An Analysis of Babi Yar :: Babi Yar Essays

An Analysis of Babi Yar Yevtushenko speaks in first soulfulness throughout the poem. This creates the tone of him being in the shoes of the Jews. As he says in lines 63-64, No Jewish blood is mixed in mine, precisely let me be a Jew . . . He writes the poem to evoke compassionateness for the Jews and make others awargon of their hardships and injustices. Only then can I waul myself Russian. (lines 66-67). The poet writes of a future time when the Russian people realize that the Jews are people as well accept them as such. If you hate the Jews, he asks, why not hate me as well? True recreation and unity will only occur when they have accepted everyone, including the Jews.     Stanza I describes the forest of Babi Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev. It was the site of the Nazi massacre of more than thanthirty thousand Russian Jews on September 29-30, 1941. at that place is no memorial to the thirty thousand, but consternation pervades the area. Fear tha t such a thing could occur at the hands of other humans. The poet feels the persecution and pain and fear of the Jews who stood there in this place of horror. Yevtushenko makes himself an Israelite slave of Egypt and a martyr who died for the interest group of his religion. In lines 7-8, he claims that he still bars the marks of the persecution of the past. There is still terrible persecution of the Jews in present times because of their religion. These lines serve as the transition from the Biblical and ancient examples he gives to the allusions of more recent acts of hatred. The lines withal allude to the fact that these Russian Jews who were murdered at Babi Yar were martyrs as well.      The adjoining ezza reminds us of another event in Jewish history where a Jew was persecuted solely because of his religious beliefs. The poet refers to the pettiness (line 11) of anti-Semitism as the cause of Dreyfus imprisonment. anti-Semitism is his betrayer (line 12) when he is framed, and anti-Semitism is his judge (line 12) when he is wrongly instal guilty. Lines 13-14 claim that even the fine and supposedly civilized women of society relegate Dreyfus because he is a Jew and fear him like they would fear an animal.      In ezza III, Yevtushenko brings himself to the midst of the