<i>Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond</i>

On the eve of the Second World War, according to the 1939 census, the total population of Kyiv was 846,724, with Jews counting 224,236 residents or 26.5 % of the population.The Soviet army withdrew from Kyiv on September 17, 1941.Two days later Nazi troops entered the city and would occupy it until the Red Army recaptured it two years later, on November 6, 1943.Ten days after the occupation, on September 29, local Jews, having been ordered the day before to gather on the intersection of two streets, were marched off to a ravine called Babyn Yar on the outskirts of the city and machine-gunned.Over the course of two days at the end of that September, some 33,771 Jews were systematically massacred.During Kyiv's Nazi occupation, between 100,000 and 150,000 people perished in Babyn Yar, mostly Jews but also patients from psychiatric institutions, Soviet prisoners of war, Ukrainian partisans, Communists, Romanies and others.Initiatives by the Soviet Government between 1945 and the independence of Ukraine in 1991 to commemorate the massacres at Babyn Yar were mostly unrealized, and Jews as specific victims were largely elided under the category of "Kyivans" or "Soviet citizens."A granite stone monument was finally erected in 1966, followed by a bronze sculpture in 1976.It was only in 1991, however, that Babyn Yar was characterized in Ukraine as a predominantly Jewish massacre, culminating in 2020 with the announcement of the Foundation and Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center (whose inauguration is currently planned for 2025-2026).It is against this historical background that Ostap Kin presents his bilingual anthology (with English-language translations by John Hennessy and Kin himself) of Jewish and non-Jewish Ukrainianlanguage poetry on Babyn Yar written from 1941 to 2018, the first anthology of its kind entirely devoted to this aspect of what has become known as the "Holocaust by bullets."Of the 24 poets included in the anthology, each author presented by alphabetical order accompanied by a brief bio bibliographical sketch, most are represented by one or two poems, while others have three, four or more poems included, totaling 41 poems altogether encompassing a wide range of formal and thematic concerns, as well as different historical and geographical locations.