Just As I Thought

by Grace Paley

  The absence of the Holocaust, like the absence of women, works to throw the shul and its congregation up up into the timeless air where true magic happens. True magic is always direct, which reminds me of the way in which Fruchter brings the figures of the old man’s past to haunt him. “Haunt” is probably the wrong word, for they come not as dreams out of mist but by true magic. As a meaty rabbit leaps out of a real hat, the wife of the cheated friend (both long dead) visits, sits at his table, drinks tea, jumps youthfully to his kitchen counter, and refuses to leave until he screams, Go! Go! These scenes, together with the long internal conversations, give the book a certain rudeness, a forthright clarity.

  Near the end, the old man visits Zitomer and his talking friends in their converted storefront. They, too, are old Jews—union organizers, Communists, bringing unfortunate memory of worker betrayal to the old man. They are no doubt prophets, too, who play chess and offer one another little illuminations of truth and utopian prophecies.

  But somehow the old man wants to know: Has he been a good Jew? How is one to be a good Jew, a good person? Surely one can be both at the same time. The argument between the prophets and the priests isn’t resolved. For those of us who came after or out of the generation that accepted the Enlightenment, who want to remain Jews in the Diaspora, it’s important to know that these questions are still asked—probably more now than when Fruchter’s book was written.

  I last saw Norman Fruchter at a meeting of Brooklyn Parents for Peace, called to inform neighbors of the dangers of allowing nuclear naval carriers into New York Harbor. He came late because he’s a member of the local school board.

  The first time I met Norman Fruchter we were in North Vietnam. It was ’69. We were traveling the length of North Vietnam on a dirt road called National Highway 1. He, with a couple of others, was making a film about this journey, the lives of the Vietnamese people and the life of the devastated earth under American bombing. This is what impressed me: brains, anger, wit, kindness.

  This extraordinary book had already been written, though I didn’t know it at the time. If I had read it, I would have seen Fruchter more clearly—a kind of American-born Zitomer, a Jew that is, who, by definition, had a traditional obligation to be one of the creators of a just world.

  The amazing final fact is that, having read Coat upon a Stick twice, I find myself talking to it. And every now and then, because it is a work that cannot do without dialogue, it answers me.

  —1987

  Language: On Clarice Lispector

  Clarice Lispector spent the first two months of her life in the town of Chechelnik in Ukraine. This is a small, short fact. The interesting question, unanswered in the places I’ve looked for it, is: At what age did she enter the Portuguese language? And how much Russian did she bring with her? Any Yiddish? Sometimes I think this is what her work is about … one language trying to make itself at home in another. Sometimes there’s hospitality, sometimes a quarrel.

  Why did they go to Brazil, anyway? an American immigrant Jew provincially asks. Well, a South African cousin answers, since Jews are often not wanted in their old homes, they travel to distant, newer, more innocent places. My mother’s best friend emigrated to Argentina. There was a letter from Buenos Aires once. But not again.

  Unless Clarice Lispector’s parents were linguists with an early knowledge of Portuguese, they must have spoken Russian, as my parents did most of my childhood. It must have been that meeting of Russian and Portuguese that produced the tone, rhythms that even in translation (probably difficult) are so surprising and right.

  It’s not unusual for writers to be the children of foreigners. There’s something about the two languages engaging one another in the child’s ears that makes her want to write things down. She will want to say sentences over and over again, probably in the host or dominant tongue. There will also be a certain amount of syntactical confusion which, if not driven out of her head by heavy schooling, will free the writer to stand a sentence on its chauvinistic national head when necessary. She will then smile. There are not so many smiles in Lispector’s work, but they happen in the sudden illumination of a risky sentence. You feel that even the characters are glad.

  Once you have stood a sentence on its head or elbow, the people who live in those sentences seem to become states of literary mind—they seem almost absurd, but not in a cold or mean way. (There isn’t a mean bone in the body of Lispector’s work.) But there is sadness, aloneness (which is a little different than loneliness). Some of the characters try desperately to get out of the stories. Others retreat into their own fictions—seem to be waiting and relieved by Lispector’s last embracing sentence.

  Lispector was lucky to have begun to think about all these lives (men’s lives as well as women’s) in the early years of the women’s movement, that is, at a time when she found herself working among the scrabbly low tides of that movement in the ignorance which is often essential to later understanding. That historical fact is what has kept her language crooked and clean.

  In this collection there are many solitary middle-class Brazilian women, urban, heavily European. There are a couple of black cooks, nannies. I thought at one point in my reading that there was some longing for Europe, the Old World, but decided I was wrong. It was simply longing.

  It seems important to say something about geography. First Lispector’s. She lived for an infant’s moment in Russia. Then in Brazil in Recife, then in Rio de Janeiro; then with her diplomat husband in Europe and the United States; then her last eighteen years in Brazil.

  Brazil is a huge country. Its population is African black, Indian brown and golden, European white. There are landless peasants. There are the Indian people, whole villages and tribes driven out of their forest homes by development. There is the vast ancient forest which, breathing, produces so great a percentage of the world’s oxygen, which, breathing, we absolutely require. There is the destruction of that forest continuing at such a rate that a sensible breathing world might be terrified. Imagine living in, being a citizen of, a country in which the world’s air is made. Imagine the woman, the urban woman, writing not about that world but in it. She had to find a new way to tell. Luckily it was at the tip of her foreign tongue.

  —1989

  Isaac Babel

  When I read Antonina Nikolaevna Pirozhkova’s memoir of daily life with Isaac Babel I realized that I’d known very little about him. Only his death was famous. And of course until fairly recently most of us had that wrong, too. But I did know his work, though not until the early sixties, when the Meridian edition first appeared.

  One must begin by telling those who still don’t know those stories that they are unusual in a particular way. That is, any one of them, those in Red Cavalry and Tales of Odessa, as well as those extracted only in the last few years from bureaus and closets of old Russian friends, can be read again and again. I don’t mean every five or ten years. I mean in one evening a story you read just six months ago can be read a couple of times—and not because the story is a difficult one. There’s so much plain nutrition in it, the absolute accuracy and astonishment in the language, the breadth of the body and the height of the soul. You do feel yourself healthier, spiritually speaking, if also sadder—or happier, depending on the story.

  Where did those sentences, that language, come from? Babel’s head in childhood was buried in Hebrew, in talmudic studies. His adolescent head was European, full of French. Russian was an everyday matter, clear and crisp, the vowels in an armor of consonants. His grandmother spoke Ukrainian. When he was ten he came to Odessa. It was like every tough city, full of smart talkers; you could listen to that city all day and begin again the next. Some kind of lucky composting had begun.

  It was in Odessa, on his way to becoming a real Russian, that the story “Awakening” was made. He was supposed to be taking violin lessons, which would help him become a man like Jascha Heifetz. He would then play for the Queen of England. Somehow he began to never reach his music school
but wandered, walking in Odessa, down to the docks. He found, or was found by, a good man, the kind who appears in a child’s wandering time to say, “Go this way, not that!”—forcefully. He taught the boy the names of flowers and asked, “Well, what is it you lack? A feeling for nature. What’s that tree?” The boy didn’t know. “That bird? That bush?” Then he said, “And you dare to call yourself a writer?” (The boy had been daring.) He would never be a writer, a Russian writer, without knowing the natural world. “What were your parents thinking of?” But those days were also among his first meetings with the “others”—the wild free Russian boys, diving, swimming, clambering on the boats, the ships in Odessa harbor. He is finally taught to swim. At last he can join them.

  Years later, still longing, like most young Jewish revolutionaries (like my own parents) to become a real Russian, he has a harder time with the “others.” The Revolution has happened. The civil war is unending. Liutov (the name he gives the narrator of the Red Cavalry stories) is assigned to the Cossacks of Savitsky’s VI Division. He is billeted with half a dozen other Cossacks who look at the “specs” (eyeglasses) on his nose, are disgusted, and want to look no further. The quartermaster who has delivered him says, “Nuisance with specs … but you go and mess up a lady, and a good lady too, and you’ll have the boys patting you on the back.” There are no women around but the landlady. He’s hungry. He sees the goose, takes hold of it, places his heavy boot on its neck, cracks its head, presents it to the landlady. “Cook it!” “Hey you,” one of the Cossacks calls out almost immediately, “sit down and feed with us.” He’s asked to read them the news. Out of Pravda he proudly reads Lenin’s speech and is happy to “spy out the secret curve of Lenin’s straight line.” They slept then, all with their legs intermingled. “In my dreams I saw women. But my heart, stained with bloodshed, grated and brimmed over.”

  Loneliness, differentness, hunger enabled him to brutally kill the goose. But he was unable to go much further. In the case of Dolgushov (“The Death of Dolgushov”), he could not bring himself to end Dolgushov’s agony, though the Cossack’s belly was pouring his intestines out of its wide wound and Dolgushov begs him to “waste a cartridge” on him. He cannot do it, and he hears words of contempt from the comrade, Afonka, who has pity for Dolgushov and helps him to leave this life.

  And later, in “Going into Battle,” caught with an unloaded pistol, he asks “for the simplest of proficiencies, the ability to kill my fellow man.”

  * * *

  In a story from Red Cavalry, “Sandy the Christ” (so named for his noticeable mildness) hears his stepfather in his mother’s bed. He calls out to stop him, to remind his stepfather that he is “tainted.” He begs him to consider his mother’s fine white skin, her innocence, then trades them for permission from this man to become the village herdsman. I have read that story many times, and as I come to the last paragraphs, my heart still beats faster. Of course it isn’t the story line alone, which is certainly interesting. It must be the way of telling.

  How did he come to that?

  When he was quite young he loved French literature, particularly Flaubert and Maupassant. In fact, according to information in You Must Know Everything, he wrote his first stories in French. Then he began to think about how to write about war: he came upon Authentic Stories of the Great War by the French writer Captain Gaston Vidal. He admired the stories, the facts of the stories. But he had just come back from fighting on the Romanian front and was soon to become Liutov, the war correspondent, the writer, the storyteller for the Red Cavalry, Budenny’s First Cavalry. He began to translate the stories, and in one long moment (all his writing moments were extremely long) he created a language, a style, his brand-new sentences. In You Must Know Everything there is an excellent example. By reducing a tendentious twelve-line paragraph from one of those stories to three lines, he produced clarity, presentness, tension, and a model of how always, though with great difficulty, to proceed.

  Here is Babel talking about his method of working with Konstantin Paustovsky in his book Years of Hope:

  If you use enough elbow grease even the coarsest wood gets to look like ivory. That’s what we have to do with words and with our Russian language. Warm it and polish it with your hand till it glows like a jewel …

  The first version of a story is terrible. All in bits and pieces tied together with boring “like passages” as dry as old rope. You have the first version of “Lyubka” there, you can see for yourself. It yaps at you. It’s clumsy, helpless, toothless. That’s where the real work begins. I go over each sentence time and time again. I start by cutting out all the words I can do without. Words are very sly. The rubbishy ones go into hiding … After that I type the story and let it lie for two or three days. Then I check it again sentence by sentence … I shorten the sentences and break up the paragraphs.

  In the end there were twenty-two versions of “Lyubka the Cossack,” a wild story full of smugglers, infants, an old man, contraband, brothels, sailors, traveling salesmen, prostitutes, a baby howling to be nursed. A short story!

  To make matters clearer he wrote a story about the French writer he loved. It’s called “Guy de Maupassant.” In it the art of translation, the game of love, and the punctuation of sentences are of equal lively value. After years of love for this master he said one day, startled with the knowledge, “You know Maupassant—he has no heart.”

  In the course of Babel’s long conversation with Paustovsky he said, “I’ve got no imagination. All I’ve got is the longing for it.” What could he have done with more imagination? He was a Jew, his childhood spent in the provincial ghetto of a provincial town. Only fifteen years later he became the great chronicler of the Red Cavalry at war, their energy, fidelity, their violent natures. He wrote about a life of physical movement almost totally opposite his own sedentary youth and culture. He had the imagination to be just. It took all his strength, all his longing.

  Babel would probably be called a minimalist today, but there’s hardly a maximalist or mediumist who can tell a story, engage and shape a character with so much of the light and darkness of history, with grief and humor. The fact is, there’s a larger, more varied population in Babel’s four, five hundred pages of stories than in any three novels of most writers. A bald statement, to be proven another time.

  * * *

  Red Cavalry is about men and what they expect of one another in the way of honor, physical courage, love of horses, abuse of women and Jews. It’s about a young man, a Russian, too, but to them a foreigner, who is falling in love with their bravery and suffering. At the same time, he is trying to give us the facts of the case. When women appear, it’s because of what men need to do to them as the men demand food and sex. The women are usually pregnant, which makes very little difference in the men’s demands. The young man Babel doesn’t shirk his honorable duty, which is to tell the story whole, as beautifully, that is as truthfully, as he can.

  In the Odessa stories and others, some of which were written later, the women are able to … well, fly. Lyubka (called the Cossack, a Jewish woman) is wild and irascible, “a monstrous mother,” and is in many ways more interesting than Benya Krik (the King). And this literary and historical and unbrutalized entrance of women allows for all kinds of humor and imagery (“Meanwhile misfortune lurked under the window like a pauper at daybreak”). Which must have been a relief, because Babel liked to laugh.

  “The Jewess” is a profound figure, forced with strong familial love out of her place and time by her son—into his. This story, had Babel had the time the times did not allow, might have become a novel.

  Claudia in “Oil” is the head of the Oil Syndicate. She’s a modern woman. We know her, her closeness to women friends, her great sense of humor, her political interest and brains. Was she a woman like Antonina Pirozhkova, an engineer who had a great deal to do with the building of the Moscow subway as well as assorted tunnels and bridges? In any case, it’s good to have met these women. They must still be ther
e, old and tough—I would like to meet them again.

  But some stories, I must admit, you simply can’t read more than once every couple of years, because in reading them, sorrow grips you so. An example would be the first story of Red Cavalry, “Crossing Over to Poland.” Perhaps I feel this because it is so close to my parents’ story of their own town’s drowning in the 1905 manufactured waves of pogroms. The murder of my seventeen-year-old uncle Russya in that pogrom; the picture given to me many times of my grandmother, alone, bringing the wagon to his place of slaughter to lift his body, take him home. Within a few months she sent my young father and mother away with their Russian language to become Americans. There are only a few others, also wonderful, where the air of his normal hopefulness cannot raise the story out of heartsick sadness.

  I see I have been a bit solemn, even in describing “Awakening,” a story made famous by its humor—the large size of the violin cases, the small boys carrying them, the international hopes of the fathers, the narrow streets of the ghettos. Why is it that with the best intentions in the world, disparate size is comical except to the people involved, the unrequited lover of the disinterested and beautiful woman is a joke, at least until someone says, What’s so funny about that? Heifetz and Zimbalist and Gabrilowitsch did come from Odessa. That’s where they studied the violin. Any loving parent would think, My son is also smart, maybe even gifted. Why do you laugh?

  * * *

  There is a kind of subgenre (in which I have been implicated) called short shorts, which probably couldn’t have happened without Babel’s work. But what is missed much of the time is the density of that work. They are not pieces of life. They are each one all of life. Each one, even the shortest, is the story of a story.