Sunday, August 7, 2022, 3:00-4:30 pm Pacific Time
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Meet Benya Krik, Jewish gangster and King of Odessa's Jewish underworld in the tumultuous years of revolution from tsarist to Bolshevik rule, and, without question, writer Isaac Babel's most notorious and beloved fictional character! No, that is not a portrait of Benya above, but of his progenitor, Isaac Babel himself, at the height of his celebrity in 1931, one of the 20th century's greatest writers in any language. Any language but Yiddish!? (1)
You won't find an entry for Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel (1894-1940) in my old linen-bound standby, the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 333: Writers in Yiddish, despite the fact that the writer was raised speaking dos mame-loshn, as well as acquiring Hebrew, Russian, Ukrainian and French. Yiddish was Babel's first language and, according to his most recent translator Boris Dralyuk, his stories written in Russian are pungent with the distinctive Odessan Yiddish argot heard in the streets of Moldavanka, Babel's first home. (2) If Dralyuk conveys the flavor of this street-talking style, we still get a good whiff from Peter Constantine's much respected and now standard translation (3).
The character Benya Krik, suave, handsome, cocky, ruthless but tenderhearted toward women, a friend to underdogs, and possessing a particular sense of honor along with iron nerve, entered the Russian literary imaginary with Babel's story The King in 1921. This and other tales Babel published in journals and newspapers featuring Benya and his gang of extortionists, thieves, smugglers and pimps had for Russian readers the kind of hard-boiled appeal that readers of American 'noir' in the same period loved. Its style was not unlike the the clipped street language and casual shrug at violence in novels by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, as Dralyuk notes.
By 1926, Babel wrote and published in book form a screenplay based on three sensational stories about Benya Krik, eponymously
titled Беня Крик (кино-повесть), or, Benya Krik (Cinema-Novel). The following year, the screenplay was made and released as a black-and-white silent film by VUFKU, the state-owned movie-making monopoly established in the new Soviet Ukraine and operating 1922- 1930. The film, Benya Krik (its wonderful poster below with the Clark Gable-like actor Yuri Shumsky playing Benya), mistranslated into English as Bennie the Howl, is available free on YouTube. (4) You should see it. The film, directed by the fading director Vladimir Vilner, has been roundly panned by critics of cinema. But its extravagant characterization of the dirt-poor Jews of Moldavanka, Jewish thugs, Jewish bankers and Jewish workers makes for very interesting viewing as you tack between a Jewish gaze and that of an imagined non-Jewish Russian audience. (5)

The hour and 45 minutes you will spend watching Bennie the Howl, filmed in 1920s Odessa's streets and docks, will introduce you visually to the "myth of Odessa." (6, 7, 8) As Efraim Sicher and every other critic writing about The Odessa Stories inevitably must mention, the city has long had the image in the Russian imagination of an exotic crime-ridden frontier town populated by Cossacks, Georgians, Turks, Greeks, and especially Jews. This image comes partly from the poet Pushkin who as a naughty aristocratic lad exiled by the Tsar to the outpost on the Black Sea in 1823-1824 extolled Odessa's sun, sea, and even the city's "Odessan dust."
But Pushkin left out the Jews, as critic Sicher notes, even though they were already a sizeable presence in the sunny cosmopolitan port city. It was Babel who embroidered the myth of Odessa by delineating and coloring more vividly than ever before the Jewish underworld element. (9) In fact, the myth of Odessa has had everything to do with Catherine the Great founding the city by decree in 1794 in order populate a strategically located seaport colony with the surplus subjects Russia acquired by annexing territories on its western boundary. To put it neatly, Babel's Odessa would not exist apart from the history of the Pale of Jewish Settlement. (10)
As on New York's Lower East Side and London's East End, the high population of Jews and its concentration in the Moldavanka suburb of Odessa put its mark on the character of the city as a whole. The 1897 Russian census reported 4,805,354 Jews living in the Pale of Settlement, almost all of them Ashkenazi Yiddish speakers. (11) The Pale, a reservation system somewhat like that imposed on Native Americas, embraced 94% of Russia's Jews. Jews were 12% of the local population and 4% of Russia's total population. The opportunity to settle freely in Odessa's cosmopolitan environment drew entrepreneurial Jews. They ended up in Moldavanka, where in pre-Tsarist times under the Tatars and Turks a Jewish settlement had already existed.
By the turn of the century, an estimated 30-35% of Odessa's population was Jewish. Of course, the number was drastically diminished by World War I, the pogrom of 1905, the Russian Revolution, excesses of Bolshevik and Stalinist rule, emigration, and the Holocaust. Still, through and after Soviet times, the myth of Odessa and its Jewish coloration persists. Cambridge anthropologist Tanya Richardson's report of fieldwork in Odessa in 2001-2002 suggests that Moldavanka has become a metonym for the city in the minds of its inhabitants. (12) She attributes this to Isaac Babel's breakthrough achievement of putting Jews squarely on the Russian literary map. "Although Moldavanka occupies an ambiguous place in the Odessan imaginary," Richardson writes . . .
I argue that its symbolic centrality can be attributed to its construction in, or relation to, high culture-most notably in Isaak Babel's Odessa Stories. Moldavanka is increasingly being codified as a district in which it is possible to sense the "real Odessa" and witness its kolorit in places such as courtyards and the Starokonnoi Market.
In 1931, Babel's stories about Benya Krik and his comrades in crime were collected in print and published in Russia as The Odessa Stories. By this time, Babel had well solidified his recognition as a formidable new literary voice in Russia with the publication of stories he wrote based on his experience as an embedded journalist in 1920 with the Bolsheviks in the Russian-Polish campaign in Volhynia (western Ukraine). These poignant, deadpan semi-fictional accounts of the atrocities of the war waged with counter-revolutionary White Russians, Cossacks and Orthodox clergy turned Babel into an internationally celebrated literary figure. The sold-out book Konarmia (see cover below) published in 1927 went into eight editions and was translated into five languages. The English version was called Red Cavalry.

GET YOUR COPY OF RED CAVALRY NOW. WE DISCUSS IT ON SEPTEMBER 11.
Celebrated as one of Russia's most important writers
for his contributions to high culture and among popular audiences for his work in film, Babel was at the pinnacle of his career. His public acclaim could not exist independently, however, of Soviet government approval of the writer's bona fides as a loyal supporter. In 1939, the writer and his family (his partner Antonina Pirozhkova and their daughter Lydia Babel) were rewarded with a dacha by the state. (13)
But Babel's good fortune along with his good name quickly dematerialized when on May 15, 1939 the NKVD arrested the writer at his cottage in Peredelkino on trumped up charges of terrorism and spying. After months of imprisonment and probable torture, Babel was executed by a firing squad on January 27, 1940 at one-thirty in the morning. At 45 years old, he was one of many Jewish intellectuals who were murdered in Stalin's purges, among them also the writer Der Nister (Pinkhes Kahanovitsh, 1884–1950), whose book The Family Mashber we read and discussed last year. (14)

This sober turn regarding Babel and his fabulous Odessa Stories is where I must leave you now. Allow me to get back to the business at hand of preparing you, the Yiddish Schmoozers, to meet "The King." In the well-respected Peter Constantine translation, we are reading the stories that appear with these titles:

Brava, Gelya! Thank you for this introduction. And wow, I hope you'll invite Dralyuk to the January discussion of "Grey Bees"!