Four years after the ‘imprisonment’ of Life and Fate, and two decades after Grossman’s groundbreaking reporting on the fate of Soviet Jews during the war, Anatoly Kuznetsov took a manuscript of his documentary novel Babi Yar to the editorial office of the magazine Yunost, that blessed child of liberalisation which my parents devoured cover to cover. The writer had been the twelve-year-old boy who heard the shots ring out at Babi Yar. Before the war the ‘huge, you can even say magnificent, ravine – deep and wide like a mountain canyon’ was the place of his childhood games. After his city’s liberation, adolescent Anatoly went straight to the site to see for himself what was left there, to try to glean what had happened. From that day he began collecting stories and testimonies, everything he could find, about the ravine. In a sense, he had been writing Babi Yar since he was fourteen.
In 1965 when the novel was finished, Khrushchev was no longer at the helm but the thaw was still lingering, fresh in people’s minds. At the offices of Yunost, Kuznetsov’s manuscript was returned to him almost immediately, and he was advised in the strongest possible terms not to show it to anyone until he removed all the anti-Soviet passages, anything, in fact, that strayed from an attack on the barbarity of Hitler’s Fascism. Kuznetsov edited the text, but whatever he culled from it was evidently not enough. When he realised that his work was being totally disfigured by censorship, he tried to stop its publication. Told bluntly that it was too late, the writer flew into a rage, grabbed the manuscript from the editor’s desk and ran out into the street, tearing the pages on the way and stuffing them in rubbish bins. Of course, the magazine had other copies of the manuscript, and Kuznetsov’s outburst did nothing to stop the novel, or what was left of it, from appearing in print. When Babi Yar finally came out in Yunost in a ‘journal version’ (a particularly cruel euphemism in this case), its author could not recognise his own text. In front of me now is a copy of another version published in London in 1970, in which all the excised excerpts (a veritable sea of them) are reproduced in italics, and additions made by the author free of self-censorship appear in square brackets. Kuznetsov wanted his readers to understand how Soviet censorship operated, and his formatting techniques proved devastatingly effective. This edition of the novel was possible only because of Kuznetsov’s defection to the West. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 was the last straw; afterwards, he secured permission to travel to London by claiming that he was writing his next book about Lenin and needed to research the time the future leader of the Soviet state spent in London in 1902. As a writer Kuznetsov said that he needed to feel the atmosphere of the place, to sit in the same library in the British Museum where the Great Leader selflessly slaved away planning the world revolution, and to visit the grave of Karl Marx at Highgate Cemetery. ‘During the first four days,’ The Times said in August 1969, after the writer’s defection became a celebrated fait accompli, ‘Kuznetsov behaved like a model Communist. On the fifth evening, during a tourist’s stroll through Soho’s lurid strip joints, Kuznetsov said that he wanted to find a prostitute. Andjapazidze [the secret agent who was assigned to him in the traditional guise of an interpreter] discreetly left his companion to his own fun.’ That window of opportunity was enough for the writer to escape, a 35-mm film containing the uncensored manuscript of Babi Yar in his possession.
The novel is a work of burning dedication written by a man who comes close to losing himself entirely to his mission. Among many things, records faithfully, with not a word changed, the story told by the only survivor of the massacre that Kuznetsov could find – a young woman called Dina Pronicheva, an actor-puppeteer from Kiev Puppet Theatre. For decades after the war, faced with vicious State anti-Semitism no longer disguised or kept in check, Dina Pronicheva had to hide both the fact of her survival and her Jewish identity. Kuznetsov described how it took an enormous effort to convince her to tell how she managed to survive. ‘She did not believe her story could be published, or that anyone was interested in it.’ But eventually she told it to Kuznetsov ‘in the same building on Vorovsky Street from which she left for Babi Yar, in the same dilapidated room’. The telling took several days, during which time Pronicheva suffered several bouts of angina or heart pain.
Even today, after Babi Yar has been recognised universally as a site of a singular human catastrophe, written about endlessly, commemorated, memorialised, her story is impossible to read without breaking down. How was it to read it then – in a country where a survivor like her, a walking miracle, had to swallow her tongue; where it took over twenty-five years, a scandal and another tragedy for so much as a stone to be erected on the site of Babi Yar? The whole book is, in fact, unbearable – how could a deeply truthful book that came out of a wound the size of that ravine be any other way?
Billie, of course, knows about Babi Yar. She has not read Kuznetsov’s book or Grossman’s reportage, but she knows what happened and what this site means to her family and to Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian Jews wherever they are in the world. Ira took us to the site of the ravine in Kurenyovka, now a large park with several monuments. When I was my daughter’s age, my parents told me what had happened here. I had never heard about Kuznetsov’s account (its publication, even in a heavily censored form, was deemed a mistake; no reprints were allowed and the book version was removed from the libraries). But I knew by heart Yevtushenko’s famous poem Babi Yar, written after he visited the site with Kuznetsov in the early 1960s. (Whatever I think of the man who wrote it, that poem is unquestionably brave and powerful.) It starts with a lament over the absence of a monument on the site and ends with Yevtushenko declaring that he is a Jew to all anti-Semites and that that is why he is a true Russian. I remember being astounded by these words; they seemed to me in my adolescence to have the power of Emile Zola’s ‘J’accuse’, carrying within themselves not just the Russian poet’s personal identification with Jewish people but a public accusation not qualified by disclaimers and delivered at the same volume as the other poems Yevtushenko declaimed during those famous stadium poetry readings.
Of course I have told Billie plenty of stories about growing up Jewish, about the infamous ‘fifth line’ in Soviet passports, in which people’s ethnicity had to be recorded. (This mandatory line, I am pleased to discover, was abandoned in the late 1990s.) Some very good, very sane people did all kinds of elaborate things so as not to have the word ‘Jew’ in their children’s birth certificates: fictitious marriages, fictitious divorces, bribes – anything to spare their children the fate of an identified Jew. My parents did no such thing. In all of our documents we were Jews and Jews only. I told my daughter these stories in part because I wanted her not to take for granted the world – her world – in which Holocaust deniers were vilified and the imperative ‘We shall not forget’ did not belong merely to a handful of people worn out by constant confrontation with a society that wanted them to shut up once and for all. But not taking for granted was not simply about counting blessings. Everything in my childhood, adolescence and grown-up life taught me that this world Billie inhabited, however natural it may have seemed to her, was intensely fragile. To protect it there were things, important things, we had to do. Finally, we were at Babi Yar. I had thought about this moment for a long time. Perhaps this was some kind of homecoming, maybe even more than taking Billie to Kharkov? No one from our family lay in the ravine’s soil, but the dead under our feet were our dead. The least we owed them was a visit.