The narrative Peter is presenting elide some of the complication of intercultural response and activity and tension, but he will come to that later with various outbreaks of various kinds pogroms. But we're approaching a revolutionary situation and he has mentioned the few Jews who made it big, let's put it that way. The plutocrats, I think he called them. A handful, I called the effort to emerge from the mass. An activity that we should think of as that of virtuosos, and the most famous of them are the musical virtuosos who spring up in the late 19th century in Russia and then become world-famous. The violinists, Mischa Elman, Nathan Milstein, the pianists, Emil Gilels, eventually Oistrakh, the violinist Oistrakh. But they are echoed by other kinds of virtuosos, not just performers, who because of their great skill and their general presence became well-off. May I ask, to what extent the great musicians drew on Jewish musical traditions? They don't have their own musical traditions. They're responding to the ability to interpret the European musical traditions that have developed at that point. At some point, there will be an uprising of national feeling and they will reclaim that national tradition. But so much of European culture relates to, if you will, the Hebrew Bible. We know, for example, that Gregorian chants grew out of the chanting of Jewish priests of the Psalms, but that's much earlier and later. We don't expect Mischa Elman to do violin solos on the Psalms. He's going to be playing the great violin music of the 18th and 19th century, of which there is plenty now. This is after all, a great moment of musical explosiveness in Europe, the great 19th century composers. But I ended last time on the effect of one of those virtuosos and his presence in Odesa. Why Odesa? Because Odesa was a, let's call it a free city, a city that had many more opportunities and these opportunities were economic, but they were also cultural. Hayim Nahman Bialik, who's raised in the Pale of Settlement and grows up and gets a religious education. Goes to Odesa, and in Odesa he founds a Hebrew publishing company because the Jews are now reaching for their own cultural history, not in music, but in the use of Hebrew. One of the reasons he's in Odesa is that Odesa is a place as that poem that you heard last time. Odesa is a place where the swallows from Palestine, from the land of Israel, winter over in the land of Israel and then come to Odesa for the summer. In that poem, and the reason I wanted you to hear it, you hear the eagerness, the Messianic eagerness of the Jews to find their own sources of cultural home in effect. It's not just nostalgia. It's this is who I am, and this is after all exactly how the casts that the that the Russian Empire had. You were bound to a certain part of the land and you couldn't leave without permission. You were stuck in your settlement, if you will. Bialik founds a publishing company and the Hebrew poems that he publishes, this is one of the ironies of Jewish history. They become the great poems of the early modern Hebrew revival in the land of Israel, and Bialik stays in Odesa with the publishing company until the Soviets close it down, and then he goes and moves to the land of Israel. The revival of Hebrew is part of the effect of the enlightenment that comes to the Jews, and they turn not only to Western European culture, but to their own sources. But it's more developed than that. The Jews of Odesa learn Russian. They speak Russian. They work in Russian, but they still know Yiddish, and now they know Hebrew. They're multicultural in their own situation. Of course, Ukrainian also. All of these linguistic traditions and cultural traditions are ongoing. You have to be a virtuoso to negotiate this multicultural situation. Because you have pressure from each of those traditions, and we know Sholem Aleichim, for example, starts out writing in Russian. But he doesn't have an audience. He tries writing in Hebrew. He has a very few people who read Hebrew. But then he starts writing and publishing in Yiddish, and he has a mass audience, and the Jews of the Pale of Settlement are suddenly aware of the new technology. So Yiddish newspapers are a big deal, but they're no big deal, not only in the Pale of Settlement, they're a big deal of Jewish wherever they're at Jewish communities in Europe and in the United States, there are Yiddish newspapers. In fact, United States was home to one of the greatest Yiddish newspapers in the history of Yiddish newspapers. It's called the Forvers, it's still published now in Yiddish. But at one, they had hundreds of thousands of people subscribing. Now very few, and now there's an English language edition of the newspaper that has more than the Yiddish does. But you have to remember the big newspapers that we get in America. The big newspaper is on Sunday. For the Jews, the big newspaper is Friday. Why? Because Friday is the beginning of the Sabbath that evening, and on the Sabbath, the Jew doesn't work. He and she has time to read the newspapers, and the newspapers carry cultural information of all kinds. That's what Bialik is counting on. Those Jews who are reading Yiddish may turn to Hebrew. He may be able to sneak some Hebrew poems into the Yiddish newspapers. But now the Russian Jews are also speaking Russian and reading Russian. Now I mentioned this pressure of multicultural interests. How do you negotiate these pressures? Isaac Babel has to do that, and if you read Bible, you discover there are at least, let's say three languages going on at once. There's brilliant Russian. There's constant reference to Yiddish. There is referenced to Ukrainian, and you have to be a virtuoso to read this and get all of this, and we can hear this multicultural tapestry in reading Bible, and then there's the language of commerce, which is its own linguistic presence, and that's in Bible as well. But I want to talk about one story that I think is key to Bibles achievement, and which we can hear these many voices. Think of these languages as voices in a polyphonic literary situation. This is after all, a new thing. Because there was not a polyphonic audience before that for writers. But now there is especially [inaudible] who was writing in Russian. The story I would like us to focus on is called Gedali. I wouldn't like to emphasize that this knowledge of several languages comes about only the beginning of the 20th century. That is, it is not true in the course of the holocaust. By the beginning of the 20th century with Odesa. Yes. Jews are now learning Russian. Yes. But I have to beg to differ because the Jews made their living in part by working with the neighbors. Yes. You have to know some Ukrainian, by enlarge women were more likely to than man. Right? Yes. They are now speaking more languages than just Yiddish? Yes. We know that multiculturalism has an effect way beyond the two linguistics situations. They know how to negotiate with Ukrainians and with Jews. Which is not the case with the Russian peasants or with the Russian aristocrats. Well, I beg your pardon. Actually, the Russian aristocrats are all educated in French. They have a different problem. You hear some of this in Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, with the whole idea of La Marseillaise, as a musical theme in that Overture. The kinds of situations that these writers are in then requires great tact, as well as skill. You have to know when to use a Yiddish word, a Ukrainian word, or word of commerce, or the word of revolution. In Gedali, we have that. Now, the very name of the story, the title of the story, Gedali, is a Hebrew word, but it's also a Yiddish word. It means God is great. It means make God Great, [inaudible]. [inaudible] is one of the names of God in Hebrew. [inaudible], make it great, from [inaudible], big. But one of the things that's so interesting about Gedali is he is at the turn of this later on, the revolution has come. There are some keywords you should be aware of in the story as you read the story. Revolution, counter-revolution, international. These are words we use all the time, but they have special meaning in the story. Because Gedali says at one point, well, I stopped for a moment. Gedali is the name of the main character, and the story is about [inaudible] narrator meeting good Gedali, and Gedali has a little shop, and the shop is a Curiosity Shop. Right-of-way [inaudible] says, it's like Dickens' Curiosity Shop. Right away we are in not only multiculturalism, we are in England, we are in the notion of a cultural situation where things for many cultures are all in the same place. But Gedali is talking to Bibles narrator, and the narrator will come to who he is and what makes him so special. Is asking Gedali about things. Right away, Gedali realizes he's talking as the narrator does to a Jew. This is what's one writer Ruth Weiss has defined as Jewish literature. Jewish literature is about two Jews talking. Listen to the beginning. On the eve of the Sabbath, I am tormented by a dense sadness. The eve of the Sabbath, that's Friday evening. Who knows what that is. Except another Jew. They're having a conversation about Jewish experience, if you will. Right away, Gedali has somebody to listen to him. The narrator who is Jewish, is not a practicing Jew as Gedali is , but understands this. He was raised as a Jew, as a practicing Jew. He understands the texture of that meaning of words. Now, you might be able to hear it in the Russian. [inaudible] [inaudible]. What does it mean to say it's Friday evening? Friday evening, what does that mean for modern Americans? But for a Jew, Friday evening means it's the evening of the Sabbath. It's about to be a moment when the Jew is in his fullness as a religious practitioner. So this is a Sabbath evening that's tormented by a dense sadness of memories. The two Jews who are talking know that they're no longer in the heyday of Jewish culture. This is a cultural situation that has been broken, but they can both remember it, a dense sadness of memories. On these evenings, long ago, the yellow beard of my grandfather would stroke from time to time, the volumes of Ibn Ezra. The narrator's grandfather used to read Ibn Ezra, Medieval, very important commentator on the Hebrew Bible. Right away we are in Jewish cultural conversation. But it's the grandfather who was doing this. The narrator isn't doing it now. Now it's Gedali. In fact, Gedali has in the course of the story, a very interesting set of problems, because Gedali lives in revolutionary times. He says, we have a revolution. Gedali says revolution is good. But then comes counter-revolution, and at that point, we're saying what historical moment is he talking about? Well, he's talking about at least the 1920s when there is a back-and-forth revolution, counter-revolution, when the area where this is taking place, let's say it's near Zhytomyr where the Jews were at one point part of the Pale of Settlement, but also part of Poland, and there's a Polish-Russian war. So Babel has to deal with, he's trying to think, how can I tell everybody without doing a narration that there's great cultural argument, but also war? Gedali expresses it, he says, there is revolution, then there is counter-revolution. What we have is Gedali says, the revolution is good, then comes the counter-revolution. Then the revolution says, Gedali the revolution is here, give me your gramophone. My gramophone? Gedali says, I love music. You know what a gramophone is? It's a record player. Why does the revolution wants to take my record player from me? I love music. This is one of the things that happens in revolutionary times. Then Gedali says, the Revolution wants my record player, my gramophone, because it knows it says better than I do what I want. May I point out the time period we're talking about? Please. The Russian civil war, in which there is revolution and counter-revolution. You're talking about from 1918-1920, and the Russian-Polish War from 1921. This is the period which [inaudible] is talking about. We have a whole civil war. Yes. In a civil war, there were all these pressures from these different groups. Gedali says, so I have to give up my gramophone, because the revolution knows better than I do. But that's part of revolutionary times. I asked you to look at keywords in the story as you read it, revolution, counter-revolution. I would like to point out that the Babel is perhaps the only writer who is regarded as a very hard of Russian culture and literature, and at the same time, self-consciously Jewish. There really is no other Sholem Aleichim. He's not Russian. Same way. Mostly Grossman these are the different areas with different barriers. What Babel is regarded as a great Russian, his language is so much appreciated because of his choice of words that he's sometimes regarded as a poet. I understand. Well but one of the things to realize is that Babel is the only Russian writer like that but he's part of what we might call literary modernism with many languages at play as its international literary movement, and I say keywords, revolution, counter-revolution, but also international. Now the story begins with on Sabbath evening, and it ends on the following sentence, and I asked you to consider what he's done in this sentence. The Sabbath is coming in Gedali. The narrator says, because Gedali is leaving, he's putting on his hat and takes his prayer book, and the narrator says, Gedali, the founder of an impossible International, has gone to the synagogue to pray. I propose that what Babel has done is he's taken the word International. What could be more important for the revolution than the International. In fact, it's modern patriotic song is called the L'Internationale. Well, it's more than a patriotic. Well, it's the song of Russia. It is international by the very definition. But now, Gedali is the founder of an impossible international. Babel's phrasing works in more direction than one. It works to tell us something about Russia, about the Soviet Union, it also tells us something about Jewish culture. Because Jewish culture is also international, and he calls it The Impossible International has gone to the synagogue to pray. This is a very ironic phrasing. Irony is key to what Babel does as a writer, and if you want to ask who are the great modernist writers, let's talk about irony. There are ironist, and this is a new literary tradition, if you will. All right. I don't want to start talking about that new literary tradition, but I hope to talk about literary modernism later on about Babel further. But this is one of the things we see upfront, if you will, in Gedali. Now, I also mentioned, he's tells us about Dickens, he tells us about Eben Ezra, he tells us about Jewish culture. We have a thick set of references that are one on top of the other. We have a layers of meaning in Babel that are very accessible. But you may not have known what the word Gedali meant, some additions have a footnote. But one of the ways in which Bable works, is by giving us images, and images are accessible in different ways, even if you don't know the lexical meaning and the images that he has, are multicultural and quite accessible, and this becomes something that Babel is famous for as a Russian writer and as a Jewish writer, the creation of imagery that multicultural. I want you to think about that as one of the hallmarks, one of the characteristics of multicultural literary modernism. I'll stop at this point because we need to go back and read Gedali in detail.
