debates it engendered were taken as signs of an attempt at what is now called glasnost. (After all, Stalin's crimes finally were being brought to light and acknowledged under Khrushchev; indeed, that same year, Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd in a specific ritual of dishonor.)

More than a third of a century after the poem was first printed, the problem of anti-Semitism in the former Soviet Union has hardly been resolved. In some ways, the monument at Babii Yar -- and the official treatment of it -- can be said to epitomize this dilemma. There is nothing noticeably Semitic about any of the people depicted in the monumental tableau, or any annotation that specifies it as a killing ground for Jews. Indeed, our 1988 tour guide took great pains to point out that more than half of those interred there were not Jewish -- that it was a grave for people of many faiths, nationalities and ethnic derivations. Notably, despite its international fame, the monument was not mentioned in the official guidebook supplied to us by Intourist.

Yet the monument does stand, towering and resonant. It is unguarded and undesecrated. People, many of them -- and not only foreign tourists like ourselves -- were there to pay respects or bear witness, obviously unconcerned with being observed. Some of us walked down into the ravine. It was a very silent place, but if you put your ear to the ground you could hear the earth screaming.

The youngest of our group -- I'll call him Ari -- was fourteen years old. He had rapidly become the surrogate grandchild of everyone on the cruise (most of whom were over the age of sixty), and a significant ambassador for peace in his own right. Adept at making friends, Ari manifested a gift for sensing the right gesture, boundless good humor, all that exhausting teenage energy, and an open heart. By now, I'm sure, he's a heartbreaker -- but I suspect he's a mender too.

He reminded me much of my own son at that age; and, seeing him so without peers in his own age group among us, I had (with the blessing of his grandmother, with whom he was traveling) tucked him under my wing, serving as a kind of big brother/surrogate father. He and I and a young potter from Boulder -- I'll call her Dina -- had taken to hanging out together. As a result, her father (who'll be Jerry here) was also in frequent contact with the boy, and had been treating him in a fatherly manner.

Ari had relatives who died at Babii Yar. The previous evening, his grandmother had told him of Babii Yar and of the fate of the members of his family. Our visit there was a solemn one for him, and he clearly bore the burden of memory. He laid a flower and a stone on the simple marker at the foot of the monument.

(To be continued.)

Translation of "Babii Yar" by George Reavey, from The Poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko (October House). © Copyright 1965, George Reavey.

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© Copyright 1999 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved.
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