Synonyms

Odessa; Odesa; Odes

Introduction

Isaak Babel (1894–1940), one of the best known Soviet Russian prose writers of the twenties, published a series of short stories about his hometown of Odessa between 1921 and 1937. They are loosely connected by a number of characters but contain inconsistencies and, because of political repression and Babel’s arrest in May 1939, were never completed. Although only four of the stories were collected as “Odesskie rasskazy” [“Odessa Tales”] in Babel’s lifetime, a cycle of nine stories has been recovered (Sicher 2018). The setting of the stories is Odessa’s Moldavanka, a working-class district populated mainly by Jews, and, while the topography is both realistic and accurate, the stories build a mythical world that is intensely, though not exclusively, Jewish and perpetuates Moldavanka’s reputation for criminality (Briker 1994). Written after the Bolshevik takeover, the stories combine nostalgia for a lost world of gangsters and eccentrics with an ironic view of the human price paid for the promised new world of socialism. While the readers of the first Odessa stories remembered the recent famine and blockade, the Moscow magazines which republished them could market the romantic appeal of the opulence and adventure of the exotic characters, who soon became part of a popular counterculture.

The early stories tell of the rise to fame of Benia (Ben-Tsion) Krik, the son of Mendel the carter, who becomes king of the gangsters after he sets fire to the local police station during his sister Dvoira’s wedding, just when the police were planning to round up the gangsters (“Korol’” [“The King”]). In “Kak eto delalos’v Odesse” [“How It Was Done in Odessa”], Arye-Leib, a synagogue beadle [shamash] and Odessa’s oracle, explains to the narrator, an intellectual in spectacles, how it was Benia and not anyone else who became king of the gangsters. The device of the intellectual in spectacles who cannot match the deeds of men of action is used here and again with devastating effect in Babel’s civil war epic Конармия [Red Cavalry] (1926). In “How It Was Done in Odessa” the stammering intellectual cannot act when Jews, who had no civic rights under the tsars, are empowered, like the new Muscle Jew of Jewish nationalist politics in the early twentieth century, by the use of both their brawn and brains.

Four further stories “Spravedlivost’ v skobkakh” [“Justice in Brackets”], “Liubka Kazak” [“Liubka the Cossack”], “Zakat” [“Sunset”], and “Otets” [“The Father”] build a microcosm of Odessa’s squalid Moldavanka, where Jews live unimpeded by the oppressive laws of the tsarist regime, yet far from the traditions of the shtetl. In “Justice in Brackets,” Babel experiments with an insider as narrator, Tsudechkis, who tells a story of how he tipped off two rival gangsters about a job and was beaten to a pulp by one of the gangsters, the famed Benia Krik. In “Liubka the Cossack,” Tsudechkis is locked up in a room in Liubka’s tavern, which doubles as a brothel, for not paying his bill and uses his confinement to wean Liubka’s baby David from his mother’s breast. He is rewarded with his freedom and appointed as manager in recognition of his wily skills and know-how. In “Sunset,” Mendel Krik the carter holds a vicious grip over his household, until his sons rebel against his tyrannical rule. The old man tries to escape to Bessarabia with his pregnant Russian mistress, but Benia proclaims the old man’s retirement and takes over the business. The narrator, Arye-Leib the shamash, suggests that generations succeed each other in a biblical and historical cycle (contrary to the Marxist doctrine of materialist determinism) and that nothing can stop the succession of Mendel’s sons, who are not revolutionaries by a long chalk but who signal the end of the old order.

In “The Father” Benia proves his prowess as a suitable bridegroom for Basia, Kaplan the grocer’s unruly daughter, and also proves his masculinity when he beds a Russian whore. Nevertheless, the gangsters are comic opera figures (they shoot in the air because if you don’t, you might kill someone), and Benia Krik is no Robin Hood. His magnanimity in paying for the hospitalization and funeral of Iosif Muginstein, shot in the stomach during a raid on the wealthy magnate Ruvim Tartakovsky in “How It Was Done in Odessa,” can hardly me read as social justice. Benia Krik is quite different from his prototype, Moishe Vinnitsky, nicknamed the Jap because of his slanted eyes. Vinnitsky was in fact safely behind bars in 1913, when the early Odessa stories were set, and was released only in the amnesty of the February revolution in 1917. Vinnitsky at one point joined forces with the Bolsheviks but was shot dead – the Bolsheviks had no place in a socialist society for dangerous bandits (Budnitskii 2012). In the film version of the Odessa Tales, Benia Krik (1926, dir. Vladimir Vilner), Babel tried to give the plot more class consciousness and introduced a Gorkyan master-baker as the real hero, but the movie nevertheless ran into trouble with censors and critics for romanticizing the gangsters. Now was no time for nostalgia for a vanished past as the Soviet Union geared up for the first Five-Year Plan and Stalin tightened control. This is doubtlessly one reason why Babel’s stage adaptation of the story of the same name, Zakat [Sunset], flopped on the Moscow stage in 1928.

The last Odessa stories are melancholy, lamenting the pre-revolutionary Odessa swept away by communism. In “Konets bogadel’ni” [“The End of the Old Folk’s Home”], Arye-Leib and the remaining residents of Odessa’s Isabella Kauffman Jewish retirement home make a last-ditch stand before they are evicted. They have been recycling the same wooden coffin at funerals, relying on an ancient Jewish tradition that the dead be buried only in a shroud, thus saving money for their meager rations. But when Broidin, the new communist manager of the Jewish cemetery, takes over, he imposes a new order and ensures that the Bolshevik hero Hersh Lugoi gets a proper burial. With the sole coffin gone and wood in short supply, the old Jews are lost, abandoned to slow starvation. Broidin, however, wins the old Jews over with a subterfuge, a night out at the theater with liver sandwiches, and gets rid of them. The victory of the communist revolution in destroying the old bourgeois world of sweatshops and exploitation leaves a bitter taste. In “Froim Grach” the last of the gangster leaders is executed in cold blood in a Cheka cellar, while the narrator relates the old man’s legendary exploits to an unsympathetic new officer from Moscow. As in the ending of the film Benia Krik, there can be no denying that the Bolsheviks have won and are building a socialist society in Russia, but the new commissar cannot understand the value of Odessa’s past that has been lost.

In “Karl-Yankel” the narrator looks back to his childhood during a show trial of a mohel [ritual circumciser], part of an anti-religious campaign that cracked down on Judaism up till the end of the twenties. As in the mock trials of religion and show trials of arrested rabbis, ritual slaughterers, and circumcisers, the proceedings are a cruel charade. Jewish Party members often used an expedient to circumcise their children by letting the mother’s family secretly give their child to a mohel, from fear of losing their Party membership and the privileges that came with it. This is how, in the story, the baby gets two names, Karl, after the father of Marxism, and Yankel, after the Jewish patriarch Jacob. The double name would have been impossible in Soviet Russia, where there could be no synthesis between communism and Judaism. But the duality affords the story a subtle irony as the child is suckled by a Kirghiz woman (the propaganda slogan of the friendship of Soviet peoples) and is promised a dazzling future as a pilot (the slogan of progress), while the narrator looks out the window at the streets of his childhood, thinking (in an ambiguous closure) that nobody fought over him as they are now fighting over Karl-Yankel. It is left unclear whether the unfortunate baby will indeed, as the narrator hopes, be happier than he was.

Conclusion

The “Odessa Tales” became an integral part of the Odessa myth and the hyperbolic comic grotesque of their celebration of bygone days in Odessa, spiced with Odessa Russian slang and witticisms, perpetuated a cultural image of the city as freedom-loving and cosmopolitan. The style of the later stories is sparser and the mood somber, as a way of life has been destroyed in the name of socialism. After the Russian Revolutions of 1917, Jews were emancipated, but the communists ruthlessly suppressed the vibrant Jewish cultural center and Zionist stronghold in Odessa. The nostalgia for a vanished world in Babel’s Odessa stories became a placeholder for a memory that was lost. The stories, along with the first Red Cavalry stories, made Babel’s reputation when they were published in Moscow in 1923–1924 and have endured ever since as an example of modernist urban prose.

Cross-References