In Her Once Elsewhere, Who Now Would Know Akhmatova? Censoring Palestine in a Time of Genocide

For my twentieth birthday, a friend I met in a university poetry class gifted me a copy of Selected Poems by Soviet poet Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966). I didn’t know much about Akhmatova then, but she was greatly admired by this friend, who added the inscription, “Hope you like Akhmatova.” The poem I remember us later discussing at length was Akhmatova’s “Requiem.” Since learning of the poem’s genesis, my memory has never let go of the few facts I have read about it — that it was composed over three decades but, for much of that time, was not written down. Rather Akhmatova committed it to memory, and the memory of trusted friends, whom she apparently obliged to first learn her revisions by heart and then to expunge earlier versions from their recall.