Johnson's Russia List
#7444
30 November 2003
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A CDI Project
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#11
Chicago Tribune
November 30, 2003
Poetry resonates for city's Russians
Yevtushenko told of Nazi horrors
By Russell Working
Tribune staff reporter

In a gray Rogers Park building reminiscent of a Soviet housing block,
memorabilia from the Private Museum of Yevgeny Yevtushenko fills the
entryway, living room and dining room of Apartment 913.

The walls are covered with posters advertising recitals by the Russian
poet. Books, records and videotapes cram the shelves. Proprietor Mark
Levin, 71, even wears a red shirt with white cuffs that the author gave him.

For the Russian immigrant, promoting Yevtushenko has been a calling since
he and his wife, Anna, first met the poet in the Soviet republic of Georgia
in 1977.

Levin said: "When we parted, I swore an oath to him and put this hand on my
heart, and I told him the following words: `Dear Yevgeny Alexandrovich
[Yevtushenko] for the rest of my life, I will do all that is in my power
... to make your poetry penetrate among the masses.' And that's what I am
doing."

The Levins aren't alone in their zeal for the verses of Yevtushenko, who
will return to Chicago to read his work in Russian at 3 p.m. Dec. 13 in ORT
Technical Institute, 3050 W. Touhy Ave. The Siberian poet is the author of
"Babi Yar," a 1961 meditation on a visit to the site where Nazi Germans and
Ukrainian collaborators murdered 100,000 Jews during World War II. For
Russian-speaking Jews in the Chicago area, including the Levins, the poem
is personal: Many lost relatives in the Holocaust.

Yevtushenko, 70, condemned not only the fascists who committed the
massacre--not a difficult target in the Soviet Union--but the anti-Semitism
that historically has poisoned the minds of many Russians and others
throughout history, a much touchier subject. And in doing so, he voiced
Soviet Jewish anger about the prejudice that drove many from their
homeland: the internal passports that designated them as Jews, the epithets
spat out by self-styled patriots on streetcars, the vandalism of synagogues
and graveyards, the assaults by thugs and skinheads.

"I couldn't find a job because I was Jewish, and when I did, I worked for a
smaller salary," said Dina Vayner, 66, from Kharkiv, Ukraine, who praises
"Babi Yar" for tackling the theme. "There were acts of violence against our
family, and in the early 1990s, our synagogue was burned. There was a
pogrom, and we couldn't go out those days. We had to stay at home in order
to save our children."

An affinity for poetry

Russian-speakers (millions of whom lived in Ukraine and other former Soviet
republics) harbor a deep love of poetry. Throughout the former Soviet era,
truck drivers and physicists could recite from 19th Century lyricists such
as Alexander Pushkin or spout lines from dissident poets such as Anna
Akhmatova. Russia's writers often have been outsized personalities who die
in duels or are exiled by tyrants in the Kremlin.

Yevtushenko cut a sweeping figure as a poet, filmmaker and member of
Mikhail Gorbachev's parliament. He has been called the Bob Dylan of Russia,
and his recitals have filled auditoriums in Moscow. His literary reputation
abroad has varied. For a time he drew the ire of both Kremlin apparatchiks
and conservative foreign writers such as Kingsley Amis, who felt he was too
close to the Soviet powers. During the 1970s, Yevtushenko was well-known
enough to be lampooned in G.B. Trudeau's Doonesbury, which portrayed him
holding forth on an American campus while leaves swirled around him, even
indoors.

But among Russians, he is beloved.

"He's just such an icon of Soviet poetry," said Chicago resident Yulia
Demidovich, 29, who first heard of the massacre at Babi Yar when she read
Yevtushenko's poem as a teenager in the Soviet Union. "I don't think anyone
else told the truth about that era the way that he did."

Reached by phone in Tulsa, where he teaches Russian literature part of the
year, Yevtushenko recalled driving through Moscow with American poet Allen
Ginsberg. Yevtushenko made an illegal U-turn and a policeman pulled him over.

"When he recognized me," Yevtushenko said, "he immediately gave me back my
driver's license, but with this one condition: `If you have a book of your
poetry with you, [give it to me].' And it's the only kind of bribe I use in
my life. When driving in Russia, I always keep some books of my poetry for
road police."

Yevtushenko remembers that Ginsberg burst out laughing, unable to imagine a
New York cop twisting an American poet's arm for a chapbook of verses.

Making a name

Yevtushenko was one of a handful of writers who emerged during the Nikita
Khrushchev regime in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. Though most of his
work is on non-Jewish themes, he rose into public view with "Babi Yar." In
stanza after stanza, he imagined himself suffering as Jews throughout
history: "Now I seem to be a Jew ... / I seem to be Dreyfus ... / I seem to
be a young boy in Belostok [site of an infamous pogrom] ... / I seem to be
Anne Frank/ transparent/ as a branch in April ... / I am each old man/ here
shot dead./ I am/ every child/ here shot dead."

The poem was sparked by the poet's visit to the site of the Nazi slaughter.
Soviet sources state that 100,000 Jews were murdered at Babi Yar, according
to United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. During the two
days when the killing began--Sept. 29-30, 1941--33,771 people were
machine-gunned to death and heaped in open pits. But the Soviet Union,
never hesitant to denounce Nazis, had remained mostly silent about this
atrocity because hundreds of Ukrainian collaborators had worked under the
command of the Nazis.

Yevtushenko expected to find a monument. Instead, it was a garbage dump.

"I was shocked," he said. "I see a dump. There was not even a little sign.
There was no monument. You know, I always write poetry out of shame or out
of love and tenderness. ... It's a poem written out of shame."

On a recent Sunday afternoon, patrons of Three Sisters, a Russian market on
Devon Avenue, paused while shopping for salted fish and jars of pickled
mushrooms to talk about Yevtushenko, whose reading is advertised in four
fliers on a corkboard. Among Russian and Ukrainian Jews, discussions of the
poet always turn to "Babi Yar." Sofia Pushkaryova, 68, a retired chemistry
and biology teacher who lives in Chicago, became teary as she discussed the
poem.

"I'm from Kiev, and I returned home three years ago," Pushkaryova said.
"And I visited Babi Yar and left many flowers, because my grandfather and
grandmother died there, and many of my relatives. They were very young."

Levin understands. A retired electrical engineer, he was born in 1932 in
Kiev, where he was living when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union..

"When the war started, I was 9 years old," he said. "And from the very
first day my grandma started to say, `We need to flee. Otherwise we'll
die.'... We escaped Kiev July 9, 1941, Grandma, my mother and I. We left
everything in the apartment.

"If we hadn't gone, we would have ended up in Babi Yar."

- - -
An excerpt from `Babi Yar'
The wild grasses rustle over Babi Yar.
The trees look ominous,
like judges.
Here all things scream
silently,
and, baring my head,
slowly I feel myself
turning gray.
And I myself
am one massive, soundless scream
above the thousand
thousand buried here.
I am
each old man
here shot dead.
I am
every child
here shot dead.
--From "Babi Yar," Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Translated by George Reavey

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