A Ukrainian friendship forged through storytelling
Isaac Babel, 'In the Basement'
Growing up in Odessa, Ukraine, twelve-year old Isaac has few friends. Instead, he immerses himself in books. One day at school, during recess, when the top student Mark Borgman rattles off facts about the Spanish Inquisition, Isaac intervenes. He is bothered by the lifelessness of Mark’s account, and transforms it into a gripping story. The two boys become best friends, but they are divided by their backgrounds: Mark comes from a wealthy family, whereas Isaac is living with his poor aunt and uncle. Despite their differences, the boys are drawn to one another. In this passage, they are out exploring the city together.
Now read on:
Evening fell. A bat rustled past. The sea rolled more blackly on to the red rock. My twelve-year-old heart swelled with the gaiety and ease of others’ wealth. Joining hands, my chum and I walked down a long avenue. Borgman told me he was going to be an aeronautical engineer. There was a rumour that his father was going to be appointed London representative of the Russian Bank for Foreign Trade – Mark would be able to receive his education in England.
In our house, the house of Aunt Bobka, no one talked of such things. I had nothing with which to repay this boundless magnificence. Then I told Mark that even though everything in our house was different, Grandfather Levi-Itskhok and my uncle had travelled the whole world and had thousands of adventures. I described these adventures in order. My consciousness of the impossible instantly left me, I took Uncle Wolf through the Russo-Turkish War to Alexandria, to Egypt…
Night straightened up in the poplars, the stars leaned on the bending leaves. As I talked, I swung my arms. The fingers of the future aeronautical engineer trembled in my hand. Waking with difficulty from the hallucination, he promised to come and see me the following Sunday. Armed with this promise, I took the steam tram home to Bobka’s.
Translation by David McDuff (reprinted by kind permission of the translator)
What we love about this passage...
Once Isaac begins to tell stories, and his ‘consciousness of the impossible’ leaves, the entire narrative changes. Night and the stars become personified, straightening up, bending—everything he describes is suddenly precarious and full of motion. What was solid before, Mark’s future as an aeronautical engineer, is contrasted with the instability of his trembling fingers.
Isaac’s storytelling serves as the basis for the two boys’ friendship, and it plays a critical role in the narrative’s closing paragraphs. Isaac invites Mark over to his house, but as they sit downstairs in the basement, they hear his uncle hit his aunt upstairs. Isaac, seeing Mark grow pale, begins reciting Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in an attempt to “shout down all the evil in the world.”
For Isaac, both the character and the author, telling stories is a way to remain emotionally open to the world despite the prevalence of violence. In this passage, it is also an act of love—his tales are how he communicates his debt to Mark, his first close friend.
About the author
Isaac Babel (1894-1940) was a writer, playwright, and journalist who grew up in what is now Ukraine. This passage, written in 1926, is one of his ‘autobiographical’ stories; he is also well known for Red Cavalry, a short-story cycle penned while covering the Polish-Soviet War of 1920 as a journalist.
He was killed in 1940 on Stalin’s orders by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, as one of 346 'enemies of the party and the soviet regime'. His last words were, “I am asking for only one thing—let me finish my work.'
Today's guest curator
Our curator for today is Jack Delaney, a junior at Yale University studying History and English.
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