The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (4 page)

This publication is also the realization of a dream of my husband, Richard Harvey Brown, who for over thirty years has hoped that I would be able to master my memories sufficiently to bring this volume to print. His benevolence and loving support throughout these struggles also should be publicly acknowledged.

I would like to thank Nathalie Babel for offering me this project, and  for her constant support and encouragement. I owe particular thanks to my Russian editor, Anneta Greenlee, for her tireless checking of my translation against the Russian original for stylistic nuance. My translation owes much to her specialized knowledge of early-twen-tieth-century Russian language and literature. I am also grateful to Katya Ilina for her help in editing Isaac Babel's 1920 Diary, and for the weeks she spent studying the many editions of Babel works, checking for editorial variations and instances of Soviet censorship.

I am also indebted to my editor at Norton, Robert Weil, for his insightful and knowledgeable editing and particularly for his expertise in American and European Jewish literature. I am also grateful to Jason Baskin and Nomi Victor, editors at Norton, and to David Cole for copyediting the manuscript.

I am indebted to Professor Gregory Freidin for his help and advice, and for his specialized knowledge of Isaac Babels life and works, and to Christine Galitzine for her knowledge of pre-Revolutionary Russia.

I am thankful to Peter Glassgold for his initial suggestion that I translate Isaac Babel, and for his helpful editorial advice. I am thankful also to my agent, Jessica Wainwright, for her encouragement and constant support as I worked on the translation. I also wish to thank Jennifer Lyons, the agent of the Babel estate, for her help and input.

I am deeply indebted to the resources of the New York Public Library, where I did all my research and annotation. I owe special gratitude to Edward Kasinec, curator of the Slavic and Baltic Division, for his erudite advice and for the many times he personally located materials for me that were hidden in obscure Soviet publications of the 1920s and 1930s. I am also grateful to Tanya Gizdavcic, librarian of the Slavic and Baltic Division, for her help in locating material, and to Serge Gleboff, Robert Davis, Lev Chaban, and Hee-Gwone Yoo for their help and advice.

I would like to thank Paul Glasser at YIVO for his helpful explanations of Yiddish expressions. I would also like to express my appreciation to Karina Vamling from the Linguistics Department of the University of Lund, Sweden, for her explanations of Georgian expressions in Isaac Babels texts and the information she provided on aspects of Georgian and Caucasian politics that Babel referred to, and to Peter Gasiorowski of the University of Poznan, Poland, for his linguistic advice on expressions used in the 1920 Diary. I am also grateful to Thomas Fiddick for his help—I benefited greatly from his books and articles on the Russian-Polish war of 1920. I am thankful as well to Patricia Herlihy for her encouragement: I found her book Odessa: A History, 1794-1914 a great help in putting early-twentieth-century Odessa—the Odessa of Babels early years—into perspective. I found the extensive annotations in the German translation of the 1920 Diary by Peter Urban very helpful, as I did the scholarly and bibliographical work on Babel by Efraim Sicher.

My very special thanks to Burton Pike, who inspired, helped, and advised me throughout the project.

Peter Constantine

When the twenty-one-year-old Isaac Babel arrived in St. Petersburg in 1916, he found the city in mid but stimulating upheaval It was still the capital of Russia and the center of Russian literature and art, where the foremost writers of the day lived and published. But the city was shaken by World War I. The Imperial government was losing control, and calls for change; which were to lead to the Revolution and Civil War, were in the air. Perhaps most important for a young writer was that the Czarist censorship was crumbling, which meant that daring new subjects could be treated in new ways, a characteristic that was to stay with Babel throughout his writing career. His first published story, “Old Shloyme” (1913), dealt with the subversive subject of Jews forced by officially sanctioned anti-Semitism to renounce their religion. In the story, a young Jew gives in to the pressure to Russianize himself, “to leave his people for a new God,” while the old Jew, though never interested in religion or tradition, cannot bring himself to give them up. In the subsequent stories, Babel touches on other taboo subjects: Jewish men mixing with Christian women, prostitution, teenage pregnancy, and abortion.

These early stories also reveal Babel’s growing interest in using language in new and unusual ways. He has a young woman offer herself to her lover; “and the lanky fellow wallowed in businesslike bliss.” Odessa matrons, “plump with idleness and naively corseted are passionately squeezed behind bushes by fervent students of medicine or law” Babel describes the Czarina as
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a small woman with a tightly powdered face; a consummate schemer with an indefatigable passion for power” In a forest scene, “green leaves bent toward one another, caressed each other with their flat hands” We also see the recurring motifs of sun and sunset, which are to play an important role in Babel’s later writing.

Babel’s piquant brand of realism soon caught the eye of Maxim Gorky, who was to be the single most influential literary figure in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s, and who was particularly instrumental in helping young Soviet writers. Gorky published BabeVs stories “Elya Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofievna”and “Mama, Rimma, and Alla”in 1916 in his literary magazine Letopis, which marked the beginning of Gorky’s mentoring of Babel’s career This mentoring was to last until Gorky’s death exactly twenty years later.

Although our town is small, its inhabitants few in number, and y [ although Shloyme had not left this town once in sixty years, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single person who was able to tell you exactly who Shloyme was or what he was all about. The reason for this, plain and simple, is that he was forgotten, the way you forget an unnecessary thing that doesn’t jump out and grab you. Old Shloyme was precisely that kind of thing. He was eighty-six years old. His eyes were watery. His face—his small, dirty, wrinkled face—was overgrown with a yellowish beard that had never been combed, and his head was covered with a thick, tangled mane. Shloyme almost never washed, seldom changed his clothes, and gave off a foul stench. His son and daughter-in-law, with whom he lived, had stopped bothering about him—they kept him in a warm corner and forgot about him. His warm corner and his food were all that Shloyme had left, and it seemed that this was all he needed. For him, warming his old broken bones and eating a nice, fat, juicy piece of meat were the purest bliss. He was the first to come to the table, and greedily watched every bite with unflinching eyes, convulsively cramming food into his mouth with his long bony fingers, and he ate, ate, ate till they refused to give him any more, even a tiny little piece. Watching Shloyme eat was disgusting: his whole puny body quivered, his fingers covered with grease, his face so pitiful, filled with the dread that someone might harm him, that he might be forgotten. Sometimes his daughter-in-law would play a little trick on Shloyme. She would serve the food, and then act as if she had overlooked him.

The old man would begin to get agitated, look around helplessly, and try to smile with his twisted, toothless mouth. He wanted to show that food was not important to him, that he could perfectly well make do without it, but there was so much pleading in the depths of his eyes, in the crease of his mouth, in his outstretched, imploring arms, and his smile, wrenched with such difficulty, was so pitiful, that all jokes were dropped, and Shloyme received his portion.

And thus he lived in his corner—he ate and slept, and in the summer he also lay baking in the sun. It seemed that he had long ago lost all ability to comprehend anything. Neither his sons business nor household matters interested him. He looked blankly at everything that took place around him, and the only fear that would flutter up in him was that his grandson might catch on that he had hidden a dried-up piece of honey cake under his pillow. Nobody ever spoke to Shloyme, asked his advice about anything, or asked him for help. And Shloyme was quite happy, until one day his son came over to him after dinner and shouted loudly into his ear, “Papa, they re going to evict us from here! Are you listening? Evict us, kick us out!” His sons voice was shaking, his face twisted as if he were in pain. Shloyme slowly raised his faded eyes, looked around, vaguely comprehending something, wrapped himself tighter in his greasy frock coat, didn’t say a word, and shuffled off to sleep.

From that day on Shloyme began noticing that something strange was going on in the house. His son was crestfallen, wasn’t taking care of his business, and at times would burst into tears and look furtively at his chewing father. His grandson stopped going to high school. His daughter-in-law yelled shrilly, wrung her hands, pressed her son close to her, and cried bitterly and profusely.

Shloyme now had an occupation, he watched and tried to comprehend. Muffled thoughts stirred in his long-torpid brain. “They’re being kicked out of here!” Shloyme knew why they were being kicked out. “But Shloyme cant leave! He’s eighty-six years old! He wants to stay warm! Its cold outside, damp. ... No! Shloyme isn’t going anywhere! He has nowhere to go, nowhere!” Shloyme hid in his corner and wanted to clasp the rickety wooden bed in his arms, caress the stove, the sweet, warm stove that was as old as he was. “He grew up here, spent his poor, bleak life here, and wants his old bones to be buried in the small local cemetery!” At moments when such thoughts came to him, Shloyme became unnaturally animated, walked up to his son, wanted to talk to him with passion and at great length, to give him advice on a couple of things, but... it had been such a long time since he had spoken to anyone, or given anyone advice. And the words froze in his toothless mouth, his raised arm dropped weakly. Shloyme, all huddled up as if ashamed at his outburst, sullenly went back to his corner and listened to what his son was saying to his daughter-in-law. His hearing was bad, but with fear and dread he sensed something terrifying. At such moments his son felt the heavy crazed look of the old man, who was being driven insane, focused on him. The old mans two small eyes with their accursed probing, seemed incessantly to sense something, to question something. On one occasion words were said too loudly—it had slipped the daughter-in-laws mind that Shloyme was still alive. And right after her words were spoken, there was a quiet, almost smothered wail. It was old Shloyme. With tottering steps, dirty and disheveled, he slowly hobbled over to his son, grabbed his hands, caressed them, kissed them, and, not taking his inflamed eyes off his son, shook his head several times, and for the first time in many, many years, tears flowed from his eyes. He didn’t say anything. With difficulty he got up from his knees, his bony hand wiping away the tears; for some reason he shook the dust off his frock coat and shuffled back to his corner, to where the warm stove stood. Shloyme wanted to warm himself. He felt cold.

From that time on, Shloyme thought of nothing else. He knew one thing for certain: his son wanted to leave his people for a new God. The old, forgotten faith was kindled within him. Shloyme had never been religious, had rarely ever prayed, and in his younger days had even had the reputation of being godless. But to leave, to leave ones God completely and forever, the God of an oppressed and suffering people—that he could not understand. Thoughts rolled heavily inside his head, he comprehended things with difficulty, but these words remained unchanged, hard, and terrible before him: “This mustn’t happen, it mustn’t!” And when Shloyme realized that disaster was inevitable, that his son couldn’t hold out, he said to himself, “Shloyme, old Shloyme! What are you going to do now?” The old man looked around helplessly, mournfully puckered his lips like a child, and wanted to burst into the bitter tears of an old man. But there were no relieving tears. And then, at the moment his heart began aching, when his mind grasped the boundlessness of the disaster, it was then that Shloyme looked at his warm corner one last time and decided that no one was going to kick him out of here, they would never kick him out. “They will not let old Shloyme eat the dried-up piece of honey cake lying under his pillow! So what! Shloyme will tell God how he was wronged! After all, there is a God, God will take him in!” Shloyme was sure of this.

In the middle of the night, trembling with cold, he got up from his bed. Quietly, so as not to wake anyone, he lit a small kerosene lamp. Slowly, with an old man s groaning and shivering, he started pulling on his dirty clothes. Then he took the stool and the rope he had prepared the night before, and, tottering with weakness, steadying himself on the walls, went out into the street. Suddenly it was so cold. His whole body shivered. Shloyme quickly fastened the rope onto a hook, stood up next to the door, put the stool in place, clambered up onto it, wound the rope around his thin, quivering neck, kicked away the stool with his last strength, managing with his dimming eyes to glance at the town he had not left once in sixty years, and hung.

There was a strong wind, and soon old Shloymes frail body began swaying before the door of his house in which he had left his warm stove and the greasy Torah of his forefathers.