E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-78227-552-7
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Isaac Babel was a short-story writer, playwright, literary translator and journalist. He joined the Red Army as a correspondent during the Russian civil war. The first major Russian-Jewish writer to write in Russian, he was hugely popular during his lifetime. He was murdered in Stalin's purges in 1940, at the age of 45.
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ODESSA STORIES: ISAAC BABEL AND HIS CITY
Boris Dralyuk AN OLD JOKE: A Jew is kvetching (complaining, for the uninitiated) to a stranger about never having had any children. “But that’s the way it is with my family,” he groans. “My father was childless, and so was my grandfather before him…” Flummoxed, the stranger asks, “Then where did you come from?” The Jew replies, “From Odessa.” Why start there? Well, as the saying goes, there’s a grain of truth in every joke. (And when it comes to Odessa, the scales tip altogether: the version I grew up hearing is that there’s a grain of joke in every joke.) In its wily way, this little gag tells us a whole lot about my native city. Who is this fellow, anyway? All Jews in jokes kvetch—it’s what they do—but his griping is over the top, excessively schmaltzy and, in the end, entirely absurd. Is our hero off his nut, a far-gone luftmensch? Or is he trying to pull one over on the stranger, playing for sympathy so as to separate a fool from his money? That would make him a rogue, a schnorrer with chutzpah to spare. Humour and dreamy eccentricity, daring and double-dealing—part and parcel of the Odessa myth, which has grown up around this notoriously lawless provincial capital on the coast of the Black Sea since its founding in 1794. As Jarrod Tanny argues in City of Rogues and Schnorrers, his marvellous study of the myth’s evolution, “Much like Shanghai, New Orleans, and San Francisco’s Barbary Coast, old Odessa was both venerated and vilified as a city of sin—heaven for some, hell on earth for others—a haven for smugglers, thieves, and pimps who boasted of their corruption through endless nights of raucous revelry.”1 What set this particular band of “smugglers, thieves, and pimps” apart is that many of them were Jews, the most adventurous machers among the thousands of their co-religionists who poured into the “Russian Eldorado” from Eastern European shtetls. And they weren’t just adventurers: they were funny, making your sides split with laughter as they slit the side of your purse. There weren’t many other places these Jewish fortune-seekers could have gone. In the nineteenth century, Odessa, with its major commercial port, was the most cosmopolitan and least tradition-bound city in the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement, which was home to half of the world’s Jews. Odessa’s economy boomed and its population kept doubling in size about every other decade, reaching 400,000 by 1900. Approximately 140,000 of that 400,000 were Jews, an enormous proportion by any standard and the second largest Jewish population in the Empire after Warsaw—which had more Jews than any city in the world other than New York. To be sure, Jews left an indelible mark on the cultures of Warsaw and New York, as well as of Vilnius and Kiev, but Odessa, the fate of which has been so thoroughly intertwined with Jews from the start, became a uniquely Jewish city. Odessa’s distinctive and instantly recognizable language is a Russian dialect spiced with Yiddish words and grammatical structures, and, perhaps even more importantly, inflected by Yiddish intonation and pronunciation; it is spoken by Odessa’s Jews, Ukrainians, Russians and Greeks alike. The city’s transgressive culture heroes—thieves and gangsters like Sonya the Golden Hand (Son’ka Zolotaya Ruchka, née Sheyndlya-Sura Solomoniak, 1846–1902) and Mishka the Jap (Mishka Yaponchik, né Moyshe Vinnitsky, 1891–1919)—were regarded with awe by Odessans of all backgrounds, and tales of their feats spread like wildfire through the Russian-speaking world. Their fame hasn’t waned: both Sonya and Mishka were recently the subjects of big-budget Russian TV mini-series (airing in 2007 and 2011, respectively). The fact that these dubious figures were lionized indicates the darker side of Jewish history, not just in lawless Odessa but throughout the Russian Empire. Whatever they were in real life (and let’s face it, they were psychopaths), in the Jewish imagination they became Robin Hoods, social bandits using their natural gifts to triumph over systemic discrimination and—at least in the case of Mishka—to redistribute the oppressors’ wealth among the community. It serves to recall that old Odessa wasn’t just the land of opportunity: it was the site of many horrific pogroms, during which hard-boiled Jewish gangsters rose like golems to defend their people. Sonya and Mishka are by now so thoroughly cloaked in legend that they might as well be entirely fictional—and, indeed, it is fiction proper, along with poetry, popular song and film, that has fixed the myth of Odessa in the public imagination. There are statues of Ostap Bender, the quip-spewing Soviet trickster at the centre of Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov’s picaresque novels The Twelve Chairs (1928) and The Golden Calf (1931) in sixteen Russian and Ukrainian cities, and the “criminal” songs popularized by Leonid Utyosov (1895–1982), one of Odessa’s proudest citizens and Stalin’s favourite performer, are still sung—Odessan accent and all—by Russian-speakers wherever the winds of history have tossed them. But no author has done more to solidify the myth, and to raise Odessan lore to the level of art, than Isaac Babel (1894–1940), one of the greatest prose stylists of the twentieth century and a victim of Stalin’s terror. Born in Moldavanka, Odessa’s counterpart to London’s Whitechapel and New York’s Lower East Side, Babel was raised in a well-heeled Jewish family. He spent his early childhood in the city of Nikolayev (now Mykolaiv, Ukraine). When the boy was eleven, the Babels relocated to a nice part of Odessa, but the budding author’s affinity for life’s seamy, variegated underbelly drew him back to Moldavanka, where he collected material for a cycle of stories that transformed the exploits of Mishka the Jap and his ilk into a modernist epos. Published in newspapers and journals in the early 1920s contemporaneously with his Red Cavalry stories, which chronicled his service in the Red Army during the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–21, Babel’s Odessa Stories consolidated the city’s myth, never shying away from its darker elements. His depiction of the Mishka-like Benya Krik, “King” of Odessa’s underworld, is bracingly ambiguous—alluring and terrifying in equal measure. This volume also features tales that draw on Babel’s childhood and youth in Odessa and Nikolayev, including ‘The Story of My Dovecot’, perhaps the most harrowing narrative of anti-Semitism in both its systemic and convulsively violent aspects ever constructed. Of course, what really keeps you hanging on Babel’s every word are the words themselves, that rich Odessan argot. As Froim the Rook says of Krik, “Benya, he doesn’t talk much, but what he says, it’s got flavour. He doesn’t talk much, but when he talks, you want he should keep talking.” This, after the gutsy Benya barges in on the one-eyed gang boss and declares, “Look, Froim, let’s stop smearing kasha. Try me.” Once Froim gets a taste of that “kasha”, he can’t help giving Benya a try. The language of Odessa, with its Yiddish inflections and syntactic inversions, its clipped imperatives and its freight of foreign words, was in the air all around me as I was growing up. Little did I know that a similar melting pot, New York’s Lower East Side, had made a similar “kasha” out of English at around the time Benya’s archetypes were raising hell in Moldavanka. When I discovered the novels of Samuel Ornitz, Michael Gold, Henry Roth and Daniel Fuchs, the plays of Clifford Odets and the stories of Bernard Malamud, I felt right at home.2 I was also fatefully drawn to the Black Mask school of detective fiction, which brought a tough, vivid urban vernacular—the language of gunsels and private eyes—into the mainstream. My English Benya is, linguistically, a product of my misspent youth with the pulps. But I don’t think I’m doing him a disservice by having him tell a kid, “You got words? Spill.” After all, Isaac Babel and Dashiell Hammett were born only a month and a half apart in 1894. The liberties I’ve taken with the dialogue are not terribly radical. In general, I’ve tended toward concision, feeling it more important to communicate the tone—the sinewy, snappy punch—of the gangsters’ verbal exchanges than to reproduce them word for word. A longer phrase that rolls off Benya’s tongue in Russian may gum up the works in English. For instance, in the original Russian, Benya refuses to smear kasha “on a clean table”. In English, “on a clean table” felt superfluous. Both the tone and the image were sharper without it. To my ear, the pithy “let’s stop smearing kasha” has the force and appeal of an idiom encountered for the first time. In other places, I’ve sought equivalents for idiomatic Russian (or Odessan, or even simply Babelian) turns of phrase. For example, when an old matchmaker warns Froim that his daughter is hungry for romance, he puts it this way: “I see your child is asking to be let out onto the grass” or “to pasture”. The Russian is concise and clear in its meaning. A literal translation would either be cluttered or semantically hazy. I opted for “I see your baby girl is champing at the bit”, which is clear,...
