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  • Essay / An Analysis of Babi Yar - 1023

    An Analysis of Babi YarYevtushenko speaks in the first person throughout the poem. This gives the impression that he is in the place of the Jews. As he says in lines 63 and 64, "No Jewish blood is mixed with mine, but let me be Jewish..." He writes this poem to evoke compassion for Jews and make others aware of their difficulties and their injustices. “Only then can I call myself a Russian.” (lines 66-67). The poet speaks of a future time when the Russian people will realize that the Jews are a people and accept them as such. If you hate the Jews, he asks, why not hate me too? True peace and unity will only come when they accept everyone, including the Jews. Stanza I describes the forest of Babi Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of kyiv. It was the site of the Nazi massacre of more than thirty thousand Russian Jews on September 29-30, 1941. There is a commemorative name for the thirty thousand, but fear gripped the area. Fear that such a thing could happen in the hands of other humans. The poet feels the persecution, pain and fear of the Jews who were there in this place of horror. Yevtushenko becomes an Israelite slave from Egypt and a martyr who died for the sake of his religion. In lines 7 and 8, he states that he always blocks out the traces of past persecutions. There is still terrible persecution against Jews today because of their religion. These lines serve as a transition between the biblical and ancient examples he gives and allusions to more recent acts of hatred. The lines also allude to the fact that those Russian Jews murdered at Babi Yar were also martyrs. The following 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 "traitor" (line 12) when he is accused, and anti-Semitism is his "judge" (line 12) when he is wrongly convicted Lines 13 and 14 assert that even the noble and so-called civilized women of society avoid Dreyfus because he is Jewish and fear him as they would. fear of an animal In Ezza III, Yevtushenko finds himself in the middle of the.