The Odessa Stories - Isaac Babel E-Book

Isaac Babel

• Herausgeber: Lebooks Editora
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 116

Beschreibung

Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel, better known as Isaac Babel, was a Soviet journalist and writer of Jewish origin. Despite being an idealistic advocate of Marxism and Leninism, he was arrested, tortured, and executed during Stalin's Great Purge. "The Odessa Stories" a collection published in 1931, is a selection of beautiful stories by Babel whose narratives take place in the city of Odessa. Babel describes, among other stories, the life of the fictional Jewish mafia boss, Benya Krik, one of the great anti-heroes of Russian literature, and his gang in the Moldavanka ghetto during the time of the October Revolution. Isaac Babel is a master of conciseness. This characteristic was emphasized by the writer himself when he once declared that while Tolstoy could narrate minute by minute everything that happened to him throughout a day, he preferred to focus on the five most interesting minutes. It is a fact that Isaac Babel's narratives are profoundly interesting. An excellent and captivating read.

Leseprobe

Isaac Babel

THE ODESSA STORIES

Contents

INTRODUCTION

ODESSA STORIES

THE KING

JUSTICE IN PARENTHESES

HOW THINGS WERE DONE IN ODESSA

LYUBKA THE COSSACK

THE FATHER

FROIM GRACH

THE END OF THE ALMSHOUSE

SUNSET

INTRODUCTION

Isaac Odessa

1894-1940

Isaac Babel was born in Odessa, a city where Jews could enjoy certain freedom and security, the son of a family that had fled anti-Semitic pogroms in lands dominated by the Cossacks. Yet he, in his youth, would clandestinely fight alongside the Red Cossacks!

In his adolescence, Babel entered Trade School. In addition to regular subjects, he studied theology and music. Later, he studied Business and Finance, where he met Eugenia Gronfein, his future wife. At that time, they were both Marxists.

In 1915, Babel moved to Russia's cultural center, Petrograd, where he met Maxim Gorky. They became friends, and Gorky published some of his stories in the magazine he directed; he also guided the aspiring writer to seek more real-life experience. And he sought it! Years later, Babel wrote in his autobiography: "The person I love and admire the most is Gorky."

Although recognized as one of the brightest representatives of literary journalism of the generation born in the 1880s, Babel saw his fiction work greatly affected by the vicissitudes of life. His literary peak occurred in the 1920s, first with the publication in 1920 of the "War Diaries," which later led to the classic "Red Cavalry" of 1926. M. Berman pointed out that one of the central themes of the book is the idea that, to be himself, the hero must learn not only to confront but somehow internalize his antithesis, since both the self and its antithesis revolve around violence. If the author's ego is a rational intellectual, with a natural tendency towards melancholy and introspection, his antithesis is that of an animalistic, primitive, and cruel man without reflection.

When Babel's character joins Budenny's Army in "Red Cavalry," the bespectacled hero is despised by the Cossacks and must commit some cruelty to be accepted, preferably against a woman. He accepts the challenge in "My First Goose." But when he fails in a fight because he forgot to load his pistol, a superior beats him, and he "pleads to God for competence to kill his fellow man." Few artists knew how to treat fragments of reality as real and complete as Babel's genius did. Many of his stories in "Red Cavalry" are developments of events experienced in the war.

In all the stories, there is frankness, turbulence, an unstoppable tone, anguish, and explosiveness in the author's voice. Vladimir Mayakovsky, his admirer, published several of these stories in the Leftist Review. It is true that the brutal description of the reality of war earned him enemies, like Budenny from the party bureaucracy. However, Gorky's influence ensured its publication, and abroad, the book was a bestseller, translated into more than fifteen languages. A Marxist-Leninist from his youth, Babel served as a volunteer in the Great War and then participated in the 1917 battles to establish socialism. He led the Red resistance in the city of Petrograd when it was surrounded by White and Polish forces, and the Soviet Government had moved to Moscow.

He also participated in confiscation expeditions in the countryside to bring grain to the hungry populations of the cities. When he joined the only group of Cossacks that remained in the Red Army during the Civil War, Budenny's Red Cavalry, he did so under a false identity provided by the Communist Party to avoid being identified as a Jew and to avoid Cossack anti-Semitism.

The cavalry campaign passed through Galicia, one of the most educated Jewish communities in Europe at that time. In cities like Chernobyl, Kovel, Brody, and in Galicia itself, mass murders, intentional fires, rapes, torture, and the killing of more than one hundred thousand Jews occurred, mainly at the hands of the White and Polish Armies. However, atrocities were also committed by the Red Cossacks, narrated by Babel. One of Babel's characters says: "This is not a Marxist revolution, it is a Cossack uprising."

And yet: "I feel great sadness for the future of the Revolution... We are the vanguard, but of what?" "Why can't I overcome my sadness? Because I am far from my family, because we are destroyers, because we advance like a hurricane, like a tongue of lava, hated by all, life is crumbling, I am on an immense, endless campaign to revive the dead."

ODESSA STORIES

THE KING

The wedding ceremony ended, the rabbi sank into a chair, then he left the room and saw tables lined up the whole length of the courtyard. There were so many of them that the end stuck out of the gates onto Gospitalnaya Street. The tables, draped in velvet, coiled through the yard like a snake on whose belly patches of every color had been daubed and these orange and red velvet patches sang in deep Voices.

The rooms had been turned into kitchens. A rich flame, a drunk, plump flame, forced its way through the smoke-blackened doors. Little old women’s faces, wobbly women’s chins, beslobbered breasts, baked in the flame’s smoky rays. Sweat, red as blood, pink as the foam of a rabid dog, dripped from these blobs of rampant, sweet-odored human flesh. Three cooks, not counting the scullery maids, prepared the wedding feast and over them eighty-year-old Reizl reigned, traditional as a Torah scroll, tiny and hunchbacked.

Before the feast began, a young man unknown to the guests wormed his way into the courtyard. He asked for Benya Krik. He took Benya Krik aside.

“Listen, King!” the young man said. “I have a couple of words I need to tell you. Aunt Hannah from Kostetskaya Street, she sent me.”

“So?” Benya Krik, nicknamed “the King,” answered. “So what’s these couple of words?”

“Aunt Hannah, she sent me to tell you that a new chief of police took over at the police station yesterday.”

“I’ve known that since the day before yesterday,’’ Benya Krik answered. “Well?”

“The chief of police called the whole station together and gave a speech ...”

“A new broom is always eager to sweep,” Benya Krik answered. “He wants a raid. So?”

“But when does he want to raid, King, do you know that?”

“Tomorrow.’

“King, it’s going to be today.’

“Who told you that, boy?’

‘'Aunt Hannah, she said so. You know Aunt Hannah?”

“I know Aunt Hannah. So?”

“The chief called the whole station together and gave them a speech: ‘We must finish off Benya Krik,’ he said, ‘because when you have His Majesty the Czar, yoli can’t have a King too. Today, when Krik gives away his sister in marriage and they will all be there, is when we raid!’ ”

“So?’

“Then the stool pigeons began to get worried. They said, ‘If we raid them today, during his feast, Benya will get angry and a lot of blood will flow.’ But the chief said, ‘Our self-respect is more important to me!”

“Good, you can go/’ the King said.

“So what do I tell Aunt Hannah about the raid?’

“Tell her Benya he knows from the raid.’’

And the young man left. Three or four of Benya’s friends followed him. They said they would be back in about half an hour. And they were back in half an hour. That was that.

At the table, the guests did not sit in order of seniority. Foolish old age is just as pitiful as cowardly youth. Nor in order of wealth. The lining of a heavy money bag is sewn with tears.

The bride and groom sat at the table’s place of honor. It was their day. Beside them sat Sender Eichbaum, the King’s father-in-law. That was his due. You should know the story of Sender Eichbaum, because it’s a story definitely worth knowing.

How did Benya Krik, gangster and King of gangsters, make himself Eichbaum’s son-in-law? How did he make himself the son-in-law of a man who owned one milch cow short of sixty? It all had to do with a robbery. A year or so earlier Benya had written a letter to Eichbaum.

“Monsieur Eichbaum,” he wrote. “I would be grateful if you could place twenty thousand rubles by the gate of number 17, Sofiyefskaya Street, tomorrow morning. If you do not, then something awaits you, the like of which has never before been heard and you will be the talk of al Odessa. Sincerely yours, Benya the King.”

Three letters, each clearer than the one before, remained unanswered. Then Benya took action. They came by night, ten men carrying long sticks. The sticks were wound with tarred oakum. Nine burning stars flared up in Eichbaum’s cattle yard. Benya smashed the barn’s locks and started leading the cows out, one by one. They were met by a man with a knife. He felled the cows with one slash and plunged his knife into their hearts. On the ground drenched with blood the torches blossomed like fiery roses and shots rang out. The dairy maids came running to the cowshed and Benya chased them away with shots. And right after him other gangsters began shooting into the air because if you don’t shoot into the air you might kill someone. And then, as the sixth cow fell with a death bellow at the King’s feet, it was then that Eichbaum came running out into the courtyard in his underpants.

“Benya! Where will this end?” he cried.

“If I don’t have the money, you don’t have the cows, Monsieur Eichbaum. Two and two make four.”

“Benya, come into my house!”

And inside the house they came to an agreement. They divided the slaughtered cows between them, Eichbaum was promised immunity and given a certificate with a stamp to that effect. But the miracle came later.

At the time of the attack, that terrible night when the slashed cows bellowed and calves skidded in their mothers’ blood, when torches danced like black maidens and the milkmaids scattered and screeched before the barrels of the amicable Brownings — that terrible night, old Eichbaum’s daughter, Zilya, had run out into the yard, her blouse torn. And the King’s victory turned into his downfall.

Two days later, without warning, Benya gave back all the money he had taken from Eichbaum and then came in the evening on a social call. He wore an orange suit and underneath his cuff a diamond bracelet sparkled. He entered the room, greeted Eichbaum and asked him for the hand of his daughter, Zilya. The old man had a small stroke but recovered — there were at least another twenty years of life in him.

“Listen, Eichbaum,” the King told him. “When you die, I’ll have you buried in the First Jewish Cemetery, right by the gates. And, Eichbaum, I will have a monument of pink marble put up for you. I will make you the Elder of the Brodsky Synagogue. I will give up my career, Eichbaum and I will go into business with you as a partner. We will have two hundred cows, Eichbaum. I will kill all the dairymen except you. No thief shall walk the street you live in. I shall build you a dacha at the Sixteenth Stop{i} . . . and don’t forget, Eichbaum, you yourself were no rabbi in your youth. Who was it who forged that will? I think I’d better lower my voice, don’t you? And your son-in-law will be the King, not some snotface! The-King, Eichbaum!”

And he got his way, that Benya Krik, because he was passionate and passion holds sway over the universe. The newlyweds stayed for three months in fertile Bessarabia, among grapes, abundant food and the sweat of love. Then Benya returned to Odessa to marry off Dvoira, his forty-year-old sister, who was suffering from goiter. And now, having told the story of Sender Eichbaum, we can return to the marriage of Dvoira Krik, the King’s sister.

For the dinner at this wedding, they served turkeys, roasted chicken, geese, gefilte fish and fish soup in which lakes of lemon shimmered like mother-of-pearl. Above the dead goose heads, flowers swayed like luxuriant plumes. But do the foamy waves of the Odessan Sea throw roasted chickens onto the shore?

On this blue night, this starry night, the best of our contraband, everything for which our region is celebrated far and wide, plied its seductive, destructive craft. Wine from afar heated stomachs, sweetly numbed legs, dulled brains and summoned belches as resonant as the call of battle horns. The black cook from the Plutarch, which had pulled in three days before from Port Said, had smuggled in big-bellied bottles of Jamaican rum, oily Madeira, cigars from the plantations of Pierpont Morgan and oranges from the groves of Jerusalem. This is what the foamy waves of the Odessan Sea throw onto the shore and this is what Odessan beggars sometimes get at Jewish weddings. They got Jamaican rum at Dvoira Krik’s wedding and that’s why the Jewish beggars got as drunk as unkosher pigs and began loudly banging their crutches. Eichbaum unbuttoned his vest, mustered the raging crowd with a squinting eye and hiccupped affectionately. The orchestra played a flourish. It was like a regimental parade. A flourish, nothing more than a flourish. The gangsters, sitting in closed ranks, were at first uneasy in the presence of outsiders but soon they let themselves go. Lyova Katsap smashed a bottle of vodka over his sweetheart’s head, Monya Artillerist fired shots into -the air. But the peak of their ecstasy came when, in accordance with ancient custom, the guests began bestowing gifts on the newlyweds. The synagogue shamases jumped onto the tables and sang out, above the din of the seething flourishes, the quantity of rubles and silver spoons that were being presented. And here the friends of the King proved what blue blood was worth and that Moldavanka chivalry was still in full bloom. With casual flicks of the hand they threw gold coins, rings and coral necklaces onto the golden trays.