asked, and looked for a long time at the tender face of a child / young man who is only beginning to live. 48 Not everyone could be anointed by a god, but there was no lack of would-be godfathers and priests, as young Jewish men and women continued to join the faith that most of them (including Abraham Cahan in New York) would profess for the rest of their lives. Babel’s life, like everybody else’s, began on Pushkin Street. I stood there alone, clutching my watch, and suddenly, with a clarity such as I had never experienced before, I saw the soaring columns of the Duma, the illuminated foliage on the boulevard, and Pushkin’s bronze head touched by a dim reflection of the moon. For the first time in my life, I saw the world around me the way it really was: serene and inexpressibly beautiful. 49 Raisa Orlova’s mother, Susanna Averbukh, died in 1975, at the age of eighty- five. As she lay dying, she asked her daughter to read some Pushkin to her. “I read Pushkin. She started reciting along: line by line, stanza by stanza. She knew these poems from her childhood, from her father. . . . Perhaps she had read Pushkin to my father on their honeymoon?” 50 Converting to the Pushkin faith meant leaving the parental home. If the Russian world stood for speech, knowledge, freedom, and light, then the Jewish world represented silence, ignorance, bondage, and darkness. In the 1870s and 1880s, the revolution of young Jews against their parents reached Russia—eventually in the form of Marxism but most immediately as Freud’s family romance. The Jews who shared Mandelstam’s reverence for the “clear and pure Russian sounds” tended to share his horror of the “Judean chaos” of their grandmother’s household. She kept asking: “Have you eaten? Have you eaten?”—the only Russian words she knew. But I did not like the old people’s well-spiced delicacies, with their bitter almond taste. My parents had gone into the city. Every now and then, my mournful grandfather and my sad, fussy grandmother would try speaking with me, only to give up and ruffle their feathers like little old birds in a huff. I kept trying to explain to them that I wanted to be