Ukraine

“My world was small and terrible.” (Isaac Babel)

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This week I’m focussing on Pushkin Press as part of Kaggsy and Lizzy’s #ReadIndies event to finally read four books that have long been in the TBR. For this third post today my read is Odessa Stories by Isaac Babel (1916-1937 transl. Boris Dralyuk 2016).

The Introduction to this volume by translator Boris Dralyuk is really informative and provides some fascinating context to Babel’s writing. Odessa was a booming port when Babel was born in 1894; in 1900 around 140,000 of its 400,000 population was Jewish. Babel was part of a well-to-do family but was drawn to Odessa’s underbelly, writing stories about the legendary gangsters of the city.

Dralyuk also explains about translating the melting-pot language of Odessa, so I highly recommend reading the Introduction before you start on the stories (I often read Introductions at the end). Babel was only 45 when he was killed in Stalin’s purges.

The volume is divided into three parts: Gangsters and Other Old Odessans; Childhood and Youth; and Love Letters and Apocrypha. I always struggle to write about short story collections and generally Babel’s stories are so short that I don’t want to give spoilers. Here I just want to give a flavour and you can see if you might want to seek out these stunning stories for yourself.

The first part is mainly told in the third person and weaves together tales of violence and corruption, with recurring characters including “Benya Krik, gangster and King of the gangsters”. The tales are colourful and carnivalesque, but Babel never allows the broader strokes to obscure the unlawful methods that so many live by:

“At this wedding they served turkey, roast chicken, goose, gefilte fish and fish soup in which lakes of lemon glimmered like mother-of-pearl. Flowers swayed above the dead goose heads like lush plumage. Does the foamy surf of Odessa’s sea wash roast chickens ashore?”

At the same time, he doesn’t position the reader above the gangsters or way of life. Babel suggests that this side of Odessa is as it is because this the logical way to be, and it has emerged as part of the society, laws and political structures that surround it:

“Let’s not throw dust in each other’s eyes. There’s no one else in the world like Benya the King. He cuts through lies and looks for justice, be it justice in quotes or without them. While everyone else, they’re as calm as clams. They can’t be bothered with justice, won’t go looking for it – and that’s worse.”

The second part of the stories in Childhood and Youth becomes more personal, with first-person tales that follow on from one another in some instances. I understand The Story of My Dovecote is the most famous, and rightly so. Within this brilliant collection, it still stands out. (Skip the next two paragraphs if you don’t want to know any details in advance.)

A young boy has spent five of his ten years coveting a dovecote. He manages to find ways around the anti-Semitism at his school to do well academically and get the reward of finally being able to buy his doves. He sets out to the market with his money and gets his beloved birds, tucking them into his jacket. If your heart is sinking at this description, you are absolutely right…

The story is fifteen pages in this edition and completely devastating. I would urge anyone to read it, but it will absolutely stay with you. It will rip your heart out and stamp all over it. The final word of this story is “pogrom”.

There are lighter stories in this section too, such as The Awakening, about a precocious young man:

“Writing was a hereditary occupation in our family. Levi Yitzchak, who went mad in his old age, had spent his whole life composing a tale titled A Man With No Head. I took after him.”

Odessa Stories was my first experience of reading Babel and I was blown away. Babel clearly enjoyed the almost fabulist tales of Benya the King, but somehow never glamorised him. His writing is hugely entertaining but also truthful – the violence towards people and animals suddenly appears in the midst of the stories and jolts the reader to remember the visceral realities of what is being described.

In evoking the worst of human behaviour in Dovecote, Babel is restrained and absolutely drives home the tragedy.

Babel’s writing is intensely human, marrying together humour, violence, pathos and beauty seamlessly. I will definitely seek out more by him on the strength of Odessa Stories. Sadly, there isn’t much as his life was cut short. However, Pushkin Press publish Red Cavalry, another short story collection.

“For the first time I saw my surroundings as they actually were – hushed and unspeakably beautiful.”

“I had a lion inside me that wouldn’t shut up!” (Ingrid Bergman)

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This week I’m focussing on Pushkin Press as part of Kaggsy and Lizzy’s #ReadIndies event to finally read four books that have long been in the TBR. Today it is a book of two essays, City of Lions by Józef Wittlin and Philippe Sands.

Pushkin Press’ website describes the volume: “Lviv, Lwów, Lvov, Lemberg. Known by a variety of names, the City of Lions is now in western Ukraine. Situated in different countries during its history, it is a city located along the fault-lines of Europe’s history. City of Lions presents two essays, written more than half a century apart – but united by one city.”

The book comes with maps of Lwów and Lviv within the French flaps and photographs throughout which are both useful and illustrative, making a really lovely edition. It also forms another stop on my Around the World in 80 Books reading challenge.

Józef Wittlin was a poet and novelist and his essay My Lwów (1946, transl. Antonia Lloyd-Jones 2016) beautifully evokes his longing for a city he knows has gone forever, with his writing full of nostalgia and loss.

Wittlin is completely aware of his skewed view of the city, having left in 1922 and writing his essay sat in New York so many years later:

“Nostalgia even likes to falsify flavours too, telling us to taste nothing but the sweetness of Lwów today. But I know people for whom Lwów was a cup of gall.”

Yet still he longs for city of his past.

“Alright, so Lwów hasn’t got a decent river, or a legend. What would it need a river for? The urban planners and tourists say that if Lwów were graced with a river, it would be a second Florence. In my view Lwów has more greenery than Florence, though less of the Renaissance. Moreover, it resembles Rome…”

But as Wittlin evokes the cityscape, its smells, food and people with great artistry and passion, world events – recent at the time of his writing – do filter through. In his evocation of a culturally mixed European city in the early twentieth century, he would have been aware that the Jewish population which had made up around a third of Lwów’s inhabitants had been almost entirely wiped out.

“It is not Lwów that we yearn after all these years apart, but for ourselves in Lwów.”

Philippe Sands essay My Lviv (2016) is written in conversation with My Lwów and views the city through the eyes of someone who never lived there, but whose family history – and the reason they had to leave –  is firmly rooted there.

“I could have chosen to turn away from the stories stuffed into the cracks of each building, or what was hidden behind freshly plastered walls. I could have averted my gaze, but I didn’t want to. Observing with care was part of the reason for being there, seeking out what was left, traces of what came before.”

Sands essay is deeply personal as he revisits his grandfather Leon’s home city. It is an experience he feels deep in his bones:

“I understood it to be part of my hinterland, one that was buried deep because Leon would never speak of that past. His long silence hid the wounds of a family that was left and then lost, but from the moment I set foot in the place it felt familiar, a part of me, a place I had missed and where I felt comfortable.”

At the same time, Sands is visiting with broader knowledge of devastation wreaked by the Holocaust, and he sees these layers within Lviv, even when they aren’t overtly commemorated:

“The first time I stood in the courtyard behind the school, in the autumn of 2012, I had no idea what that yard had been used for. Now armed with that knowledge, that this vast and empty place was a gathering point for thousands of final journeys […] it was a place of terrible silences, the expression of a conscious desire not to remember.”

I found City of Lions a deeply moving read. It is an elegy for a lost time, a eulogy for those lost, and a stark reminder that history is lived and died through by ordinary people. Cities grow and change, but they build upon and contain all that has gone before. It is all there if we take the time and care to look.

At the same time, what these two very different evocations of the same city demonstrate so well is that we experience our surroundings through ourselves. Wittlin and Sands are writing as much about themselves as they are about the city, but the essays are no less fascinating for that.

“Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens/Bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens/Brown paper packages tied up with strings/These are a few of my favourite things” (Maria Rainer/Julie Andrews, The Sound of Music)

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I write to you from within a fog of lemsip and cough syrup.  Yes, this week I’ve had a grotty cold.  Nothing major by any means, but just enough to make me feel grim and make the days a little greyer.  So I thought for this post I’d cheer myself up and be totally self-indulgent, by choosing two books that are thematically linked only in the fact that they are two of my favourites.

Firstly, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor (Bloomsbury, 2002).  This was McGregor’s first novel, longlisted for the Booker, and written when he was only twenty-six.  Choking down my jealousy, I am able to tell you that the accolades are highly deserved.  I think this is such a beautifully written, confident debut.  It tells the story of an ordinary street and its ordinary inhabitants, over the course of a day.

“The short girl with the painted toenails, next door, she says oh but did you see that guy on the balcony, he was nice, no he was special and she savours the word like a strawberry, you know she says, the one on the balcony, the one who was speeding and kept leaning right over, and they all know exactly who she means, he’s in the same place most weeks, pounding out the rhythm like a panelbeater, fists crashing down into the air, sweat splashing from his polished head.”

“In his kitchen, the old man measures out the tea-leaves, drops them into the pot, fills it with boiling water.  He sets out a tray, two cups, two saucers, a small jug of milk, a small pot of sugar, two teaspoons.  He breathes heavily as his hands struggle up to the high cupboards, fluttering like the wings of a caged bird.”

“She opens her front door, just a little, just enough, and she hops down her front steps, the young girl from number nineteen, glad to be out of the house and away from the noise of her brothers.  The television was boring and strange anyway, it was all people talking and she didn’t understand.  She taps her feet on the pavement, listening to the sound her shiny black shoes make against the stone…”

I hope these three examples give a good idea of why I love this novel so much.  McGregor is so skilled at finding the poetry in ordinary lives and how the self is expressed through seemingly innocuous actions.  Gradually the inhabitants of the street emerge as fully realised characters from the details of this one day.  This narrative is intertwined with a first person narrative, and you begin to realise that something significant, and tragic, took place on this ordinary day.  If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things is a novel of startling sensitivity and lyricism.

If this has whetted your appetite for McGregor’s novels, I discuss his second novel, So Many Ways to Begin here.

Secondly, Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov trans. George Bird (1996, English translation 2001, Harvill Press).  How to describe this novel?  It’s frankly a bit bonkers and one of those I think I understand, but maybe it’s about something else entirely.  It’s a great read though.  It tells the story of Viktor, an aspiring writer who gets a job writing obituaries, and his pet penguin Misha, who he took on when Kiev zoo gave all its animals away: “he had been feeling lonely. But Misha brought his own kind of loneliness, and the result was now two complimentary lonelinesses, creating an impression more of interdependence than amity.”

The character of this depressed penguin is as vividly realised as any of the human characters, and you really start to feel for this bird who symbolises the existential crisis of his owner and others caught up in a post-Soviet world that they do not understand: “Sleeping lightly that night, Viktor heard an insomniac Misha roaming the flat, leaving doors open, occasionally stopping and heaving a deep sigh, like an old man weary of both life and himself.”

The fragile relationship between Viktor and Misha is tested to its limit by a series of surreal events.  Viktor’s friend Misha-Non-Penguin leaves his daughter Sonya with Viktor, and so he drifts into a family unit with this self-contained little girl and her nanny.  But meanwhile, someone is using his obituaries as a hit-list, and he is being followed by a mysterious stranger known only as the fat man…

“The Chief considered him through narrowed eyes.

“Your interest lies in not asking questions,” he said quietly.  But bear in mind this: the minute you’re told what the point of your work is, you’re dead. […] He smiled a sad smile.  “Still, I do, in fact, wish you well.  Believe me.””

Death and the Penguin is a surreal adventure story, a post-Soviet satire, an examination of the individual spirit up against forces that seek to control.  It’s funny and it’s sad, it has something to say, and it says it in a truly unique and engaging way.

Here are the novels with another of my favourite things, my psychotic cat (he looks calm in this photo, but trust me, he is hell-bent on world domination):

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