his father, David Bronstein: “The instinct of acquisitiveness, the petit-bourgeois outlook and way of life—from these I sailed away with a mighty push, never to return.” The life of all the people in the world did not include Jewish parents. Babel’s “Awakening” ends in the same way as Trotsky’s: “Aunt Bobka held me tightly by the hand, to make sure I did not run away. She was right. I was plotting an escape.” 53 Most such plots were successful because the jailers’ only weapon consisted of monologues “composed of unfamiliar noises.” Their language was either artificial or dead, and their children could not bring themselves to speak it, even if they knew how. When Abraham Cahan was packing for his “historic trip to Petersburg,” his father, with whom he was not on speaking terms, came to help. “I wanted to make peace with my father. But somehow I couldn’t. My aunt and my mother pushed me toward him; my uncle pleaded with me. It was no good; I couldn’t move from the spot.” Moreinis-Muratova’s father, an Odessa grain exporter, was much more learned but equally impotent. “Leaving my blind father so soon after he lost our mother was extraordinarily difficult, especially because I loved and respected him very much. I knew that for him my departure would be worse than my death, because it meant disgrace for the family. But I felt it was my duty to leave home and earn my own living.” 54 Every Jewish parent was a King Lear. Jacob Gordin’s most famous New York play was his 1898 The Jewish Queen Lear , based on his 1892 The Jewish King Lear . By far the most successful production of Mikhoels’s State Jewish Theater in Moscow was Shakespeare’s King Lear (1935). And of course the central text of Yiddish literature, Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Milkman , is itself a version of King Lear —as are countless family chronicles written in Tevye’s shadow. 55 Bound by the Bard, Jewish fathers were prey to their own foolishness. According to Cahan, all Jewish families were unhappy in two different ways: “There were the families in which children addressed their parents as ‘tate’ and ‘mama.’ In the other group, parents were called ‘papasha’ and ‘mamasha,’ and it was these families that sent their boys to receive the new, daring, gentile education.” As G. A. Landau put it, How many Jewish parents of the bourgeois or townsman classes did not watch with sympathy, often pride, or at least indifference how their children were being branded with one of the assorted brands of one of the assorted revolutionary-socialist ideologies? . . . In fact, they themselves were products of the grandiose cultural and domestic revolution that had brought them, within one or two generations, from an Orthodox shtetl in