The Mating Dance of the Blue-Footed Booby
ISAAC BABEL THE JEW
“I didn’t choose my nationality,” he suddenly said in a
breaking voice. “I’m a Jew, a Yid. There are times when I believe I can
understand everything. But there’s one thing I’ll never understand: the reason
for that black, base thing that is so banally termed antisemitism”
(reminiscences of Konstantin Paustovsky).
Babel translated into Russian several stories by the Yiddish
writer Sholem Aleichem. His wife Antonina Pirozhkova summarizes the plot of one
of them that he read aloud to her (Reminiscences
of Contemporaries, p. 370). It is instructive that Babel would find this
story amusing.
“Two Ukrainian Cossacks were out in the steppe, preparing
kasha over a campfire. Down the road nearby walked a disheveled hungry Jew.
They saw a chance to have some fun, so they invited him over to share their
kasha. The Jew accepted their invitation, and they gave him a spoon. But no
sooner had he dipped the spoon into the kasha and brought it to his lips than
one of the Cossacks cracked him on the head with his spoon and said to the
other, ‘Your Jew is out-eating my Jew; he’ll eat up all the kasha, and nothing
will be left for my Jew.’ Then the other Cossack cracked the Jew on the head
with his spoon, saying, ‘No. It’s your Jew who won’t let my Jew eat.’ And so
they went on beating him, each of them pretending he was looking out for his
own Jew, while beating the other fellow’s Jew.”
What a parable for those times; and for our own times as
well.
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