Word: kiev
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...September, 1941, and victorious Nazi armies were pouring into Russia. Toward the end of the month, the Germans ordered "all Jews of the city of Kiev and its environs" to assemble near the Jewish cemetery overlooking a ravine called Babi Yar (Old Wives Gully). They came, locking their homes behind them and carrying their valuables, believing they were to be resettled beyond the war zone. Instead, they were marched to the cliffs of Babi Yar, stripped and machine-gunned in groups of ten. By the Germans' own orderly bookkeeping, 33,771 were slaughtered in the first 48 hours...
...local soccer team that imprudently defeated an all-star German army eleven. Such ultimate impartiality made it possible for postwar Soviet policy, with its own vein of antiSemitism, to try to suppress the Jewish portion of the Babi Yar massacre-until 1961, when Poet Evgeny Evtushenko memorialized the Kiev Jews in burning verse. He was rebuked by the Soviet literary Establishment, but his own rebuke, in the poem's first two lines, was lastingly effective...
...English translation, and they do not seem to burn with artistic flame-they itch like inflammations. Except for the famous piece Babii Yar, which is more an emphatic speech than a poem about the slaughter of tens of thousands of Jews by German troops near Yevtushenko's Kiev, topics of recent years are often triumphs of trivia, his attitudes the aggravations of an adolescent...
...misses by very little, however. Malamud's novel is a fictional version of the Beiliss Case in Kiev, 1911, in which a Jew was wrongly accused of the ritual murder of a Christian child and of milking his blood for the purpose of making Passover matzos. The incident, followed by an obscene wave of antiSemitism, was documented in a bleak narrative by Maurice Samuel in Blood Accusation, published this year. Malamud coincidentally worked on the same gruesome subject, but he has gone beyond journalistic intention...
...Jewish Quixote. It could also be said of his dream of "good fortune and a comfortable house," in the conditions of the Ukraine of that day, that nothing could be more hopelessly quixotic. He trades his Rosinante for a ferry ride and enters the holy city of Kiev. As a final renunciation of his historic identity, Yakov gives himself a Russian name: "Yakov Ivanovitch Dologushev...