One of the major themes that comes up again and again in Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry the conflict between the narrator’s ‘two selves’: there is the self that he physically presents to the Red Army fighters around him, that of a bespeckled Odessa Jew, and there is the self of his ideation, the craved self, the self that would ‘wear’ Savitsky’s envied “steely strength and youthful complexion.” My First Goose is the tidiest encapsulation of this struggle, and has been discussed through this lense elsewhere.

I would like, rather, to focus on how Babel uses ‘object vignette’ to explore this theme within the structural constraints of the dispatch-story form. The Rabbi’s Son is short, coming in at barely three pages. The narration flits from memory to present, from descriptive prose to epistle. An economy of space is needed: every object counts, every object must be drenched in meaning.

At the risk of oversimplification, Elijah as a character is more of a collection of objects that tell a story than anything else. His belongings do not merely add color to the narrative: they are a secondary narrative, of Jewishness versus ‘Red manhood,’ of the spiritual versus the physical. Maimonides the religious philosopher is juxtaposed with Lenin the materialist, Lenin’s skull is iron, Maimonides’ portrait is the dull silk of religious vestments. Agitprop leaflets are annotated in ancient Hebrew verse, and the narrator is rained on by the Song of Songs and revolver cartridges alike. The messages inscribed in Elijah’s body and possessions extend to images of physical decay and eros: his sexual organs are “the stunted, curly-covered virility of a wasted Semite.” The Rabbi’s Son is the last story in the Red Cavalry cycle: the narrator has run out of room, and tripartite transformations such as in My First Goose are made impossible. All of his contradictions and pain and double-selving must come out concisely, tumble out of a dying man’s kit, a biography in mixed-message paraphernalia. The contradictions, however, are two large to be contained in the ‘object vignette’: the narrator can “scarce contain the tempests of [his] imagination,” his body is aged, and death brings brotherhood more quickly than can be reconciled.

Postscript: Red Cavalry might be my favorite work of Soviet literature ever. I recommend the whole collection wholeheartedly! The Odessa Tales are great too.