skills, never learn how to truly love a horse, and never lose either the glasses on his nose or the autumn in his soul. Even as a Cheka employee, Babel would always remain an interpreter. To paraphrase Osip Mandelstam’s epigram, “The horse miaowed, the tomcat neighed. / The Jew was acting like a Cossack.” 134 That was true of Babel, every one of Babel’s doubles, countless other Jewish boys with glasses who could not swim, as well as all of Russian literature’s “superfluous men” who had never been able to satisfy a Russian woman. But that was not what made Babel “a literary Messiah . . . from the sunny steppes washed by the sea,” as Babel himself put it. What made Babel a literary Messiah from the sunny steppes washed by the sea was his discovery of Jewish Apollonians—Jews who were “jovial, paunchy, and bubbly like cheap wine”; Jews who thought only “of downing a good shot of vodka and punching somebody in the face”; Jews who were kings and “looked like sailors”; Jews who could make a Russian woman named Katiusha “moan, and peal with laughter”; Jews who were taller than the tallest policeman in Odessa; Jews “whose fury contained within it everything that was necessary to rule over others”; Jews who had “murder in their souls”; Jews who could “shuffle their fathers’ faces like a fresh deck of cards”; Jews who had well-deserved nicknames like Pogrom and Cossack. Jews who were more like Goliath than David, more like Cyclops and Achilles than Ulysses. 135 One such Jew—of small stature but “with the soul of an Odessa Jew”—was the blacksmith Jonah Brutman, who had three sons, “three fattened bulls with purple shoulders and feet like spades.” The first son followed in his father’s trade; the second went off to join the partisans and got killed; and the third, Semen, “went over to Primakov and joined a division of Red Cossacks. He was made commander of a Cossack regiment. He and a few other shtetl boys became the first of an unexpected breed of saber-wielding Jewish horsemen and partisans.” 136 Members of this breed became familiar heroes of Soviet folklore, fiction, and recollection. There are Perets Markish’s “Shloime-Ber and Azriel, a shoemaker’s sons turned Red Cavalrymen, riding to the front”; there is Izrail Khaikelevich (“Alesha”) Ulanovsky, a brawler, sailor, miner, and partisan, who did not like intellectuals and became an NKVD spy; there is the biggest man of the Stalin era, Grigory Novak, the first Soviet champion of the world (in power lifting, in 1946) and the only circus athlete to juggle seventy-pound weights; and there are legendary gangsters, drunkards, and womanizers who, “if there were rings attached to heaven and earth, would grab those rings and pull heaven down to earth.” All of them were begotten by Semen Brutman—or possibly Anatoly