constipation alternating with sudden storms of colitis and bloody dysentery, influenza, and heartburn. He had learned to ignore his flesh—to work with a fever, to read Marx while holding his cheek swollen from an infected tooth, to make speeches while suffering from acute stomach pains. And no, he had never been embraced by tender arms. It is Faktorovich, however, who, through sheer courage, hatred, and faith, saves his comrades from captivity and uncertainty. For “although his child-sized long underwear kept sliding down ridiculously and his camel-like Hebrew head trembled on its tender neck . . . , there was no doubt that strength was on the side of this true believer.” 144 Nor was there any doubt about the source of true strength in one of the most celebrated poems about the civil war, Eduard Bagritsky’s “The Tale of Opanas” (1926). An imitation of Shevchenko’s “tales” and Ukrainian folk epics, the poem rethinks and finally resolves the traditional Cossack-Jewish confrontation by translating it into the language of social revolution. The commissar and head of the “requisitioning detachment” Iosif Kogan does what is necessary by confiscating peasant food and executing those who resist. The confused Ukrainian lad Opanas deserts the detachment and ends up joining the army of the peasant anarchist Nestor Makhno. O Ukraine! Our native land! Autumn’s golden harvests! In the past, we joined the Cossacks, Now we join the bandits! Opanas kills, robs, loots, and drinks (“Beating Communists and Yids— / What an easy job!”) until he is ordered to shoot the captured commissar. Torn by doubt, Opanas suggests to Kogan that he try to escape, but Kogan only smiles, straightens his glasses, and offers Opanas his clothes. The shot rings, and Kogan falls down into the dust, “nose first.” Tormented by remorse, Opanas confesses his guilt to a Bolshevik interrogator and is sentenced to be shot. The night before the execution, he is visited in his cell by Kogan’s ghost, who smiles sternly and says, “Your life’s road, Opanas, / Ends beyond this threshold. . . .” 145 All these commissars were perfect heroes both because they were Jewish and because they had left their Jewishness behind. Or rather, it was their Jewishness that had allowed them to break with the past. Levinson had “ruthlessly suppressed within himself the passive, languid yearning” for a promise of future