Isaac Babel's Jewish Biscuits

I once wrote a short story about the execution of Isaac Babel.

I wrote the story to express my visceral disgust at the fact that Babel, a Jew, rode as a war correspondent with Soviet Cossacks in a disastrous military campaign to export the Revolution into Poland in the summer of 1920. In the story, the chief executioner, also a Jew, first condemns a sniveling Babel for licking enemy boots, then puts a bullet through his head.

Historically, the Cossacks rank among the Jews' cruelest butchers ("eternal enemies," said the NY Times). Babel seemed to have sold his soul for a cold glass of Communist cool-aid. The draft still sleeps in my files of unfinished stories.

The story is unfinished indeed. Babel is a breathtaking writer. His collection of short stories, Red Cavalry, is an astonishing masterpiece of literary modernism, of highly polished poetic prose. It is not for the feint of heart. If I ever work on the story again, I may not be so quick to pull the trigger.

A story like "Gedali", for instance, leaves me wondering. Taking place on a Friday evening in Zhitomir, in the wake of a pogrom unleashed by retreating Polish troops, it is one of Babel's purest Jewish stories.

"On the eve of the Sabbath," the narrator begins, "I am always tormented by the dense sorrow of memory" (grandfather learning Torah, grandmother lighting Shabbos candles). "On those evenings my child's heart was gently rocked, like a little boat on enchanted waves."

While the cavalry rests in between battles, the narrator wanders through the Jewish quarter, "looking for the timid star," the Star of David. The streets are empty, only a few old Jews selling chalk soap and candle wicks for Shabbos, the others preferring to suffer their traumas privately.

Among the maze of padlocked stores and tightly shut market stalls, one shop, a junk shop, is open. Here, the narrator meets Gedali. "Everyone has left the bazaar, but Gedali has remained. He roams through his labyrinth of globes, skulls, and dead flowers, waving his cockerel-feather duster, swishing away the dust from the dead flowers."

The pogrom is over, the devastation remains. One army has left, and another has taken its place, but it's clear, at least to Gedali, at least to the Jews, that one army is as bad as the other. The two men sit on empty beer barrels and talk. Gedali's top hot sways above them, "like a little black tower."

Gedali is the talkative one. The narrator interrupts him a couple of times, with tough talk. "The sun cannot enter eyes that are squeezed shut," he tells Gedali, "but we shall rip open those closed eyes!"

But the narrator is from the intelligentsia. The Cossacks hate him for wearing glasses. The tough guy is made of straw, a man playing the role of a badass Bolshevik. I trust this is by design.

The real substance is Gedali's. "This is marvelous," he says, "this is the Revolution! But then the same man who beat the Pole says to me, 'Gedali, we are requisitioning your gramophone!' 'But gentlemen,' I tell the Revolution, 'I love music!' And what does the Revolution answer me? 'You don't know what you love, Gedali! I am going to shoot you, and then you'll know, and I cannot not shoot, because I am the Revolution!'"

The Revolution promises happiness, he says, but happiness doesn't like orphans. And good people don't kill.

The story comes to a close with the first Friday night star of Shabbos.

The narrator asks Gedali where he can find "some Jewish biscuits, a Jewish glass of tea, and a piece of that retired God in the glass of tea?"

"You can't find any," Gedali answers. "There's a tavern next door, and good people used to run it, but people don't eat there anymore, they weep."

With that, Gedali stands, buttons his coat, dusts himself off, wipes his hands, and walks off, "tiny, lonely, dreamy, with his black top hat, and a large prayer book under his arm."

So I'm still left wondering what the executioner in my story should do. It would be nice to redeem a Jewish poet; if only someone would wipe the smirk off his face in his photographs.