[NGFP-BookClub] reading babel

[Manja Ressler]

ruth wisse wrote:

> Yet Babel obviously knows that the Revolution has come at a terrible 
> moral price, and that the price will be felt by the Jews first and 
> foremost. Look at the story sequence of "Gedali" and "My First Goose," 
> and "The Rebbe" to see how he broaches the problem of the moral cost 
> of the Revolution. The Jew has been allowed to ride with the 
> Cossacks--it is political victory. (Better than being killed by the 
> Cossacks, which had been their fate before.) But is the price of this 
> improvement worth it? That's the question Gedali poses. 

In Gedali's story, the main question is posed in the fragment where 
Gedali applies a kind of Talmudic reasoning on the Revolution. In his 
world view, 'good men do not kill', so the Revolution must also be the 
work of bad men. The narrator, on the other hand, with all his apparent 
nostalgia (when the story begins, he tells about Shabbat at his 
grandparents' house) is convinced that blood must be spilled to change 
the world. For him, Judaism is already 'paradise lost'. For many Jews in 
his generation, I suppose, at least in Eastern Europe, time had run out 
on the Mashiach. They felt they had to take matters into their own 
hands, whether they were Communists, Anarchists, Zionists, or 
Social-Democrats. I think it would be hard to overestimate the impact 
this change of attitude has had on our people.
It was not just Communism, not just the Revolution which turned peace 
loving, civilized Jews into active participants in history and people 
with blood on their hands. Gedali is right, of course, to ask what we 
win and what we lose by becoming active players. But we also understand 
the narrator, who is aware that necessary changes are just not going to 
happen, unless we do something ourselves.
 From then on, it's compromising between your ethical values and the 
desire to change the world. Only much later, toward the end of the 
twentieth century, many Communists became aware of the price they had 
paid and even worse, had made others pay. Gedali already senses what is 
to become of this Revolution, and I think the narrator does, too. He 
does not answer Gedali's questions, but keeps repeating that blood must 
flow. He seems so determined to bring about change, that he is willing 
to overlook the obvious.
Also, I think, as a writer (and a Jew?) he is looked down on by the 
soldiers. He wants to prove how tough he is, as I think is the rationale 
behind his behavior in 'My First Goose'. Which makes it only more 
interesting that, when he seeks some peace and maybe consolation, he 
looks for Jewish company, as in the story 'The Rabbi'. It is quite a 
surprise to me that Babel describes the Jews with so much love. Compared 
to a man like Trotsky, he doesn't seem to want to get rid of his 
Jewishness or pretend to distance himself. He is clearly wrestling with 
his own attachment to 'Jewishness'.
Manja