An Analysis of Babi Yar :: Babi Yar Essays

An Analysis of Babi Yar Yevtushenko speaks in first person 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, but let me be a Jew . . . He writes the poem to evoke compassion for the Jews and make others aware of their hardships and injustices. except then can I call myself Russian. (lines 66-67). The poet writes of a future time when the Russian people realize that the Jews are people as well get into them as such. If you hate the Jews, he asks, why not hate me as well? True peace and unity will only occur when they render 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 thanthirty thousand Russian Jews on September 29-30, 1941. in that respect is no memorial to the thirty thousand, but timidity pervades the area. Fear that 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 sake of his religion. In lines 7-8, he claims that he chill out 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 also allude to the circumstance that these Russian Jews who were murdered at Babi Yar were martyrs as well.      The next 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 slightness (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 hi s judge (line 12) when he is wrongly found guilty. Lines 13-14 claim that even the fine and purportedly civilized women of society shun 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