How a Poet from Lviv Speaks for the Victims of Babyn Jar
Der Standard, June 20, 2024
German original: https://www.derstandard.de/story/3000000225039/wie-eine-lyrikerin-aus-lwiw-die-opfer-von-babyn-jar-zur-sprache-bringt
Ronald Pohl
Marianna Kijanowska's band "Babyn Jar. Stimmen" gives the Jewish dead of the Kiev massacre of 1941 their right to be heard.
It is "Grandpa Yakov" who knows what is in store for him and the other Ukrainian Jews. The old man has been shot. The feathers of his pillow are "piercing through" his sickbed. In Marianna Kijanowska's collection of poems, Babyn Jar. Voices are subject to names like things, strictly lower case.
The Jews in Kiev had few possessions left in September 1941. The clothes they were wearing, including a wedding dress that no longer made sense after the groom had been murdered by the Nazis' special forces. Some of the elderly were clearing household items into the attic. But Grandpa Yakov "cries and begs us for death." He "asks quietly / whether we realize that it is now time for us to die too." Pause. "Then he screams, 'Get out of here, but kill the cat first.'"
The enormity of the massacre at Babyn Jar is based on the particular diligence of the Nazi murderers. 34,000 Jews, among them a disproportionate number of the elderly, women and children, were driven into a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev on September 29/30, 1941 and shot in large numbers.
It is one of the most infamous aspects of Soviet politics that for a long time no commemoration of this major crime took place. The Jewish victims were not singled out in any way, but rather the unity of all Soviet citizens was emphasized from a class point of view.
Shostakovich's setting
It took courageous "people's poets" like Yevgeny Evtushenko, who wrote a poem entitled Babi Yar in 1961, to provide the first clues, after which Shostakovich set the text to music in his 13th symphony. It immediately became a worldwide success.
Author Marianna Kijanowska, born in Lviv in 1973, trampled on the memory of the Jews in Ukraine: unintentionally, as a child she played with fragments of stone slabs in the marketplace. Only later did she realize that they were grave slabs from the Jewish cemetery, which had been abandoned.
Her memorial for the victims of Babyn Jar comprises 65 voices: the victims realize the inevitability of their fate. They accept it; often they examine the testimonies of themselves and their peers. Just by naming their names, a space of resonance is created: Alik, Avram, Khaviva, Yanyk, Yasha, Lyalya, Lyova, Mykola, Shoryk, Zilya, Zylunya... "The last cup will soon be handed out," it says in one of the heart-rending litanies.
In fact, some of these tentative poems resemble prayers. Claudia Dathe's translation weaves a dense web of phonetic references. She makes assonances (vocal consonance) audible. The effect is archaic, as both the author and translator make use of an elementary vocabulary based primarily on two- and three-syllable nouns. With sporadically interspersed verses such as "und blutschwarze mohnblüten quellen" (and blood-black poppy blossoms well up), the boundaries of good taste are almost reached.
Guilty respect
Who is authorized to speak on behalf of so many people who were killed – and yet not to inappropriately appropriate the fates of others? Through her project, which she pursues with great seriousness, Kijanowska pays her guilty respect to the victims. It was a large number of local militiamen who assisted the German murderers: they carry out their dirty work here under the cover and collective term "polizaj".
Babyn Jar. Stimmen was written in 2017, and Kijanowska says that the process cost her her hair. The book was distilled from hundreds of attempts. It is a pressing reminder to take up the history of Ukrainian collaborators. Such acts of self-reflection seem to be absolutely necessary – especially now, when the invasion of Russian aggressors on Ukrainian soil is costing countless victims, including those of war crimes.
"We are all Jews now," says one of the many breathtaking texts. It is not false appropriation that points the way to coming to terms with guilt and disinterest; it is the speaking of empathy, which only great, crazy authors can command. In a theologically unprecedented poem, one of the doomed speaks the following scandalous couplet: "The only thing that is difficult is that I could not say goodbye to God / so I have to believe, even if it is without salvation." (Ronald Pohl, 20.6.2024)
Marianna Kijanowska, "Babyn Jar. Stimmen". Poems in Ukrainian and German. Translation and epilogue: Claudia Dathe. €24.70 / 160 pages. Suhrkamp, Berlin 2024