Notes Introduction 1 Quoted in Савва Голованивский, “Великий одессит”, Воспоминания о Бабеле, сост. А. Пирожкова, Н.Юргенева (Москва: Книжная палата, 1989), 213. 2 “Introduction,” Great Jewish Short Stories, ed. Saul Bellow (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1963), 16. 3 Г.Белая, “Конармия И.Бабеля: Вчера и сегодня”, in her Дон Кихоты 20-х годов: “Перевал” и судьба его идей (Москва: Советский писатель, 1989), 149-69; revised version: Дон Кихоты революции — опыт побед и поражений, изд. 2-е, допол. (Москва РГГУ, 2002); С. Гандлевский, “Гибель с музыкой (о Бабеле)”, Знамя 9 (2009): 187-97. 4 И.Яркевич, “Бабель как Маркиз де Сад русской революции”, Независимая газета 16 марта 1994. English version: “Babelʹ as the Marquis de Sade of the Russian Revolution,” trans. A. Bromfield, Glas 8 (1994): 227-30. 5 W. Cukierman, “Новый документ”, Глагол 3 (1981): 298-99. 6 Ростислав Александров, Волшебник из Одессы: По следам Исаака Бабеля (Одесса: Пласке, 2011), 22-24. Aleksandrov’s account gives no documented sources and is partly based on hearsay and memoirs. 7 For anecdotes about such pranks see A.Пирожкова, “Семь лет с Иса- аком Бабелем”, Собрание сочинений, IV, 466-67. Ehrenburg recalls Babelʹ’s compulsive secretiveness in his memoirs, И.Эренбург, Люди, годы, жизнь: Воспоминания (Москва: Советский писатель, 1990), I, 469. 8 Пирожкова, “Годы, прошедшие рядом (1932—1939)”, Воспоминания о Бабеле, 272. He also introduced Semyon Gekht to the Russian poet Esenin as his son (С.Гехт, “У стены Страстного монастыря в летний день 1924 года”, Воспоминания о Бабеле, 54). 9 Letter to A. G. Slonim, 7 December 1918,Собрание сочинений, IV, 5. 10 Bellow, “Introduction,” 15-16. 252 N o t e s 11 David Theo Goldberg and Michael Krausz, “The Culture of Identity,” in Jewish Identity, ed. David Theo Goldberg and Michael Krausz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 1. 12 Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). See also David Shneer’s account of literary politics in Yiddish secular culture, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 13 See Steven J. Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794- 1881 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985). 14 See early assessments of Odessa’s cosmopolitan traditions in Л.М.де- Рибас, Из прошлаго Одессы: Сборник статей (Одесса: Маразли, 1894); А.Кирпичников, “Из истории умственной жизни Одессы”, Очерки по истории новой русской литературы (Санкт-Петербург, 1896), 383-420. 15 “A Port, Not a Shtetl: Reflections on the Distinctiveness of Odessa,” Jewish Culture and History 4, 2 (2001): 173-78; see chapter three. 16 Mordecai Altshuler, Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust: A Social and Demographic Profile (Jerusalem: Centre for Research of East European Jewry, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1998), 14, 36, 40, 225. 17 See Steven J. Zipperstein, “Remapping Odessa,” in his Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 63-86. 18 See Jarrod Tanny, City of Rogues and Schnorrers: Russia’s Jews and the Myth of Old Odessa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). Tanny identifies Ostap Bender’s coded Jewishness as indicating a criminality associated with Odessa (104-07). 19 Maurice Friedberg has attempted to reconstruct Odessa’s social life based on interviews with Soviet emigrants in How Things Were Done in Odessa: Cultural and Intellectual Pursuits in a Soviet City (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991). 20 Robert A. Rothstein, “How It Was Sung in Odessa: At the Intersection of Russian and Yiddish Folk Culture,” Slavic Review 60, 4 (2001): 781-801. For Odessa underworld songs that became popular see Boris Briker, “The Underworld of Benia Krik and I. Babelʹ’s Odessa Stories,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 36, 1-2 (1994): 124-28. 21 В.Шкловский, “Юго-Запад”, Литературная газета 5 января 1933, 3. 253 N o t e s 22 “Some Themes and Archetypes in Babelʹ’s Red Cavalry,” Slavic Review 53, 3 (1994): 653. 23 Rebecca Stanton, “Identity Crisis: The Literary Cult and Culture of Odessa in the Early Twentieth Century,” Symposium 57, 3 (Fall 2003): 117. 24 Е.Каракина, По следам юго-запада (Новосибирск: Свиньин и сыновья, 2006). For a polemical repudiation of these claims see О.Кудрин, “Уроки одесской школы и гребни одесской волны”, Вопросы литературы 3 (2012): 9-64. 25 А.Воронский, “И. Бабель”, Литературные типы (Москва: Круг, 1925), 101; translated by James Karambelas as “Isaac Babelʹ,” in Twentieth-Century Russian Literary Criticism, ed. V. Erlich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 182. 26 Замятин, Лица (New York: Chekhov Publishing House, 1955), 252. 27 Замятин, Лица, 225; translated as “On Literature, Revolution, and Entropy,” in A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin, ed. and trans. Mirra Ginsburg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 121-23. 28 “И.Бабель: Критический романс”, Леф 2 (1924): 152-55. 29 Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918-1930, 231, n1. 30 Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution, 69-70. 31 Harriet Murav, Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post- Revolution Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 3-5. See chapter six. 32 Quoted in Victor Erlich, Modernism and Revolution: Russian Literature in Transition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 120. 33 Nakhimovsky, Russian-Jewish Literature and Identity: Jabotinsky, Babel, Grossman, Galich, Roziner, Markish (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 106. 34 Maxim Shrayer, in his pioneering study of Bagritsky, argues for a much wider definition of the poet’s Jewishness (Russian Poet/Soviet Jew: The Legacy of Eduard Bagritskii [Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000]). See Gregory Freidin, “Eduard Bagritsky: Soviet Poet/Russian Jew. Review essay of Maxim D. Shrayer. Russian Poet/Soviet Jew: The Legacy of Eduard Bagritsky,” Russian Review 62, 3 (July 2003): 446-49. 35 The Bnei ‘akiva (Sons of Akiva) are the youth movement of the religious Zionist party Po’el mizrakhi (founded 1929); considering their ideological 254 N o t e s orientation and the persecution of Zionist activity in the Soviet Union, the reference is surprising, and Babelʹ might have really meant Rabbi Akiva himself, the famous sage of Talmudic times, who was martyred by the Romans for his dedication to Judaism. 36 See Zvi Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics: The Jewish Sections of the CPSU, 1917-1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). 37 See Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 38 See Sicher, Jews in Russian Literature after the October Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 112-64; А. Лежнев, Современники: Литературно-критические очерки (Москва: Круг, 1927), 95-118. 39 Maurice Friedberg, “The Jewish Search in Russian Literature,” Prooftexts 4, 1 (1984): 93-105. Sicher, Jews in Russian Literature after the October Revolution, 27-29. 40 История моей жизни (Москва: Советский писатель, 1936), 214. 41 See Sicher, Jews in Russian Literature after the October Revolution, 65-70; Judith G. Wechsler, “El Lissitzky’s ‘Interchange Stations’: The Letter and the Spirit,” in The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, ed. Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 187-200. שמואל ווליץ, “‘מנחם מנדל’ של שלום-עליכם כרובד ב‘שנים-עשרה כסאות’ של אילף 42 ופטרוב,” חולוית 2 )1994(:931-721. 43 See Gabrielle Safran, “Isaak Babelʹ’s Elʹia Isaakovich as a New Jewish Type,” Slavic Review 61, 2 (2002): 253-72. 44 М.Семанова, Чехов и Советская литература, 1917-1935 (Советский писатель: Ленинград, 1966), 165-69. See chapter five. Chapter One 1 Of twenty-five agricultural machinery firms, five were in the hands of Jews in 1912 (“Одесса,” Еврейская энциклопедия [St. Petersburg: Brockhaus-Efron, 1913], XII, 60). More common was the Jewish middleman, or broker, like Tsudechkis who jokes about this in “Justice in Parenthesis” (“Справедивость в скобках”). In “Story of My Dovecote” we are told that the Jewish brokers instilled fear in peasants and landowners, who could not get away from them without buying something. 255 N o t e s 2 Letter of 14 October 1931, Собрание сочинений, IV, 297; translated by Andrew R. MacAndrew and Max Hayward in Isaac Babel, The Lonely Years, 1925-1939: Unpublished Stories and Private Correspondence, ed. Nathalie Babel (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964), 189. See Nathalie Babel, “Introduction,” in Lonely Years, ix-xxviii. 3 Charles King, Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (New York: Norton, 2011), 156. 4 King, Odessa, 157. 5 Babelʹ met Jabotinsky only once, in Paris in 1935, according to his testimony during interrogation by the NKVD, and he had little in common with the revisionist leader about to break from the mainstream Zionist movement (М.Соколянский, “Общие корни: Владимир Київ] 10 [2002]: 248-64] יעהופץ/Жаботинский и Исаак Бабель,” Егупец [in Russian]). 6 See Alice S. Nakhimovsky, Russian-Jewish Literature and Identity; Barry P. Scherr, “An Odessa Odyssey: Vladimir Jabotinsky’s The Five,” Slavic Review 70, 1 (2011): 94-115. See also Michael Katz, “Odessa’s Jews: The End of Assimilation,” Southwest Review 87, 2-3 (2002): 271-82. 7 Roshanna P. Sylvester, Tales of Old Odessa: Crime and Civility in a City of Thieves (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005). 8 According to his sister Meri, quoted in Judith Stora-Sandor, Isaac Babelʹ: L’homme et l’oeuvre (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968), 18-20. 9 M.М.Берков, “Мы были знакомы с детства,” Воспоминания о Бабеле, 203. 10 On the possible influence of Pater on Babelʹ see Philip Bullock, “The Cruel Art of Beauty: Walter Pater and the Uncanny Aestheticism of Isaak Babelʹ’s Red Cavalry,” Modern Language Review 104, 2 (2009): 499-529. 11 Берков, “Мы были знакомы с детства,” 204. 12 Roman Katzman, Poetics of Becoming: Dynamic Processes of Mythopoesis in Modern and Postmodern Hebrew and Slavic Literature (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005), 20-22.