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Babi Yar and Other Poems
Ilya Ehrenburg, translated by Anna Krushelnitskaya
Smokestack Books, £9.99
SMOKESTACK continues its fine tradition of publishing international poets of different generations in English translation, a poetic and publishing feat in itself. Babi Yar and Other Poems also has an extensive yet compact introduction by Joshua Rubenstein, a former director of Amnesty International USA.
Ehrenburg (1891-1967) served as a Russian war correspondent in France during WWI, covered the Spanish Civil War for Izvestia, and survived Stalin, while his outspoken columns during WWII won him a huge following among the Red Army and the personal enmity of Hitler who sought his capture and execution.
A Jew, his many books documented the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Soviet territory. The words Babi Yar themselves refer to a two-day mass shooting of Jews at a ravine called Babyn Yar in 1941, one of the largest massacres perpetrated by German Nazis in Europe. His novel The Thaw gave its name to the Khrushchev years, while his memoir People, Years, Life tested the limits of Soviet censorship under Brezhnev by championing the work of his old friends, such as Marina Tsvetaeva, Isaac Babel, and Osip Mandelstam.
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