Rybakov’s Uncle Misha, a “recklessly generous and desperately brave” Red army commander, “broad-shouldered and burly, with a chiseled, tanned Mongol face and slanted eyes, a daredevil.” Uncle Misha had also left home to become a cavalryman. “He was a kind, devil-may-care, courageous, just, and selfless man. In the revolution he had found a faith to replace the faith of his ancestors; his straightforward mind could not stand Talmudic hairsplitting; the simple arithmetic of the revolution was more comprehensible to him. The civil war provided an outlet for his burning energy; the simplicity of a soldier’s life freed him from the pettiness of human existence.” 137 Such Jews were larger than life, but they were marginal (as most Goliaths are). The Jews who occupied the center stage of early Soviet culture were the unmistakably Mercurian incarnations of Bolshevik Reason, and thus much more familiarly Jewish. All “Party-minded” literature was about the transformation of proletarian spontaneity into revolutionary consciousness, or, in mythic (socialist- realist) terms, the taming of a recklessly generous, desperately brave, devil-may- care Red Cavalryman into a disciplined, scripture-reading holy warrior. All such proletarians had mentors, and many such mentors were Jews—partly because there were many Jews among Bolshevik mentors, but also because this was a role that called for an authentic, believable Mercurian. The iconic commissar was the consciousness to the spontaneity of the proletariat, the head to the body of the revolution, the restless nomad to the inert enormity of the masses. It made sense for the iconic commissar to be a Jew. 138 In one of the foundational texts of socialist realism, A. Fadeev’s The Rout (1926), the Red Partisan commander Iosif Abramovich Levinson is “a tiny man in tall boots, with a long, red wedge of a beard,” who looks like a “gnome from a children’s book,” suffers from a pain in his side, embarrasses himself at Russian skittles, and comes from the family of a used-furniture salesman who “spent his life hoping to get rich but was afraid of mice and played his violin very badly.” One of the men under Levinson’s command is the shepherd Metelitsa. He had always felt vaguely attracted to that man and had noticed on many occasions that it gave him pleasure to ride next to him, talk to him, or simply look at him. He admired Metelitsa not for any outstanding socially useful qualities, of which Metelitsa did not have very many and which Levinson possessed to a much greater degree, but for the extraordinary physical agility, the animal vitality with which he overflowed and which Levinson himself so sorely lacked. Whenever he saw Metelitsa’s nimble figure, ever ready for action, or simply knew that Metelitsa was not far