Editors threw him out of their offices, and he wandered like a pirate into the arms of Maxim Gorky; it was Gorky who told him that his “two or three tolerable attempts” at literature were “successful by accident,” and sent him out into the world—v lyudi.
And now comes the biggest fable of them all. “For seven years—from 1917 to 1924—I was out in the world,” a barefoot boy who became a soldier on the Rumanian front, a member of the Cheka (Babel’s first wife called this a piece of pure fiction), a reporter in Tiflis, something of an apparatchik in Odessa, and more. “Only in 1923 did I learn how to express my thoughts clearly and concisely. Then I set about writing again.”
So says Isaac Babel, who’d published “The King” and another Benya Krik story in 1921. The fact is, Babel had been writing all along; he took his manuscripts wherever he went, even as he was galloping into Poland, and was in constant dread of losing them. But Babel considered that his “literary career” started in 1924, when “The King” was republished in Lef, the most perceptive Russian journal of the period.
Babel was constructing his own chronology: the barefoot boy who followed Gorky’s assignment—komandivorka—and wandered across Russia as a vagabond soldier-poet and secret policeman, sucking in experience like some talented anteater, the way Gorky might have done, all the while wrestling with God and the devil. But Babel wrestled with words. He lived in a much more abstract universe than Maxim Gorky. He was constantly curious. He would meet a prostitute in Paris (long after his lies to Paustovsky) and pay her to show him the contents of her purse.
“You are a born intelligence man,” Gorky once told him. “It’s terrifying to let you in the door.” This must have delighted Babel, who was much more complicated and perverse than the original barefoot boy. And we have to wonder about his autobiography. Was it simple performance, the need to “polish” himself and invent a persona for his Soviet masters? To cast himself as another Gorky, with working-class roots, whose own vagabondage had shaped him as a writer and a socialist? Perhaps. Gorky was the very best card he could play. But Babel’s autobiography was more than an artful dodge and a confidence game. It was the attempt of a mytholept to offer himself another start, put forward an apprenticeship of seven years, yet leave out his marriage to Zhenya Gronfein in 1919, forget the little king of Odessa who gave birth to Benya Krik in 1921, forget the birth of his sister Meri, or Maria, in 1899, forget his ten or eleven years in Nikolaev, or the affection that his “Jewish shopkeeper” father had for him, and his own affection for Emmanuel (Manus) Babel, and the Dickensian list of characters that people his stories, disturbing and delighting Babel the boy. He had room for only one parent in his autobiography: Maxim Gorky. Everything else seems to disappear from Babel’s portrait of the artist.
3.
BABEL DIDN’T SPRING full-grown out of the Moldavanka. He didn’t spring out of the Moldavanka at all. But we have few witnesses to his boyhood and young manhood—his sister, who never appears in his stories, and whose totem name serves as the title of his second play, Maria (a character we never meet); a few friends and classmates like Lev Nikulin; Zhenya Gronfein, the invisible wife, and their daughter, Nathalie, or Natasha, who knew her father only as a visiting shadow when she was a little girl. And then there’s the main witness, Isaac Babel, with his stories, letters, plays, propaganda, wartime diaries, speeches, interviews, and conversations that often contradict and confuse, even as they beguile. . . .
Babel was about camouflage, about the armor he wore beneath his eyeglasses—a Don Quixote on horseback, gregarious and withdrawn, gargantuan and lilliputian at the same time. Patricia Carden, who wrote one of the first books on Babel, believes that “it was in the peculiar insular world of his own mind that Babel’s deepest and truest life was lived. This fact constitutes the enigma that all who knew him felt, the mystery of the other, hidden life. The works are messages to us from that other life, the only record that we have.”
But Babel’s works are often as bewildering as the man; his narrators are always unreliable, and at least in Red Cavalry the narration itself is close to schizophrenia. So who the hell was Isaac Babel, and what can we reliably say about him? Very little. He was born in Odessa. His mother taught him to read, according to Maria. He could be taciturn or explode into cheerfulness, and loved to play tricks on people, according to Nikulin.
His parents were also from Odessa, a city of sailors, foreigners, convicts, and Jews, founded by Catherine the Great. A seaport far from Moscow and Petersburg, Odessa enjoyed a period of relative enlightenment and prosperity for Jews. Isaac’s father, Manus, was part of this prosperity: he had his own warehouse. The boy’s mother, Fanya, would mock her husband’s interest in wealth, in worldly things. Manus was a bold man and a dreamer who could fall into a terrible rage; unlike little Isaac, a runt with myopia, he had an overpowering physical presence, and wanted to make some kind of Jewish prince out of his son, a prince who would conquer the entire planet. But his wife demanded much less. She preferred that “Issya” stay at home. And she would fight with Manus over his ambitions for the boy.
Issya attended a commercial school when he couldn’t get into the gymnasium, and in some way suffered through the pogrom of 1905 in Nikolaev, though he himself and his immediate family were never harmed. This pogrom is the defining motif of two tales, “The Story of My Dovecot” and “First Love.” In the former, we meet him as a little boy in Nikolaev studying for the entrance exam to the gymnasium. It’s hellish work—only two out of forty Jewish kids will get in. But Manus promises him a dovecote as a reward. “Never in my life have I wanted a thing more.” He passes the exam, finds himself at the head of the class. Yet this isn’t good enough. Khariton Efrussi, a Jewish corn and wheat baron, bribes the boy’s professors, permitting Efrussi Junior to enter the gymnasium by climbing right over young Babel’s back.
Manus wants to beat up the corn baron, and the boy has to return to his books and study for the next entrance exam, at which he recites Pushkin on the subject of Peter the Great and is given “an unrivaled A+.”
He gets his dovecote and goes to the bird market to buy some pigeons. But he’s caught in the middle of a pogrom. Makarenko, a legless cripple who rides across Odessa in a wheelchair selling cigarettes, suddenly turns on him, takes one of the “cherry-colored she-birds” and slaps him over the head with it, while Makarenko’s wife shrieks about the Jews of Nikolaev. “Their spawn must be wiped out,” she says.
Young Babel sits on the ground, the bird’s guts trickling down his temple, blinding him in one eye. He closes his other eye. “This world was tiny, and it was awful.” And in a bitter parody of David and Goliath, he opens his unstopped eye and sees a stone in front of him, “a little stone so chipped as to resemble the face of an old woman with a large jaw,” just like Goliath. “A piece of string lay not far away, and a bunch of feathers that still breathed.”
But he does have a curious consolation. One of the town Goliaths smashes a window frame of Khariton Efrussi’s mansion, “with the amiable grin of drunkenness, sweat, and spiritual power,” almost as if the mob were obeying young Babel’s deepest wish.
Both his parents escape the pogrom, hiding in the home of the tax inspector, while the half-blind boy swims along with the looters, his face covered with feathers and blood. But in “First Love,” the boy, with his sexuality awakened by the young wife of an army officer, watches his father being humiliated by a Cossack captain with lemon-colored gloves. Manus is trying to save his store from the “mob of hired murderers.”
Galina, the young wife, washes the feathers and blood off the boy’s face—he’s just returned from his encounter with Makarenko—calls him a little rabbi, and says that he looks like a bridegroom now that his face is clean. He imagines himself to be a member of the Jewish Defense Corps, like the coalman’s son, fighting off the mob of murderers. But the boy has a strange attack of the hiccups, which is later diagnosed as a nervous disorder, and the entire family moves back to Odessa so that the
boy can have his pick of specialists.
How wise it would be to count the ways in which that pogrom marked Babel’s life. Wherever he was during the pogrom—on the moon, at school, in some safe house with his pigeons—the two stories give us a jolt that’s hard to ignore. The pogrom winds around the boy with such ferocious ambiguity that we can’t help but read it as a focal point of his fiction. The pogrom punishes him and rewards him. Efrussi’s mansion is attacked as well as Manus’ store. And if he hadn’t been sullied by the cigarette boy, would he have been able to lean against Galina’s hip, “her hip that moved and breathed,” and would she have washed off the “smear of pigeon” sticking to his cheek like sexual matter, and kissed him on the mouth? It’s as if the pogrom itself had aroused him, and sexuality is seen as a form of violence, with the Cossack officer riding as erect as a penis with “a tall peaked cap.” Unable to unravel his own crisis of pleasure and pain, the reality that he’s been eroticized by the pogrom, he develops a nervous disorder that covers up his confusion and guilt.
4.
“IN THE BASEMENT,” the third story about his childhood, finds him a boy of twelve living with Aunt Babka, Uncle Simon, and Grandfather Leivi-Itzkhok in a basement of the Moldavanka. Leivi-Itzkhok, an ex-rabbi who is out of his mind, was expelled from his little town for being a forger, and so young Babel has a criminal in the house. Grandfather has been scribbling a book, The Headless Man, on sheets of paper “as large as maps.” The book describes all the neighbors he ever had—cooks at circumcision parties, gravediggers, cantors, and other madmen like himself. And Uncle Simon is even worse. He loves to brag and boast about imaginary conquests. “Though to tell the truth,” the boy says, “if you go by the heart, it wasn’t all that untrue.”
And this could be the parabola of Babel’s own fiction—the pith of a story comes from the heart’s particular truth, which is often hidden and full of strange trajectories and opposing signs, frustrating all those who want to find in Babel little lesson plans on good and evil. . . .
Mark Borgman, the top student at young Babel’s school, tries to tell the other boys about the Spanish Inquisition. But “there was no poetry in what he said,” nothing but “a mumble of long words.” Young Babel, a “forger” of words like his grandfather, has to butt in. He talks about “old Amsterdam, the twilight of the ghetto, the philosophers who cut diamonds. . . . My imagination heightened the drama, altered the endings, made the beginnings more mysteriously involved,” the way a storyteller should. “The death of Spinoza, his free and lonely death, appeared to me like a battle.” Was Babel anticipating his own death in a regime already suspicious of the diamonds he could cut? How will we ever know?
In the next story, “Awakening,” young Babel is now fourteen. But he finds no solace. His father tries to pass him off as an eight-year-old dwarf. Odessa was the land of infant Jewish prodigies during Babel’s childhood, virtuosos on the violin. Babel mentions Jascha Heifetz and Mischa Elman, “exempted by the Tsar himself from military service,” which was rather ironic, since throughout the nineteenth century Jewish boys from the age of twelve could be kidnapped from their villages and forced to serve in the tsar’s army for a minimum of twenty-five years; very few of these “dwarfs” ever came back. . . .
Manus dreams of Mischa Elman’s mansions and sees the family’s salvation in having the boy become a little maestro. His teacher is Mr. Zagursky, a man with frail legs and a factory of Jewish dwarfs. Babel didn’t have to invent his own tortured life as a false prodigy. He did suffer through the delirium of being a musical dwarf. In the letters he wrote to his mother and Maria, he talks about Zagursky’s actual counterpart, Pyotr Salomonovich Stolyarsky, who still had his famous factory in 1935. Babel had watched the most recent dwarfs perform at a concert in Moscow. “We met in the foyer and fell into each other’s arms. . . . Just as before, Stolyarsky is mass-producing child prodigies and supplies violinists for the concert halls of the world. I am the only one he cannot boast about. He remembered everything—our dining room, our courtyard on Tiraspolskaya Street and my determined resistance.”
And with Pyotr Salomonovich in our sights, we can find in “Awakening” one of the catapults of Babel’s fiction—a real event multiplied out of proportion, as “a lad suffering from hysteria and headaches” would see it. Babel has narratized his own life, taking whatever incident—music lessons or a pogrom—and weaving it into myth and private enigma.
In The Wound and the Bow, Edmund Wilson writes about the damage done to Dickens when he was twelve. His father was thrown into debtor’s prison. The boy was taken out of school and obliged to work as some kind of cellar rat for six months in a blacking factory. And Wilson believes that Dickens’ entire career as a writer was an attempt to “digest” these six months, which he never could:
“For the man of spirit whose childhood has been crushed by the cruelty of organized society, one of two attitudes is natural: that of the criminal or that of the rebel. Charles Dickens, in imagination, was to play the rôle of both, and to continue up to his death to put into them all that was most passionate in his feeling.”
I wish I could say that Babel was a “criminal” and a “rebel” in his own mind, that the pogrom in Nikolaev—sanctioned and aided by the tsar and his police—was as big a “wound” as the blacking factory was to Dickens. The pogrom lasted three days and must have disturbed a boy who saw himself as an enlightened creature in an enlightened town, where Jews could mingle a bit more freely than in other parts of the Russian empire, become bankers, salesmen, and artists, even dare to write in the language of Tolstoy. But it didn’t give him a murderous imagination. He was, as he said, an hysterical boy, prone to nervous disorders, a storyteller wrapped in multiple masks, dueling with words. Sensitive, myopic, and small. And the pogrom, however painful, would feed his imagination. He would store it in his memory, internalize it like some wily cannibal, play it upon the registers of his own past. His grandfather, “who went cracked as he grew old,” spent his whole life writing The Headless Man. And as Babel himself says: “I took after him.”
But there was yet another Headless Man, Manus, who was a writer as well as a middle-class merchant. In his spare time he would scribble out tiny satirical texts, ridiculing the vanity of neighbors and friends. Manus was mercurial and melancholy, believed that his only son could rise in an altogether Russian world. And “Awakening” relives this essential truth—Manus’ megalomania about his son, and the boy’s rebellion. Isaac flees from his music lessons, and when Manus finds out, Isaac locks himself inside the privy. Manus wails and hurls himself against the privy door. And he says, almost like a Cossack: “I am an officer. I go hunting. I’ll kill him. This is the end.”
But Manus’ own mother saves young Isaac. “I do not wish to see blood in our house.”
The boy dreams of running away, but like Babel himself— man and writer—he’s “married” to Manus, feels a sympathy for him that’s like a mourner’s music. The stories about his childhood were written after Manus’ death in 1923. Manus haunts these stories even when he doesn’t appear. And didn’t Isaac become a “Jewish dwarf,” fiddling with language like the greatest of virtuosos? Manus was his real music teacher.
5.
“A GRACELESS, PUFFY-CHEEKE D young provincial” of sixteen, he landed in Kiev in 1911, sent there by his father to enroll at the Institute of Finance and Business Studies, because as a zhid he was locked out of the University of Odessa. Once in Kiev, he was introduced to Boris Gronfein, a rich manufacturer of agricultural machinery who’d been doing business with Manus and considered him a friend. Gronfein was “a cultured, indulgent, generous man” with a melancholy wife, Berta Davidovna, who loved to play chess.
The Gronfeins’ fifteen-year-old daughter, Zhenya, was much more sophisticated than Babel. But she still led a cloistered life. “Great Russian literature, the Italian renaissance [ . . . ] and Balzac were more familiar and less disturbing to her than the outside world.” From the moment they met, Babel
and Zhenya seemed to form their own pact. “My mother and father, from adolescence on, shared a commitment to art and a belief that they ought to sacrifice everything for it,” writes Nathalie Babel.
Nathalie’s parents “were determined to live heroically. My mother refused to wear furs and pretty dresses her parents gave her. My father, to harden himself, would walk bareheaded in the dead of winter without an overcoat.” And when Babel took Zhenya out to tea for the first time, he was no longer the shy bumpkin who refused everything the Gronfeins put before him. He began to gobble cake after cake. “When I start eating cake, I can’t stop. So it’s better for me not to start at all.”
Babel loved to spread the rumor that Gronfein didn’t like him and wouldn’t accept such a raggedy boy as a son-in-law, that he had to elope to Odessa with his bride in 1919. And Paustovsky tells the story that Babel told him. “There could be no question of marriage: a penniless student, [ . . . ] Babel was not a suitable match for Gronfein’s heiress.”
Paustovsky continues Babel’s fable. “Mama weeps into ten handkerchiefs,” and Babel “is driven from the house.” Paustovsky even has Berta Davidovna arrive “unannounced” in Odessa to make peace with Babel.
But something nagged at me. I was haunted by Gronfein and his poor wife, Berta Davidovna, she who boiled eggs for Babel in Odessa while Gronfein fumed in Kiev. “Gronfein cursed the Babels to the tenth generation, and disinherited his daughter.” I didn’t believe it. The Headless Man had transmogrified Boris and Berta Davidovna into his very own gargoyles, and had passed on his fictional dance to Paustovsky. And so I went to the “source,” not Babel scholars or biographical dictionaries, but his daughter Nathalie, who might tell me the stories she’d heard from her own mother about Boris and Berta. I called her in Washington, D.C., where she was currently living—Nathalie was as much of a wanderer as the Headless Man. It was a day after the big blackout of 2003, when a whole slab of the continent from Canada to Cleveland had gone off the electrical grid, and I’d scratched half a page of this book under the myopic yellow beam of my flashlight.
Savage Shorthand Page 4
