How Things Were Done In Odessa by Isaac Babel, 1923
The magic trick:
Creating an anti-hero and trusting the reader to assemble the appropriate morality
We start another week of Babel stories (we read seven pieces from the Red Cavalry collection in 2021) with a pull from his Odessa cycle. Its tale of gangsters and violence is not dissimilar to Red Cavalry’s often-desperate brutality. Even peacetime in Odessa, it would seem, was less than peaceful.
It’s a myth-making story; in essence, a superhero origin story. Our narrator asks to be told how Benya Kirk became king. We learn that he did so through the kind of masculinity that would power much of the American film industry the rest of the century – bravery, quick-thinking, confidence, toughness, and, maybe most importantly, action.
Benya is a man of action, whereas the people around him (and especially, as the story notes at least twice, our narrator) don’t anticipate but instead lay passive and reactionary.
It’s a tricky story because – again encouraging the Red Cavalry comparisons – it relies on an assumed understanding that the reader will reject the story’s morality, therefore making the story not just a tale of organized crime but a commentary against a way of life.
And that’s quite a trick on Babel’s part.
The selection:
“He, Benchik, went to Froim Grach, who even back then peered at the world with only one eye and was just what he is now. And Benya told Froim, ‘Take me on. I want to come on board your ship. The ship I end up on will do well by me.’
“Grach asked him, ‘Who’re you, where d’you come from, what’s your bread and butter?’
“’Try me, Froim,’ Benya answered, ‘and let’s stop wasting time spreading kasha on the table.’
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