Odessa Stories, Isaac Babel

I can barely read Isaac Babel. I am turning the pages but only certain words are coming forward, action words like bleeding, shouting, pleading, running, tearing, choking, blowing, boiling, like the sunset. 

I picked up the book because of Putin, because of my history, because I remember at Liverpool Street Station late at night in the 1960s, Ukrainian nationalists would meet and shout. 

What can you do when someone starts a war? You can read something from the history of that place. 

I've tried to read Isaac Babel before, jewish street life in Odessa in 1905, the year Einstein, in Bern, thought up his theory of relativity. He was well placed, well displaced, Einstein, for relativity. Isaac Babel was well-placed for fiction, at a distance from the life of his stories.

The streets, the tribe, was the real life, that's to say, fiction. But at the same time you had to pass exams, you had to excel if you were a jew. Fight or excel. Scamp or scholar. Stories were the currency of the life you didn't quite live. 

It was only when I started the second half of Odessa Stories that I started reading: a wider sweep than these here pages.  

'The Story of my Dovecote' opens the Childhood and Youth section. A nine-year-old wants a dovecot. He must earn it by passing exams. By excelling at exams. Since there are only two places for jews at secondary school. He excels, his uncle makes a dovecot, he goes into town for the doves. A pogrom is in progress. The nine year-old is beaten with his own doves, who die. 

I walked down an unfamiliar street cluttered with white boxes, walked alone, adorned in bloody feathers, down pavements swept as clean as if it were Sunday, and wept more bitterly, fully and joyously than I ever would weep again in all my life. 

My family's origins, Isaac Babel

As soon as I read anything that smacks of my family's origins, I wriggle or turn away. In the middle of last night, awake at an even more ludicrous hour than usual, I read one of the Odessa stories by Isaac Babel and suddenly saw what I was reading: between Dashiell Hammett and my grandparents. I have been ill lately. My defences are lowered. I couldn't read Babel or his like while my parents were alive. Three of their parents came from north-east of Odessa, Bessarabia, as Babel calls it, as I did before I called it Russia, or Romania, or Moldova.

The name, elusive as Bessarabia/Romania/Moldova, is everything. If Odessa is a summary of whatever I wriggle from, so be it. I was pleased once to be described by a fellow jew as 'one of the Odessa crowd'.

In its tribal regalia, Odessa defeats me. I have no aptitude for the dense colours of these stories. Quickly I feel overwhelmed by rich tapestries of people strutting their noms de guerre. Social fabric I don't know how to weave, how to believe. I wriggle and turn away. Glimpses are all I can manage. I prefer Joseph Roth's Job: internal, uncomprehending, bottomlessly sad, engaged with a room and its outside, a family—if that—and its fragility.

I am happy to learn that in Odessa there were kefir makers, and that Bessarabia was a lush place with wine that smelled of sun and bedbugs. And I am always pleased to see the Yiddish term of endearment, bubbeleh, on the page. Babel's Odessa, up to almost including the pogrom, is linguistically riotous, seductive and vivid. Boris Dralyuk, the Pushkin Press translator, grew up there.

This language has lain mostly undisturbed all my life, just beneath my awareness; and my will. Inflections, inversions, a tone of complaint and triumph, a patois I could not accept as my father would have wanted. I had to invent my own. That was, and is still, the thing.