In The Basement by Isaac Babel, 1929
The magic trick:
Sitcom laughs in a story with tragic overtones
Isaac Babel can write very funny, even as tragedy looms over every page. “In The Basement” is a nice example of this.
Our narrator is excited to have befriended the top student in his class, Mark Borgman, the son of a prominent banker. He invites him to his house for lunch in what is a big social moment for his family. Or at least his aunt is impressed. The rest of his family is a bit too far on the eccentric side.
And the story plays out as you might expect it to were it an episode of “Golden Girls” or “Three’s Company” or “Perfect Strangers” or any other 1980s American sitcom. Predictably ridiculous. Disastrously Hilarious.
But about that tragedy looming…
Nothing with Babel can be purely comedic. Certainly nothing in his times appeared to have been. This isn’t a sitcom setup. It’s a culture clash, a class-divide story, a story that shows that, just like his young protagonist, Babel’s gift for storytelling might open some doors for him but will never be enough to overcome the antisemitic society that seeks to keep him in the basement. His “eccentric” relatives aren’t clowns; they’re victims of the system.
Suddenly, it’s not so funny anymore.
And that’s quite a trick on Babel’s part.
The selection:
As we were reading, Bobka made her appearance in the brown dress. Padded on all sides with her fat, benevolent breasts, she sailed in with a samovar on the tray. I introduced them. Bobka said: “Nice to meet you,” extended her perspiring, immobile fingers and clicked both her heels. Everything was going well, exceptionally well. The Apelchots weren’t releasing Grandfather. One by one, I hauled out his treasures: grammars of all sorts of languages and 66 volumes of the Talmud. The vat of blacking, the miraculous alarm clock, and the mountain of Talmud dazzled Mark; one couldn’t have seen all of these things in any other home.
Each of us drank two glasses of tea with the strudel, and Bobka, nodding her head, disappeared. Overcome by an elation of spirit, I struck a pose and began to recite the stanzas I loved more than anything in the world. Anthony, bowing before Caesar’s corpse, addresses the people of Rome:
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar.
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