Isaac Babel, "The Jewess"

The Russian text of "The Jewess" has never been published. Although the typewritten manuscript in our possession is incomplete, Babel's architecture is so solid that the story has artistic unity just as it stands.

The structure of "The Jewess" -- different from that of Babel's other known fiction -- and the fact that he was working on it in the early thirties when he had expressed an urge to experiment with larger forms make it seem likely that "The Jewess" was conceived as a novel.

The story is autobiographical insofar as it relates to the death of Babel's father in 1923. But it should not be read as a straightforward family reminiscence. In the first place Babel, unlike his fictional hero, was actually present when his father died. Also Babel's family lived in Odessa where he and his mother were born; the family in the story lives in the Pale of Settlement. Instead of the robust characters of Odessa, "The Jewess" shows us a devastated shtetl peopled by broken-down and desperate Jews much like the ghetto dwellers of Galicia depicted in Red Cavalry.

Babel made the following notes on the manuscript:

Eternal Jew?
More dialogue, less pathetic narration?
Style of Gleb Alekseyev?
Strengthen the factual side--surnames, names, descriptions of the place?
Factual description of the cemetery?

These notes suggest that he was consciously aiming at a new style. In "The Jewess" there is a noticeable reduction in the ornamentation of narrative so characteristic of his earlier work and a turn toward direct descriptive realism. (This may explain the reference to Gleb Alekseyev [1892- ], a "physiological" writer who portrayed social types through descriptions of manners and mores.) There is no distancing through the eyes of a sensitive and compassionate narrator, no softening of the brutality. Babel finally achieves the "objectivity" for which he had always striven.

The notes also throw light on what appears to be the main point of the story--the impossibility of escaping from one's Jewishness, from one's own character, from one's historical circumstances. In Babel's earlier Odessa stories, the action springs from the will of the characters--society is presumed to be static and outside history. In the Red Cavalry stories, the dynamic is men's will in history--their true natures are brought out by the ordeal of war. In "The Jewess," however, the dramatic focus lies in the struggle of man against history--of man trying to re-create an identity by finding a new relation to the forces of social change. Hence Boris does not allow his mother and sister to mourn the old way of life. Instead, he tries to integrate them into a new world. He understands that history has passed them by and that they are condemned--left to themselves they will find no way out. He believes he will be able to put his heritage to the service of the new order and to act as a link between generations. The paradox is that for this to take place the new world must accept the new Jew. Yet if the new world were to reject him, what choices would be left to such a man as Boris?

 "The Jewess," then, is not a romanticized personal chronicle but an attempt to assess an irreversible social transformation. The surviving manuscript of the story has obscure words and passages, variants, and question marks between brackets. It breaks off in the middle of the fifth line of the sixth section. Since this text seems to require only stylistic polishing, the main question is: Why did Babel leave "The Jewess" un-finished? Why did he abandon a work that shows such mastery of craft, originality of conception, and a development toward a different view of the world? If "The Jewess" was conceived as a novel, as I believe it was, did Babel feel that he could not meet the requirements of the larger form? Was it fear of what would become of Boris if the story continued with the un-flinching truthfulness of the opening sections? Was Babel unable to resolve in himself a conflict he hoped to portray in Boris? Was it because he, so much like Boris in the story, found himself confronted by a choice between alienation and concession, capitulation and death? Or do we have only an incomplete variant of a manuscript that had been completed but that disappeared when Babel's papers were seized at the time of his arrest?
 
 

"The Jewess"

In accordance with custom, the old woman lay on a bench for seven days. On the eighth day, she got up and went outside into the shtetl. The weather couldn't have been better. In front of the house stood a chestnut tree, its candles already lit. It was bathed in sunlight. When you think of people who have just died on a beautiful sunny day, life seems merciless and its troubles beyond repair. The old woman was wearing an old-fashioned black silk dress with a pattern of black printed flowers and a silk kerchief. She had dressed up like this for the sake of her dead husband, so that the neighbors shouldn't think that he or she had lost pride in the face of death.

In this dress, old Esther Erlich went to the cemetery. The flowers thrown on the mound of earth by the grave had shriveled. She touched them with her fingers, and they began to drop down and fall apart. Old Alter, who was always in attendance at the cemetery, ran up to her. "For the service, Madame Erlich." She opened her handbag, slowly counted her money, a few silver coins, and handed them silently to Alter, who was put out by her silence. He walked away on his bandy legs, muttering to himself. The sun followed his faded, misshapen back. She was left alone at the graveside. The wind blew through the treetops and bent them over.

"I feel very bad without you, Marius," said the little old lady. "I cannot tell you how bad." She sat by the grave, clutching some bedraggled flowers in her wrinkled hands. She clenched her hands till they hurt, trying to drive away her memories. It is terrible for a wife to sit by her husband's grave and look back on thirty-five years of her life, on all the days and nights of her marriage. Worn out by the struggle with her memories, she trudged back home in the evening through the squalid streets of the shtetl.

Yellow sunlight lay over the marketplace. Deformed old men and women were selling sunflower oil, withered onions, small fish, and candies for children. Esther was met at the door of her house by her fifteen-year-old daughter. "Mama," she said in that peculiarly despairing way that Jewish women have, "don't make things hard--Boris is here."

Fidgeting with his hands, her son stood in the doorway in his military uniform, with medals on his chest. The broken old woman, her face flushed and tear-stained, stopped in front of him. "How dare you be late at your father's deathbed? How could you do this to him?"

Her son and daughter led her inside by the arm. There, in the room where she had lain for seven days, she sat down and, looking her son straight in the face, began to torture him with the story of his father's death. It was a circumstantial account, in which nothing was left out-- the swelling of his legs, the way his nose had fumed blue on the morning of the day he died, the frantic dash to the pharmacy for oxygen, the unfeelingness of the people around his deathbed. Nor did she fail to mention how he had called for his son as he lay dying. She had gone down on her knees and tried to warm his hand in hers. He had pressed her hand feebly as he repeated his son's name over and over again. Rolling his glazed eyes, he went on for a long time, distinctly pronouncing his name--the word "Boris" droned in the deathly hush of the room like a spinning wheel. Then at last the old man had gasped for breath and said in a choking voice, "Borechka." His eyes started from their sockets, and he wailed and moaned, "Borechka." The old woman, holding his hand in hers, had said, "I am here. This is your son." The hand of the dying man came alive with new strength; it began to jerk and claw at the hands that were warming it. He began to shout, "Borechka" in a quite different tone, a kind of high pitched voice in which he had never before spoken during the whole of his life, and he died with this name on his lips.

"How could you be late?" the old woman said to her son, who was sitting sideways at the table. They had not lit the lamp. Boris sat in the dark, which shrouded the room. Nothing stirred. He could hear the angry breathing of his mother. He got up, catching his revolver against the table's edge, and went outside. For half the night he walked round the shtetl in which he had been born. Reflected in the river, the stars quivered pure and snakelike. A foul smell came from the hovels at the water's edge. There were gaping holes in the walls of the synagogue, which three hundred years earlier had withstood Khmelnitsky's marauding troops. His native shtetl was dying. The new era was ringing the knell of its defenseless way of life. "Is it the end or a new beginning?" Boris asked himself. He was so sick at heart that he hadn't the strength to ponder this question. The school he had once attended had been destroyed by Hetman Struk in 1919. The house in which his friend Zhenya had once lived was now the Labor Exchange. He walked past ruins, past the sleeping, squat, and lopsided houses with the stench of poverty seeping out of their doorways, and said goodbye to them.

When he got home, his mother and sister were still sitting up waiting for him. The samovar, which needed cleaning, was boiling on the table. There was also a piece of chicken. Esther came up to him on her unsteady legs, pressed her body against his, and began to cry. Through her dress, through her loose and flacid skin, he could feel the beating of her heart, and the beating of his own heart--they were one and the same. The smell of his mother's quivering flesh was so bitter and sad that he was overcome with unutterable pity for this heart, the heart of the Erlichs. The old woman wept, shaking on his breast decorated with the two orders of the Red Banner. They were wet with tears.

This was the beginning of her recovery, and of her submission to loneliness and death.

The relatives arrived the next morning. They were the remnants of a large and ancient family, which numbered among its members merchants, adventurers, and timid, poetic revolutionaries from the heyday of The People's Will terrorist organization. Boris's aunt was a nurse who had done her training in Paris on twenty rubles a month and had once listened to the speeches of Jaurès and Guesde. One of his uncles was a pathetic ne'er-do-well shtetl philosopher. His other uncles had been grain dealers, traveling salesmen, or shopkeepers who had now lost their livelihood--a motley crowd of pathetic, sweating people in rust-colored raincoats or capes. They told Boris once more how his father's legs had swollen, where he had developed bedsores, and who had run to the druggist for oxygen. One of the grain merchants, who had been a rich man in his day but had now been driven out of his house and wrapped his skinny old legs in soldier's leggings, took Boris to one side. He wanted to get on closer terms with this nephew who had strayed so far from the rest of the family. Looking at him with blinking eyes, he said that he had not expected the dead man's body to be so clean and smooth. He had seen it while they were washing him, and he had been as well turned out and clean-cut as a boy. And to think that just because of some wretched valve in the heart or a tiny vein . . . As Boris's uncle said this, he was probably thinking that he was born of the same mother as the dead man, and that he, too, must have exactly the same sort of valve in his heart as his brother who had died a week ago.

The next day Boris was asked, at first timidly and then with a convulsiveness born of long-suppressed despair, whether he could recommend his uncles for membership in a trade union. Because of their status under the old regime, none of the Erlichs had so far been admitted to a trade union.

The life of these old people was unutterably sad. Their houses were falling down and the roofs leaked; they had sold everything, even their wardrobes, and nobody would give them work. But they had to pay for their rooms and water at the same rate as self-employed people. On top of it all, they were old and suffering from awful complaints --the forerunners of cancer and other wasting diseases--like all old Jewish families when they are in decline. Boris had long believed that it was right to put people out of their misery, but now his mother was here at his side, her face so much like his face, her body so like what his would be in a couple of decades that he suddenly had a sense of the common lot of all their bodies--the bodies of all the Erlichs, which were all in some way bound up with each other. He overcame his scruples and went to the chairman of the local soviet. This chairman was a Petersburg worker who seemed to have been waiting all his life for an opportunity to tell somebody how wretched it was to work in a local soviet in this lousy former so-called Pale of Jewish Settlement, how difficult it was to get these shtetl back on their feet and lay the foundations for a new and better life in these lousy Jewish towns of the godforsaken southwestern provinces, which were dirt poor and dying a dogs death. For several days afterward, Boris had to face both the cemetery of his native shtetl and the imploring eyes of his uncles who had once been happy-go-lucky traveling salesmen and now thought only of joining a trade union or getting registered at the Labor Exchange.

During these few days, the Indian summer came to an end and autumn set in. It began to rain the cold shtetl rain that brought mud and pebbles--a mixture like concrete-- down from the hills. The entrance to the house was flooded with water. They put rusty tins and Passover saucepans under cracks in the ceiling. As you walked about the room, you had to watch your step so as not to put your foot in one of them.

It was then that Boris said to his mother, "Let's clear out."

"Where to?"

"To Moscow, Mother."

"Aren't there enough Jews in Moscow already, without us?"

"Nonsense," said Boris. "Don't listen to what people say."

 She sat in her corner in the leaking front room, by the window from which she could see the potholed sidewalk, the neighbor's tumbledown house, and the last thirty-five years of her life. Sitting there, she commiserated, with all the feeling of which she was capable, with her sisters, brothers-in-law, and nephews, to none of whom fate had granted a son like hers. She had expected that Boris would sooner or later talk of Moscow, and she knew that she would give in to him. But before this she wanted to give full rein to her own distressed feelings and steep her surrender in the anguish of the whole neighborhood. She said that she would be terribly unhappy traveling alone, without her husband, whose great dream had been to go to Moscow, to leave this godforsaken place and live out the rest of his days--days from which one expects no more than peace and the sight of other people's happiness--in the new promised land, together with his son. But he was lying in his grave, under the rain that had been lashing down all night, and she would go to Moscow, where, it was said, people were happy, carefree, high-spirited, full of plans, and doing all kinds of remarkable things. Esther said it would be hard for her to leave all these graves where their ancestors--rabbis, tasks, and Talmud scholars--lay under gray, time-hallowed stones. She would never see them again, and how would he, her son, answer for her when the time came for her to die in strange parts among people so utterly foreign to her that she could not even picture them to herself? And then, how would she ever be able to forgive herself if she should actually live the life in Moscow? As she figured out just how unbearable it would be for her to feel happy at such a time, her hands, their long fingers deformed by rheumatism, trembled and went moist, and the veins on her yellow breast swelled up and throbbed terribly. The rain beat down on the corrugated-iron roof. For the second time since the arrival of her son, the little old Jewess in the elastic-sided shoes began to cry. She agreed to go to Moscow, because there was nowhere else for her to go, and also because her son was so much like his father that she could not be parted from him; like everybody else, her husband had had his faults and his pathetic little secrets, about which only she knew, but would never tell.

The only argument was over the question of what to take with them. Esther wanted to take everything, while Boris insisted that they should get rid of the lot and sell it. But there was nobody in Kremenets to sell it to. There was no demand for furniture, and the local dealers, who looked like undertakers and had sprung up from God knows where, like visitors from another world, were vicious characters who would offer almost nothing, whining that they could only hope to sell to the peasants.

But the relatives helped them out. As soon as they got over the first shock of their bereavement, they began to steal the dead man's things for all they were worth. And since at heart most of them were honest people, not out for petty gain, the spectacle of this furtive pilfering was particularly sad. Esther, quite bewildered and her face flushed, made one feeble attempt to seize an outstretched hand, but the hand trembled so much, and was so clammy, wrinkled, and old, with its edging of broken nails, that she recoiled, understanding everything in a flash, aghast both at the thought that anyone should want to prevent this painful larceny and that people with whom she had grown up should rush to take cupboards and sheets from her house like this.

All her things were being forwarded express to Moscow. The relatives wept as they helped her tie the bundles she was taking with her. They had now come to their senses, and, sitting on the bundles, they talked about how they were staying in Kremenets and would never leave. The old woman pushed a kitchen stool and a washtub into one of the bales. "You'll see," she said to her son. "We shall need all this in Moscow, and then I must keep something from sixty years of my life besides the ashes in my heart and the tears, which come even when I don't want to cry." When they started sending her things to the station, the old woman's hollow cheeks again flushed over and her eyes shone with blind and passionate intensity. She scurried round the ransacked, dirty room, driven by some force that made her walk with her old and shaking shoulder touching the walls, from which the torn wallpaper hung down in strips.

The next morning--the day of their departure--Esther took her son and daughter to the cemetery. There, under Talmudic tombstones, in the gaps between ancient oak trees, were buried rabbis who had been killed by the Cossacks of Honta and Khmelnitsky. The old woman went up to her husband's grave, shook slightly, and drew herself up. "Marius," she said, "your son is taking me to Moscow. Your son does not want me to be buried at your side.... She gazed steadily down at the reddish mound of crumbly, porous earth, and her eyes grew wider and wider. Her son and daughter held her by the arms. She swayed and stumbled forward a little with her eyes half closed. She tensed her wizened, sweating hands, surrendered to her children, and then went limp. Her eyes grew still wider and were ablaze with light. She broke loose and flung herself on the grave in her silk dress. Her whole body was convulsed, and one of her hands stroked the red earth and the withered flowers with hungry tenderness. Her shrill voice echoed round the Jewish graveyard. "Your son is taking me to Moscow, Marius. Pray for him to be happy there, Marius...." She passed her fingers, which were crooked as though she were knitting, over the earth covering her dead husband. Then, when her son gave her his hand, she quietly got up and went away with him. Boris took her along a path overhung by the branches of oak trees. His whole being was aching from the pressure of the tears against the sockets of his eyes and in his throat. This was his first taste of those tears that never go away and remain inside a man forever. The old woman stopped by the gate. She freed her hand, on which sweat welled up as from an underground spring, alternately hot and ice cold, and waved back at the cemetery and the grave, as though they were floating away from her. "Goodbye, my dear," she said softly, no longer crying or shaking. "Goodbye

This was how the Erlichs left their native place.
 

They traveled on the Sebastopol-Moscow express. Boris had bought tickets for a "soft" car. They were driven to the station by Boichik, the halagula who had once been known all over town for his funny stories and his enormous jet-black horses. But he no longer had these horses and his ramshackle old carriage was now drawn by a huge white nag with a drooping pink lip. Boichik himself was old and rheumatic. "Listen, Boichik," said Esther, addressing his round back as the carriage drew up to the station, "I am coming back next year. I hope to find you well then . . ." His back became even more hunched. The white nag plodded through the mud on its stiff legs with their swollen joints. Boichik turned round, showing his red-rimmed eyelids, the twisted sash round his waist, and the dirty tufts of hair growing out of his wizened little face. "I doubt it, Madame Erlich . . ." And suddenly he yelled at the horse: "Let's get back from the fair, come on now . . .

The "soft" car had been made out of several prewar coaches. Through the broad, shining windows Esther caught her last glimpse of her relatives huddled together on the platform--the rust-colored raincoats, the soldiers' leggings, the twisted capes, her old sisters with their large, useless breasts, her brother-in-law Samuel, formerly a commercial traveler, with his puffy, contorted face, her other brother-in-law Efim, who had once been a very rich man, with the rags wrapped around his old, withered, and homeless legs. They jostled each other and shouted something as the train left. Her sister Genya ran along the platform. . .

Boris pointed out passing landmarks with such pride and self-assurance, as though the whole country owed its existence and belonged to him, Boris Erlich.... Indeed, to some extent this was even true: in everything they saw-- in the "international" coach they were traveling in, in the newly built sugar-processing factories, in the reconstructed railway stations--there was a drop of sweat or blood contributed by this corps commissar of the Red Cavalry . . .

In the evening he asked for bed linen for all three of them, and with childlike pride he showed them how to switch on the blue night light and, beaming all over his face, revealed the secret of the little mahogany closet which--presto!--could be converted into a washstand.

Lying between the large cool sheets, gently rocked by the train's well-oiled springs, Esther stared out into the blue darkness, from which all light had not yet faded, and listening to the breathing of her son--he was shouting and tossing in his sleep--and her daughter, she thought how somebody would surely have to pay for this fairy palace racing through Russia with its blazing lights and shining brass tubes. This was a very Jewish thought. It had not even occurred to Boris.

As they approached Moscow he was worried only about whether Alyosha Selivanov had got his telegram asking him to meet them at the station with a car. The car in question was a new, thirty-thousand-ruble Packard for the use of the general staff of the Red Army. It whisked the Erlichs to an apartment, which had been prepared well in advance by Boris, on the Ostozhenka. Alyosha had even put some furniture in it already. Not giving his mother time to recover from her joy at the infinite marvels in the two rooms, Boris took her into the kitchen with its gas range, the bathroom with its gas heater, and he showed her the airing cupboards. The rooms were magnificent. They formed part of a suite which before the Revolution had belonged to the governor-general of Moscow.

As he ushered his mother through the kitchens, bathrooms, and mezzanine floor of this princely apartment, Boris was unwittingly obeying the command of his ancient Semitic blood. The cemetery and the grave of his luckless father, who had not lived to see all this, had aroused in him that powerful family instinct which had sustained his people for so many centuries. In his thirty-third year, in response to this ancient call, he felt himself a father, husband, and brother all in one: the defender of these two women, their breadwinner and mainstay. He felt this with all the intensity, with the painful and stubborn heartache which come so easily to his people. He was tormented by the thought that his father had not lived to see this and wanted to make up for this failure by seeing to it that his father's wife and daughter came into good strong hands. If their life in these new hands would be better than it had been in his father's, this was only by virtue of the implacable law of life.

Boris Erlich, a graduate of the Psycho-Neurological Institute (because this was the only institute of higher learning in pre-Revolutionary Russia which did not have a numerus clausus for Jews) had spent the summer vacations of 1917 with his parents in the shtetl. He had gone round all the restive villages in the region and explained to the peasants the fundamentals of Bolshevik teaching. He was handicapped in his propaganda by his curved nose but only a little--the shape of your nose didn't count for much in 1917. That same summer, Alyosha, the son of the accountant to the local government board, returned from his Siberian exile in Verkhoyansk. While recovering from his imprisonment and consuming his parents' homemade cordials and cherry dumplings, he did some research into his ancestry and discovered that the Selivanovs were descended from Selikha, a colonel of the Zaporozhyan Cossacks. In the local archives he had even found a lithographed portrait of his ancestor sitting on a horse in his Cossack great coat and holding his mace of office. There was a faded inscription in Latin under the portrait. Alyosha declared that it was in the handwriting of Orlik Mazeppa's Ukrainian chancellor. Alyosha's romantic interest in the past was combined with membership in the Socialist Revolutionary Party. The figures of Zhelyabov Kilalchich and Kalyayev were constantly before his eyes. At the age of twenty-one Alyosha led a very full life. His youthful fervor was quickened by Boris Erlich, the hook-nosed graduate of the institute with the funny name. They became close friends and Alyosha joined the Bolsheviks when it became clear that no other party in the world would have to fight, destroy, and build as this party would have to, imbued as it was with such mathematical and scholarly zeal. Boris provided him with the necessary books and the Communist Manifesto. After the Revolution, Alyosha gathered together all his friends in the shtetl: the nineteen-year-old Jewish projectionist from the Magic movie theater; the blacksmith also Jewish; a few former N.C.O.'s who were kicking their heels with nothing to do; and some youths from the next village. He put them all on horseback and called the resulting detachment an "insurgent regiment of the Red Ukrainian Cossacks." One of the N.C.O.'s was made chief of staff and Boris was appointed commissar.

Since the men of Alyosha's regiment were fighting for a palpably just cause, got on well with each other, died with their heads held high, and lied like the devil, their ranks were constantly being swelled by new recruits and the regiment developed in the same way as all the other rivulets which flowed together to make the Red Army. From a regiment it grew into a brigade and from a brigade into a division; it fought against the Green Bands, Petlyura Wrangel's Volunteer Army, and the Poles. By the time of the campaign against Wrangel, Alyosha was already a corps commander. He was now twenty-four years old. Newspapers abroad wrote about Budyonny and Alyosha as the inventors of new strategy and tactics for cavalry warfare. The specialists in the War Academy began to study lightning cavalry raids and the cadets in the Academy worked out exercises in tactics with reference to the operations of his Ukrainian Cossack Corps. Selivanov himself and his inseparable commissar, Boris Erlich, who had been seconded to the Academy also studied their own operations together with the cadets. In Moscow they set up a commune together with the former projectionist and the former N.C.O. of the Czarist army. Just as in the corps here too in the Moscow commune Boris held passionately even morbidly to the spirit of comradeship and the honor of the group. It was perhaps because his people had for so long been denied one of the finest of human feelings--that of comradeship in the field and in battle--that Boris felt such a hunger for friendship, a need to defend comrades and display loyalty to them. But despite its morbid side, there was so much that was attractive and fine in his passionate, chivalrous, and selfless approach to his comrades that Boris's apartment became a meeting place for the "Red marshals," as they were dubbed. This club really started to flourish when, instead of Moscow Cooperative Society sausage and vodka, gefilte fish began to appear on the table, the tin kettle was replaced by a samovar brought from Kremenets, and the tea was poured out by the comforting hand of an old woman. For many years Alyosha Selivanov and his brigade commanders had not seen an old woman sitting behind a samovar. It was a welcome change for them. The old woman was meek and timid, and as quiet as a mouse. But in her gelfilte fish and in her fingers, as they busied themselves with the samovar, one felt the essence of the Jewish people, its wholehearted and vehement passion.

At first there was trouble over this fish. The professor's wife, who lived in the same building, said in the kitchen that the whole place stank to high heaven. And true enough--with the arrival of the Erlichs, even the entry hall began to smell of garlic and fried onion