<406
PARTISAN REVIEW
that pensioned-off God in a glass of tea?'" Gedali simply answers, "Not
to be had,'" and goes off to the synagogue to pray.
It
was not Babel's
fault that he and Gedali could not meet each other, and the pathos of
the story is in his knowledge of his innocence and helplessness.
Yet Babel could not treat the Polish Jews with similar justice. And
here, I think, Mr. Trilling has been too generous with Babel, for he
tends to acquit him of his excessive hatred for and spite against the
Jews of the Polish villages. It is true that on certain occasions their suf–
fering exists for him as "a spiritual fact of consummate value," but these
occasions are special and few. The Polish Jews were constant objects of
derision and ironic pity before his witnessing eye. "In the room I was
given I discovered turned-out wardrobes, scraps of women's fur coats on
the floor, human filth.... The two Jews rose from their places and,
hopping on their felt sales, cleared the mess from the floor. They skipped
about noiselessly, monkey-fashion, like Japs in a circus act, their necks
swelling and twisting." In his sight, the sickly, anemic Jews of Poland,
the Hasidic Jews, were of a species alien to his Jews of Odessa, "the
stout and Jovial Jews of the South, bubbling like cheap wine." "Hasid–
ism kept that superstitious population of hawkers, brokers, and tavern–
keepers in stifling captivity. . . . Human refuse and dung accumulate
here for days. Depression and horror fill the catacombs with a corrosive
stench and a tainted acidity." The torn trousers of a Rabbi's dead son
reveal "the stunted, curly-covered virility of a wasted Semite." In con–
trast, "the captivating Savitsky," Division Commander in the Cossack
Cavalry, lives with a Cossack woman "bearing her bosom on her high
heels, a bosom that stirred like an animal in a bag," and lounges about
with his revolver "lying against the bare skin of his stomach," the image
of glamor and potency. Babel's denunciation of the Polish Jews was a
great and cruel self-indulgence.
Just as the Cossacks implicitly stood for Babel's future society, the
Jews came to represent the society he was engaged in pulling down. He
felt that the hide-bound, tyrannical past of his country and his own life
was concentrated in the culture of the decrepit Polish Jews-only the
oblique brilliance of this insight could be equal to its calamitous untruth.
In "The Rabbi," companion-piece to "Gedali," Babel sits with Rabbi
Motale and his friends, the "possessed, liars and idlers," amid dingy and
funereal surroundings, and the Rabbi, oblivious to the carnage and
change about
him,
intones "'Blessed is the Lord God of Israel Who
hath chosen us from amongst all the nations of the earth.''' Revolted
by the pathos of the Jews' insensibility Babel rises and goes to the rail–
road station where "in the propaganda train of the First Cavalry Army,
