A native of Crimea, the Soviet Jewish poet Ilya Selvinskii (1899-1968), in 1942-43, bore witness to Nazi atrocities in and near the city of Kerch (in eastern Crimea) and in the south of Russia. This included the massacre at the "Bagerovo ditch", an anti-tank ditch west of the city, where the Nazis murdered ca. 7,000 Jews of Kerch in November 1941. What he saw impressed Selvinskii for the rest of his life. He was the first Soviet poet to publish extensively on the Holocaust, most notably his two poems "I Saw It" (1942) and "Kerch" (1945). In general, he somewhat downplayed the fact that the victims were Jews, as did Ehrenburg and other contemporary poets who wrote on the Nazi mass murders. Selvinskii's shock of viewing the Bagerovo ditch was also reflected in his postwar poems, in particular in "Kandava", the first version of which was published in 1946. Selvinskii influenced many other poets who wrote on the Nazi genocide, among them Iosif Utkin and Lev Ozerov. After the war Selvinskii was accused of "cosmopolitanism" and holding an "anti-party line"; he was partially blacklisted. Pp. 263-277 contain the Russian originals and English translations of "I Saw It" and "Kerch".

Discusses the Russian Jewish poet (born Eduard Dzyubin, 1895-1934), including the role that antisemitism played in regard to the publication (or non-publication) of his works and to their interpretation. Mentions, in particular, the Russian ultra-nationalist Stanislav Kunyayev, who viewed Bagritskii both as an "alien trespasser in the fields of Russian poetry" and as a self-hating Jew. Focuses on the poems "Origin" and "February" and their relation to the poet's Jewishness, which contemporary and later Soviet criticism minimized. Examines the Jewish trauma of rejection depicted in "February" and the protagonist's reactions to it. Denies the antisemitic view that the Jew in the poem rapes a Russian woman. Rejects the image of Bagritskii as a self-hating Jew, as well as the allegation that he has no place in Russian culture. Bagritskii was hoping for a synthesis, a utopia where a Russian-Jewish identity was possible and welcome. The fate of his works, as well as those of Soviet Jews who outlived him, proved otherwise.