I Saw It ― Ilya Selvinsky and the Legacy of Bearing Witness to the Shoah

In this ground-breaking book, based on archival and field research and previously unknown historical evidence, Maxim D. Shrayer introduces the work of Ilya Selvinsky, the first Jewish-Russian poet to depict the Holocaust (Shoah) in the occupied Soviet territories. In January 1942, while serving as a military journalist, Selvinsky witnessed the immediate aftermath of the massacre of thousands of Jews outside the Crimean city of Kerch, and thereafter composed and published poems about it. Shrayer painstakingly reconstructs the details of the Nazi atrocities witnessed by Selvinsky, and shows that in 1943, as Stalin’s regime increasingly refused to report the annihilation of Jews in the occupied territories, Selvinsky paid a high price for his writings and actions. This book features over 60 rare photographs and illustrations and includes translations of Selvinsky’s principal Shoah poems.

Maxim D. Shrayer (PhD Yale University) is Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish studies at Boston College. A bilingual writer and translator, Shrayer has authored and edited a number of books, among them the path-breaking critical studies The World of Nabokov’s Stories and Russian Poet/ Soviet Jew, the acclaimed literary memoir Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration, and the collection Yom Kippur in Amsterdam. Shrayer’s two-volume Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature won a 2007 National Jewish Book Award, and in 2012 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. For more information, visit www.shrayer.com.