Isaac Babel describes in "Karl Yankel" a trial in which a Jewish communist father sues his mother in law for circumcising in secret his son Karl Yankel. Babel describes the Jewish life in the Soviet Union and the question of what happens to the traditional life in the shtetl when it clashes with the expectations of communism.
The story opens with a depiction of a smithy living in the Peresyp section of Odessa. The owner was Yoyna Brutman. The narrator remarks that once Yoyna was drunk, “the soul of the Odessa Jew came to life”. The blacksmith had three sons and his wife went to a Hassidic synagogue on Friday evening and Saturday morning. The wife was very religious but the blacksmith did not interfere with her religiosity. Two of the sons joined the partisans. One of them was killed, and the other joined the Red Cossack Division. They were the first of a company of Jewish fighters. The third son became a blacksmith. The wife of the blacksmith wanted a grandson to tell him Hassidic tales to. She reflects traditional Jewish values. She got a grandson from Polya the younger daughter who married Ovsey Belotzerkvsky, a communist Jew who was alienated from his heritage. Ovsey sued his mother in law, Brana Brutman because she had circumcised his son.
The grandmother had taken the grandson to a surgeon—a mohel, called Naftula Gerchik, and the baby was circumcised. The narrator remarks that since the father was interested in the communist party, the Odessa prosecuting attorney turned this issue into a public case, where the mohel and the grandmother were put on trial in front of an audience. The mohel is accused of draining the blood from the bris with his own lips rather than through a glass tube.
The case is described in humoristic and satirical terms. The mohel is asked if he believes in G-d. And he is accused of exposing 10,000 babies to infection. In reply, the mohel tells the prosecuting attorney than he himself had a bris from him because his father used him as a mohel for his bris and he turned out fine. Then the baby’s father Belotzerkovsky is put to testify in the role of the plaintiff. His job entails stockpiling cotton seeds. He explains that therefore he was away and could not come until two weeks later after the birth of his son. He discovered the baby with a neighbor, Citinenness Harchenk. The word choice “citizenness” is specific word choice used by the communists, the way in which people were to address each other. The father describes that the neighbor was “rocking the cradle” and singing, which the father describes as “cultural backwardedness”. He was surprised to hear that the boy is called “Yasha” when he wanted to name the boy Karl in honor of Karl Marx. He discovered that his son was circumcised. The prosecution then brought the mother of the child to the stand who testified that her mother is very religious and unhappy her sons were unbelievers, she wanted her grandsons to be Jews. She says that in the grandmother’s town “women wear wigs to this very day”. The narrator makes a humorous note that the former attorney in law Samuel Lining would be head of the Sanhedrin if the Sanhedrin still existed. He is described to have learned Russian at 25 years old and at 40 he is “writing appeals to the Senate that were no different from Talmudic treaties”. He is depicted to generate laughter “his teeth fell out, he caught them with his lower lip and put them in place again” (p. 110). Polina the mother testified she was not at home, but at the doctor when this happened. Meantime, the grandmother screamed at the mother she has to nurse the baby. In the “Red Litle Cover”, a reading room with communist literature in the factory, the baby is being nursed next to Lenin’s portrait by a working woman. A 17 year old girl with a red handkerchief comments that he will grow up to be a soldier. The red color is the color of the communist party. In the audience, the narrator remarks that there were Galician zaddisk from Warsaw, where the papers reported that the Jewish religion is on trial.
The trial brings forth characters that represent traditional values and characters that represent the changes and expectations of the Communist party, who have incorporated communism to their own life to the point that they are like converts to the communist ideology and reject their parents’ traditions. In an ironic and nostalgic way, the narrator concludes that Karl Yankel will grow up to be more “happy” than him because of much attention he is receiving and that “no one had fought over me as they were fighting over him” (p. 114).
In Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind, the narrator Genia depicsts life under communist Russia and how a misfortune has hit a family that the wife and mother of a Communist is accused of not being communist enough and the implications that this takes for her family and for herself. She does not to run away because she considered herself a true communist and she seeks to defend herself in order to exonerate herself. At the end of the story, she ends up in jail with the regret she did not realize what the future was going to bring.
This piece carries with it a satirical tone. It begins with the phrase “There’s no one so silly as a clever man”. The author of this description is the mother in law of the narrator which seems to reflect the generation before communism emerged, which emerges as critical of the way people live under communism and the expectations that the Communist party has of their allegiance. The narrator describes the mother in law as a “simple, illiterate peasant woman born in the day of serfdom, was of a deeply philosophical cast of mind and had a remarkable power of hitting the nail on the head when she talked about the problems of life…was always coming out with quaint proverbs and sayings” (p.20). The narrator recounts how she was forbidden to teach. The voice of the mother in law advising Genia to leave to their old village, a place where the communists would not search for her. The mother in law has a very well defined grasp of reality, whereas the narrator wants to do the right thing and defend herself as the innocent person she is, yet she fails to do so because in her society this becomes the “silliness of the clever man”. The narrator goes to the Control Commission of the Communist Party to prove her innocence, though this is unsuccessful. The path she takes and the manner in which she is accused like many others is reflective of how intellectual and well-intended people became “victims of the witch hunt”, of the extremist views of the communist ideology through accusations that included “lack of vigilance”, “rotten liberalism”, and “objectively gravitating”. The narrator defines her approach to defend herself “by fervent protestations of innocence and loyalty, vainly made to sadists, or officials who were themselves bewildered by the fantastic course of events and terrified for their own skins—was the most absurd of any I could have chosen” (p.24).
The narrator points out how in 1937 the term “enemy of the people” came into use. She describes other cases of how intellectual people were accused of failing to meet the standards of the communists and then they were harshly punished. The psychological torment that one had to endure when put to defend oneself makes the narrator think of suicide. Not much later she is expelled from the Communist party, they take away her Card, and soon after she is arrested. She also describes how the Communist party made changes in their doctrine and her family had to burn books which had been considered acceptable not long before.
During her last walk outside with her husband she defines herself as a “state criminal”. Her husband was in the Communist party and he was advised to “dissociate” himself of his wife. Yet though he seemed to believe in the doctrine of the communists, the narrator comments that her husband’s ultimate reaction in regards to this was to “yield to heresy”, as he too “was sure of the innocence of many of those who had been arrested as enemies” (p.46). The narrator describes in a nostalgic and satirical way her husband’s expression when she last saw him “he had the haunted look of a baited animal, of a harried and exhausted human being—it was a look I was to see again and again, there”. She was sent to a “punishment cell”. While in jail, she wondered if her “disappearance from life meant nothing to anyone?” She celebrates the New Year in the cell with hope of better times and with the traditional saying “Next Year in Jerusalem”. Yet, her remarks are bittersweet and nostalgic as she remarks that when saying this greeting, she didn’t know there would be 17 harsh years ahead that she spent locked up, away from her former existence.
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