Russian was the language of true knowledge and of “the striving for freedom” (as the populist terrorist and Siberian ethnographer Vladmir Iokheleson put it). It was a language, as opposed to the “words composed of unknown noises”—“a language, and thus something rooted and self-assured.” Osip Mandelstam’s mother had been saved by Pushkin: she “loved to speak and rejoiced in the rootedness and the sound of Great-Russian speech, slightly impoverished by intelligentsia conventions. Was she not the first in her family to master the clear and pure Russian sounds?” His father, on the other hand, had barely emerged from “the Talmudic thicket” and thus “had no language at all: just a kind of tongue-tiedness and tonguelessness. It was a completely abstract, invented language; the ornate and convoluted speech of an autodidact, in which ordinary words are intertwined with the ancient philosophical terms from Herder, Leibniz, and Spinoza; the overwrought syntax of a Talmudist; the artificial sentence not always spoken to the end—whatever it was, it was not a language, either Russian or German.” Learning how to speak proper Russian (or, for the previous generation, German) meant learning how to speak. Abraham Cahan, who was about the same age as Mandelstam’s father, remembered the thrill of becoming articulate: “I felt the Russian language was becoming my own, that I was speaking it fluently. I loved it.” 38 A true conversion to a modern nationalism—and thus world citizenship— could be accomplished only through reading. Speaking was a key to reading; reading was a key to everything else. When F. A. Moreinis-Muratova, the future regicide raised in a very wealthy traditional household, read her first Russian book, she “felt like somebody who lived underground and suddenly saw a beam of bright light.” All early Soviet memoirs (Moreinis-Muratova’s was written in 1926) travel from darkness to light, and most describe revelation through reading. The Jewish ones (Soviet as well as non-Soviet and native as well as nonnative speakers of Russian) are remarkable for their explicit emphasis on language, on learning new words as a fundamental way of “striving for freedom.” The Jewish tradition of emancipation through reading had been extended to the emancipation from the Jewish tradition. 39 In Babel’s “Childhood. At Grandmother’s,” the little narrator did his studying under his grandmother’s watchful eye. Grandmother would not interrupt me, God forbid. Her tension, her reverence for my work would make her face look foolish. Her eyes— round, yellow, transparent—would never leave me. Whenever I turned a page, they would slowly follow my hand. Anyone else would have found