By Vladislav Davidzon
Odessa was the epicenter and staging ground not only of the Russian Jew’s secularization but also of his masculinization. The great voice and chronicler of this dual evolution was Issac Babel, whose stories I re-read with great pleasure while sitting in cafés on tourist-thronged Deribasovskaya Street, in a post-Soviet Odessa that has lost most of its Jews but is in many ways unchanged from the city that Babel described with such pungent and precise language, and to such mythic effect. The title character of the “Rabbi” story in Babel’s Red Cavalry cycle is the crooked and ancient Hasidic Rabbi of Zhitomir. This wizened last representative of a dying dynasty tartly interrogates the protagonist of the story—a traveling Jewish war correspondent who has dropped in to share a Shabbat meal and to drink the wine that “won’t be offered”—about “where this Jew has come from?” The answer, “Odessa,” propels him into knowing perorations of lyrical exasperation: “The Godly city, the star of our exile, that reluctant wellspring of all our troubles!”