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313-468-1-PB.Pdf (96.10Kb) WHEN CROOKS (AND GUMSHOES) TALK YIDDISH: On Babel, Singer and Chabon Lee Williams Lecturer, Department of Languages and Literature Touro College South Michael Chabon’s bestselling novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007) extends the literary sub-genre depicting Jewish gangsters into the twenty-first century and provides the principal focus of my paper. By the late 1800s, fiction writers were portraying or hinting at a Yiddish- spouting criminal class within the Diaspora. Then, in the 1920s, Isaac Babel’s The Odessa Stories related the larger-than-life figure of Benya Krik, an extortion and protection king. Those tales were written in Russian, but with Yiddish syntax and jargon obtruding, a device recently employed by Chabon in English to great effect. The gangster theme continued with Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yarme and Keyle, serialized during the 50s under pseudonym in Forverts, a New York Yiddish daily. A chapter from this stark portrait of the Warsaw-Buenos Aires white slave trade has recently emerged in English – untouched by Singer – in a volume titled The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer, edited by Seth Wolitz at the University of Texas. Generally, Singer stuck a hand into his “translations,” seizing the opportunity to de-polemicize the Yiddish texts for an American and an eventual world audience, a redactive strategy that arguably aided in his garnering the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. Most recently, in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Chabon fashions a new playground for yarmulke-balancing mafiosos. He situates them among an enclave of three million Jewish exiles along the rugged Alaskan coastline, a counter-historical proposition that assumes Israel’s defeat in its early war with surrounding Arab nations. In fact, the idea was proposed by FDR’s Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes in 1939, so this imagined turn of events is not as far-fetched as it might seem. The late 19th century had already witnessed an exodus of pogrom-escaping Jews to Argentina under the auspices of the Baron von Hirsch’s Jewish Colonization Association. Even Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, once proposed Uganda as a temporary refuge. Chabon’s novel embellishes Babel’s and Singer’s gangster yarns by installing a homicide detective as protagonist. His Meyer Landsman is a conflicted, alcohol-swilling gumshoe reminiscent of 40s’ crime novels. While solving the murder of a Hasidic crime boss’s son, Landsman must sleuth out his own foibles and a failed relationship. I look at all three writers’ use of hyperbolic descriptors and an ambivalent narrative attitude. The novelists parody the gangster genre as well as the closed Jewish societies in which the criminals conduct their mischief. The result is a stylized, self-conscious narrative. Indeed, Lionel Trilling notes “Babel’s preoccupation with form, with the aesthetic surface,” (16) an assessment that could apply equally to Singer, and even more so to Chabon. In the case of the latter, his apparently supercilious authorial stance regarding Yiddishkeit and the Israeli state won him a scathing review by Ruth R. Wisse in Commentary. My paper addresses Wisse’s objections and shows how Chabon’s prose, like that of Babel and Singer, simultaneously exalts what it so offhandedly disses. Now, I will address each of the three writers’ indicated works, beginning with that of Babel. Isaac Babel’s The Odessa Stories appeared in newspapers and magazines between 1921 and 1924 at the apogee of High Modernism and predated the release of his more renowned story collection, Red Cavalry. Indeed, The Odessa Stories epitomize what critic Ortega y Gasset describes in a general reflection on the period as “an art that is jest, that is, essentially, a lampoon of itself / un arte que es una broma, que es, esencialmente, la burla de sí mismo” (86, my translation). Babel was born in the bustling Black Sea port of Odessa in 1894, a town that was one third Jewish and a part of czarist Russia. Despite Odessa’s international port ambiance and its far-flung, southernmost position in the Pale of Settlement, it was not immune to the pogrom of 1905. Odessa’s Jewish citizens had meandered toward assimilation and secularization, but their ghetto remains hermetically sealed in these stories. The gangsters rob their own, kill their own, marry their own, and bury their own. Babel’s tale “How Things Were Done in Odessa” provides the most emblematic foil for that author’s modernist project of self-conscious art-making vis-à-vis buffoonery, exaggeration, and blatant attention to writing as craft. An “I” narrator initiates this metafictional strategy with the request, “Let’s talk about Benya Krik. Let’s talk about his lightening-quick beginning and his terrible end” (146). After just three paragraphs, that anonymous speaker turns over the spinning to a second narrator, Reb Arye-Leib, and from him we learn of Jewish mobster Benya’s vicious rise to power. The second narrator begins rhetorically, “Why him? Why not the others you want to know? Well then, forget for a while that you have glasses on your nose and autumn in your heart” (146). With that biting line the narrator distinguishes two sorts of Jew: the forgettable bureaucrats and shopkeepers who lead lives of quiet passivity, among them perhaps the story’s readers; and brazen criminal types like Krik who apply mettle and muscle to claim a piece of the pie. Babel’s own wire-rimmed visage would seem to associate him with the former group; certainly Krik’s strong-arm tactics identify him with the latter. Not incidentally, as Rachel Rubin indicates in her book Jewish Gangsters of Modern Literature, the word krik means yell. As a rite of initiation into Odessa’s Jewish mafia, Krik must bring an all-powerful merchant called ‘Yid-and-a-half’ into line. The moniker stems from the nine previous “raids” that this mountain-sized business tycoon has repulsed. The upstart Krik begins his criminal task with an understated extortion letter that hints at the worst: “Most esteemed Rubin Osipovich, I would be grateful if by the Sabbath you could place by the rain-water barrel a… [original ellipses], and so on. Should you choose to refuse, which you have opted to do lately, a great disappointment in your family life awaits you. Respectfully yours, Ben Zion Krik” (148) Krik’s gangsters wreak violence upon their coreligionists, all the while acknowledging the Sabbath and offering grandiose religious gestures at weddings and burials. Oftentimes, though, they let loose in a sacrilegious outburst. For example, Krik philosophizes while consoling the mother of the shop assistant whom one of his henchmen has gunned down, “Everyone makes mistakes, even God. This was a giant mistake… But didn’t God Himself make a mistake when he settled the Jews in Russia so that they could be tormented as if they were in hell? Wouldn’t it have been better to have the Jews living in Switzerland, where they would’ve been surrounded by first-class lakes, mountain air, and Frenchmen galore? Everyone makes mistakes, even God” (152). In another scene, while Krik’s thugs are cleaning out Yid-and-a-Half’s safe, “Benya t[ells] stories from the life of the Jewish people” (149). Benya Krik’s literary bent, as critic Rubin notes, conjoins neatly with his role as crook. And, as has been pointed out by numerous authors themselves, what is writing but thieving from those we love and hate most? Krik’s penchant for narrative extends to the bigger-than-life narrative of his gangster existence. He confects an extravagant persona of “chocolate jacket, cream pants, and raspberry-red half boots” (151) and motors around the ghetto in his trademark red automobile with the opera Pagliacci (Clowns) blaring from a mounted sound system. Then, at the funeral he has brought to pass, he provides even more pomp: a famous cantor, an enormous throng of mourners, and sixty chanters. Krik arrives fashionably late in gangster regalia to deliver a eulogy that is mostly communistic diatribe to members of the Society of Jewish Shop Assistants, thereby co-opting the world’s labor movements and the memory of the dead man, “an honest toiler, who died for a copper half-kopeck” (153). Shortly after this sensationalist funeral, the business mogul Yid-and-a-Half steps down and so Krik’s rep is established in Odessa. In total, Babel wrote eight Odessa stories, each marked by an exuberance in speech and plot that both laud and vilify the Jewish gangster, and that elevate religious observance while at the same time mocking it. This double capacity to hold two contradictory positions, to pay homage and at the same time trivialize, marks Babel as a modernist. Now let’s consider Isaac Bashevis Singer. The Polish-Jewish émigré serialized Yarme and Keyle in the New York Yiddish newspaper Forverts between January 1956 and January 1957. The plot is set in pre-World War I Warsaw, just a few years prior to Babel’s Odessa Stories. The Jewish protagonists are cut from stark realist cloth, ganifs, white slavers, prostitutes… none of them very likable – boozers, schmoozers, brooders, and schemers. They are all out to make a buck, and none of them radiate the joie de vivre criminality of Benya Krik. Sensual love erupts occasionally between the book’s namesakes Yarme, a pimp, and Keyle, his girlfriend/prostitute. A bisexual white slaver named Max completes the frame, but all this human interchange hints at the apathetic Barfly kind of love of Charles Bukowski. Apparently, only the second chapter to Yarme and Keyle is available in English translation, and that is the text that I have consulted and will cite here, as rendered by Joseph Sherman in The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer.
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