Shifting between Melon and Kerosene

11.VII.24

It happened when I still used to read at outdoor cafés. Cigarettes and a lighter in one jacket pocket, a book in the other. If the book didn’t fit, I left it at home; I had turned twenty-three, twenty-four, and was allergic to holding printed matter in my hand. Only a typewriter would have felt worse to carry for the restless creature that I still was. In my pocket on the way to the park café this afternoon, before my next night shift in elder care: Isaac Babel’s Tales of Odessa. I had found the book, published in Tidens »Russian Classics« series, at a used bookstore. Cheap, thin, perfect in size. A floral border in mauve ran around the cover illustration of a boy with pigeons. The nine texts had been translated into Swedish partly by the Riwkin couple, Ester and Josef, partly by Staffan Dahl, whom I would eventually learn worked at the library at the other end of the park.

I sank into the Odessa of yesteryear like a body into water. Everything seemed familiar. Not that I had grown up in a poor neighborhood, much less in southern Ukraine on the threshold of the century’s first great war. I had never experienced pogroms or revolutions, knew nothing about pigeons, and had not yet set foot in a Jewish congregation. (More on that shortly.) But the people who populated Babel’s stories, the settings and social customs, the equally sober and captivating way in which he depicted life in the port city ... Granted, there was something fabulous about these reports from the fringes of mainstream society, and the characters were decidedly more colorful than those I was used to. Still, I knew: this was what a cross between the Greek and Austrian sides of my family would look like.

In short: I read with a sense of identification. Although I had been drilled in the school of skepticism, for which texts constituted constructions conveying conditional knowledge (hidden agendas, messages masked as universal truths) – despite what I hoped was my critical gaze – it was impossible not to be enchanted. I recognized a Greek sea in the Eastern European waves, »shifting between melon and kerosene.« I heard my Austrian uncle groan: »You’re draining the life out of me!« And I saw my grandmother’s half-brother, the adventurer who had emigrated to Paraguay before the century’s second great war, resurrected in Benya Krik, the gangster who rarely speaks, but when he does always says the right thing, and like so many other rootless figures in Babel carries »autumn in his soul.« The world between the covers was mine without even remotely resembling it.

During one of many moves, the volume with the mauve border was lost. The B section of the library was no longer headed by Babel, Isaac but by Bachmann, Ingeborg. The stories of quick-witted children and loud relatives, of workers, thieves, and prostitutes in the Moldavanka district receded, sinking into the murkier waters of memory. If I returned to them in my thoughts, it was no longer to specific scenes or characters, but to moods, tones of voice, attitudes – to the mental atmosphere of the texts, if I may put it that way, which consisted as much of light and shadow as of mischief and anxiety. There was a state of mind, a mixture of chutzpah and melancholy, that seemed to me Babel-like, although I could not say how it was created or back up my impressions with examples. Was it this that left me wanting more?

Much later, while working on a novel, I found out more about Misha or Moyshe Vinnitsky, better known as »Miska the Japanese,« who is said to have served as the model for Benya Krik. But in the end, the Viennese pimp my story needed still borrowed most of his traits from characters I imagined I could make out in my grandfather’s circle. Around the same time, shortly after the turn of the millennium, Babel’s daughter published his collected works in English translation. Nathalie was born in 1929 in Paris, where her mother (a Ukrainian-Jewish artist) had settled, disillusioned by the young Soviet Union. After a visit in 1935, Babel returned to Moscow, likely because he did not want to live without the Russian language – deprived of daily conversations in the streets, he considered himself »a fish out of water.« The decision may also have been made for other reasons, however. Babel had a son from a previous relationship, and in a new one he would soon have another daughter. During the final year of Stalin’s Great Purge, in May 1939, he was arrested by the security services; after that, all traces of him evaporated.

Babel’s wife Evgenia (née Gronfein) survived the Nazi occupation with their daughter. After the war, Nathalie studied at the Sorbonne and later in the United States, where she devoted herself to promoting her father’s work. In the mid-1990s, when I was spending a few years in Baltimore, she had been invited to speak about the NKVD files that had become available following the collapse of the empire. It turned out that Beria had made short work of Babel as early as January 1940. After a twenty-minute trial in his private quarters, the verdict was pronounced: execution by firing squad for anti-Soviet activity. Curious and – I must admit – gripped by misplaced homesickness, I went to the lecture, only to discover, with one foot in the door, that it was the wrong Jewish congregation.

The thousand-page American edition offered firmer ground beneath my feet. Alongside a foreword by Cynthia Ozick and Nathalie’s memorial essay, it contained maps – including one of Moldavanka, »our generous mother.« From then on, it was easy to situate the action in Babel’s stories. There lay Grecheskaya, where Pontic Greeks drank coffee while balls clattered on the felt of pool tables. Two streets away was Pochtova, crossed by a mere slip of a boy with a gift for speech, dreaming of escape. (The family saw him as the next child prodigy after Heifetz; he himself was glad to lack that sort of talent.) And on Okhotinskaya, beyond the station, there was Ivan Nikodimych, the old man who, in addition to rabbits and a peacock, also traded in pigeons. And who, when he heard that »they’d finished off old man Babel« during the persecutions of 1905, muttered: »So stupid, so stupid …«

On a recent walk through the park where Babel had first enchanted me, I got – so stupid, so stupid – an idea. Would the desire for more be rekindled if I read about him in the same place? If not, I hoped (»since we expected disasters in everything«) that memories of my former reader self might at least offer insights into the nature of naivety. Gone were not only the residents and shops of a world in which, oddly, I had felt at home, but also my inexperience. The café under the trees in one corner of Humlegården, however, turned out to have vanished. Now it called itself Omnipollos Flora, and although the name sounded as if it might have belonged to a café on Grecheskaya, it was actually a self-proclaimed »beer garden.« Out of respect, I retreated to neutral ground, this time with the 2014 reissue in hand.

It was not hard to see what I had missed on my first visit. Over a hundred years had passed since Aunt Bobka was floored by her husband and Krik’s men robbed Tartakovsky, known as »One-and-A-Half-Jew« because he had more courage and money than most. The ladies of Odessa were still playing poker as dusk fell on the veranda, the samovars were bubbling, and the music teacher Sagursky presided over his »factory of Jewish dwarfs in pointed collars and patent leather shoes« with the same stern devotion as always. But now I was not captivated by their fates and adventures. Rather, by the twists in the telling. The cleverness of the constructions. The writer’s cool conduct amid cravings and crazes. And that, unlike such enumeration, Babel managed without alliterations and other stylistic flourishes.

Still, his stories are anything but artless. The prose is millimeter-precise in its sentence structure, never stingy but restrained as adjectives and similes go; often enough, it hovers between the real and the imagined in that shimmering way familiar from Heifetz’s vibrato. There are even passages where the characters reflect on the secrets of the art of storytelling, which my former self had also missed. »My imagination is always inflamed.« »Consciousness left the world of the possible ...« »Nothing of all I told him had existed.«

One of the stories is dedicated to Maxim Gorky, mentor and patron until his death in 1936. However, Babel most clearly shows his hand – and his skills – in the only text set beyond Odessa (unless an imagined Egypt and the realm of the dead count). In the winter of 1916, the narrator finds himself in Petersburg »with a fake passport and without a penny.« To survive, he aids the wife of a lawyer who is translating Maupassant. Although her Russian versions are both strikingly accurate and completely lifeless, the master’s work stirs emotions between the two. The narrator is forced to cut paths through the syntactic thicket, weigh the remaining words, and strike a balance between what is said and what is better left unsaid. Enamored, he notes (in the Swedish translation): »A sentence comes into the world good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in the grip, an almost imperceptible grip. The lever must lie in the hand and be warm. One must pull it once, not twice.«

The metaphor works well in Swedish, but allows for precisely the kind of repetition that Babel avoids – at least if I, who do not speak Russian, am to believe the English translation. There, the »grip« is mentioned once, not twice. Moreover, it is not a lever at all, but a »key« that the fingers »gently warm« before turning it. It seems the Swedish translator has put himself in a tractor, while for Babel it is likely a more elegant machine, which ambiguously shows how ignition should be handled in both prose and the affairs of love.

Forty years ago, it was impossible not to be enchanted by the fast-paced plot, the matter-of-fact lyricism. There were exaggerations weighed as if on scales, intrigues that turned on a kopek, moods full of brakes and midsummer lightning flashes. The lesson for the rereader, however, was a different one. All credit to the blend of audacity and sadness; only prose written as if for the first and last time leaves one craving more. »No projectile can strike the heart with such paralyzing force as a period placed rightly.«

(Under strecket, Svenska Dagbladet)