"Klezmer" by Joann Sfar

Joann Sfar's Klezmer is a graphic novel about some very unlucky and also rebellious Jews approximately 100 years ago. They wander around, hungry and cold, betrayed by friends or victimized by enemies until they come to where? ODESSA! When I picked up the book I had no idea this was their destiny. Here's Sfar's imaginary scene of the Odessa they see:

As the musicians catch sight of the city, Sfar draws a series of images with quotations from Isaac Babel's description, "Odessa is a horrible town. It's common knowledge that people there butcher the Russian language," he wrote. "And yet I feel that there are quite a few good things one can say about this important town, the most charming city of the Russian Empire. If you think about it, it is a town in which you can live free and easy. Half the population is made up of Jews... "

And here we see how Sfar imagines it. I also enjoyed his quotations from many Klezmer songs, as the musicians entertain first one another, and then begin to perform for audiences in little towns. I also liked the sort of philosophical aspects of the musicians' struggle with their own misfortunes and their lost faith, though sometimes Sfar is a little too clever about this.

Isaac Babel's Odessa Tales

Isaac Babel was the creator of famous stories about the thieves and rogues of Odessa and still more famous tales about the Russian Revolution. Babel was born in the Jewish Moldavanka district of Odessa in 1894. His grandfather was a victim of the 1905 pogroms which accompanied the failed revolution.

While educational opportunities were more open in Odessa than elsewhere, there were quotas on the number of Jewish students in Odessa's universities and on Jewish enrollment at all Russian institutions of higher learning. Babel was unable to enroll at the University of Odessa, so left in 1911 to further his education in Kiev. In 1913 he published his first story “Old Shloyme.”

Like Jabotinsky’s novel (which I wrote about yesterday), Babel’s stories are mined for historic details by social historians writing about the city and about the Revolution. "More than anyone else, Isaac Babel popularized the image of Odessa as a city of swashbuckling Jewish swindlers and sinners, who all at once embodied the physical strength, revelry, and wit for which Odessa was famous. The larger-than-life Jewish gangster emerged as the prevailing icon of Odessa in Soviet culture, and he was depcted in stark contrast to the stereotypically passive shtetl Jew of Eastern Europe..." (Jarrod Tanny, City of Rogues and Schnorrers, location 78 Kindle ed.)

Odessa historians especially cite Babel's rogue character Benya Krick the hooligan. Babel captured the atmosphere of contrasting poverty and wealth in the stories that took place before the Revolution, and captured the utter disorganization of the various revolutionary forces whose power shifted constantly and who killed one another ruthlessly. As historian Charles King says, "While Vladimir Jabotinsky was busy trying to create a fighting force for Palestine, his fellow Odessan was sitting on a horse in a Cossack cavalry regiment. It was an unlikely place for a Jew, to say the least." (Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams, p. 183)

Babel’s Odessa stories and war stories are episodic and often broken off in what might be the middle of a longer development of character and plot – but the stories are about chaotic times with limited commitments; sometimes it seems as if only choppy stories can do justice to the unpredictable lives and times depicted. Or maybe Babel was just a little ahead of Hemmingway as a stylist, I don’t know -- he was a very near contemporary.

For example a story in the collection Benya Krik, the Gangster, is titled “In the Basement.” It begins: “As a boy I was given to lying. It was all due to reading.” The narrator's imagination combined with what he reads makes him well-liked, as he embellishes the historic narratives that he reads. His schoomate, the son of a rich man, finds him likable and invites him to his suburban villa.

The wealth and possessions of the friend’s family are vast: “His father … was one of those men who were making Odessa another Marseille or Naples. There was in him the mettle of the Odessa merchant of the old days.” And the villa was pure luxury, close to a beach with carefully tended flower gardens. Guests play cards, women come and go with “diamonds clapped on everywhere;” their host sits in a chair facing the sea and reads The Manchester Guardien.

The narrator, in contrast, came from a “destitute and freakish family.” His grandfather makes clever inventions, and his uncle is a successful rogue, but they live in a slum. However, he describes his feckless relatives to his schoolmate as widely traveled and accomplished, and invites the friend back to visit his hovel. The ensuing disaster is mitigated slightly by the efforts of his Aunt Bobka, who bakes a jam strudel and a poppy-seed cake, and helps him bribe his crazy and unmanageable uncle and grandfather to stay away. Obviously, it doesn’t work – they come back drunk and hurling Jewish curses and Russian obscenities. In the end, we readers have seen the two most extreme sides of Odessa Jewry.

Babel’s stories were widely read in the early Soviet era; then he fell out of favor and eventually died in prison.

Writers and Revolutionaries in Odessa

The frontier-like atmosphere of Odessa appealed to creative Jewish writers, as well as to aspiring businessmen. Mendele (Yiddish writer Shalom Yakov Abramovitch) lived there from 1881 until he died in 1917. Odessa was home to Sholem Aleichem for a short time in the 1890s. Bialik, who wrote in Hebrew and Yiddish, lived there later, leaving in 1921. The free and assimilated atmosphere and active cultural scene before World War I and the Russian Revolution was clearly condusive to creativity.

Odessa was the birthplace of several noted Jewish authors whose assimilated background contributed to their writing style. I’ve been sampling translations of three writers of Russian-language works of fiction: Vladimir Jabotinsky, Isaac Babel, and Ilya Ilf. Despite similar origins in Odessa’s Russianized Jewish community, their works almost seem designed to illuminate the various political and artistic routes open to writers of their time and place.

This post is about Vladimir Jabotinsky, mainly known as a dissident Zionist leader who favored armed struggle over the more peaceful approach of the mainstream. Jabotinsky was born in Odessa in 1880 and attended Russian schools, which Jews were allowed to do there. He became a Zionist and journalist and activist. During World War I, he and Trumpeldor (another Zionist hero) founded a Jewish military unit, the Jewish Legion, to fight for the British.

Much later, Jabotinsky returned to his calling as a writer with the novel The Five. (First published in 1936.) The narrator of The Five, like Jabotinsky, was a traveling journalist who wrote popular newspaper articles. The book is in the form of a memoir of a family with five children, obviously depicted carefully to represent typical Jewish characters in Odessa. It begins just before the crucial events of 1905 including the Potemkin, which had already been made famous by Eisenstein’s film (as I wrote yesterday) by the time Jabotinsky wrote the book. It mentions the war with Japan, which seems to have a rather small impact on the family. I think Jabotinsky expects the reader to fill in the impact of these major events, which at this long remove is hardto do.

Whatever else it is, The Five is above all a political novel. The narrator not only describes the family, he experiences a number of revelations about Odessa life and politics –all of which one sees are there partly to advance Jabotinsky’s perspective from decades later. The narrator travels, and while abroad, first hears “the use of the words Bolshevikand Menshevik, terms that were still little known in Russia outside the underground.” He notices a “rigid hierarchy in degrees of revolutionary orthodoxy … The Plekhanovites apologized to the Leninists, the Social Revolutionaries to the Marxists, the Bundists to all the rest, the Social Zionists of various stripes to the Bundists; simple Zionists were generally considered to be out of bounds and didn’t even attempt to beg forgiveness.” (p.100-101)

Although political, The Five is also very good and amazingly readable. The very typical characters are very believable. I think it would be read more widely if Odessa at that time were better known, but it’s too full of obscure cultural references to authors, poets, plays (like a quote from Chekov’s “Cherry Orchard,” which was new the year the book’s events take place).

For example, the first chapter takes place in the Odessa Opera House – which I only heard of in my recent reading of histories of the city; it also refers to a number of operas and singers that were popular then. Anotherchapter takes place in cafes on the most famous street in the city (also described by historians).

In the end, the five children of the central family meet very sad fates because there’s really nothing else possible for them. In a way, the father – a grain dealer who came from Zhitomir and overcame his Jewish accent and culture – is more comfortable in his skin than any of his assimilated children; the mother is the anchor of everyone in the family, but her life becomes sadder and sadder until the narrator calls her Niobe, the mother from a Greek myth, who defied the gods and was punished by the death of all her children.

One son tries everything non-religiously spiritual: from Yoga breathing exercises to keeping kosher (instead of eating sausages at a café) to vegetarianism. One daughter chooses a purely bourgoise marriage; the other joins the underground. Another son becomes a philosophical gangster, who says “the initial stages of mass assimilation are very difficult.” (p. 170)

At the end, the surviving youngest son, who was always a paragon in school, decides against Zionism – which is supposed to be the obvious solution by that point – and determines that he’ll convert to Christianity. I suspect the reader in the 1930s already knows how that’s going to work for him. By then, the Russian Revolution had devastated the Odessa Jewish community, along with so much of the territory.

It’s interesting that this novel was virtually unknown when published in Russian (well, ok, in 1936 it was bound to be obscured by what was happening there). It made little impact in a Hebrew translation (well, ok, a lot was going on in pre-state Israel too). And the first English translation only appeared in 2005, by which time it had become fairly opaque to most readers.

Isaak Babel (July 13, 1894)

Babel was born in Odessa, Ukraine, and some of his most famous stories are about the Jewish underworld of Odessa. Babel was alternately the darling of Soviet literature in his early years; an outcast (the Soviet authorities executed him in 1940); and a rehabilitated hero in 1954. His work is fascinating as both Russian and Russian-Jewish history, and as well-crafted stories.