Isaac Babel’s Boyish Shame and Adult Pride in His Raucous Jewish Family

In his 1929 short story “In the Basement,” the Soviet-Jewish writer Isaac Babel reminisces about his childhood in pre-Revolutionary Odessa, his befriending of a classmate from a well-to-do family, and his boyish shame and adult pride at his lower-class, quarrel-filled, and very Jewish home life. The story, in a new translation by Maxim Shrayer, begins thus:

In my boyhood, I was prone to lying. This resulted from reading. My imagination was always inflamed. I read during lessons, on breaks, on the way home, at night—under the table, disguising myself behind a drooping tablecloth. Over the book, I missed out on all the affairs of this world. I didn’t ditch lessons and run off to the seaport, or observe the start of the billiards game in the coffee houses of Greek Street, or go swimming at Langeron beach. I had no companions. Who would care to associate with such a person?

Once, in the hands of our top student, Mark Borgman, I saw a book about Spinoza. He’d just finished reading it and couldn’t resist telling the boys who surrounded him about the Spanish Inquisition. It was all educated mumble, what he was saying. There was no poetry in Borgman’s words. I couldn’t help butting in. I told those who were willing to listen about old Amsterdam, dusk over the ghetto, and also about the philosophers—the polishers of diamonds. I added much to what I’d read in books; I just couldn’t do without embellishment. My imagination enhanced the dramatic scenes, rearranged the endings, tied the beginnings into knots of mystery. In my imagination, Spinoza’s death, his free, lonely death, appeared as a battle. The synedrion tried to coerce the dying Spinoza into repenting, but he didn’t give in. I also managed to weave Rubens into this fabrication. I imagined that Rubens stood at the head of Spinoza’s bed and executed his death mask.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Isaac Babel, Jewish literature, Russian Jewry

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society