what is it if not a concentrated and hypertrophied version of Malaia Arnautskaia [in Odessa], Podol [in Kiev], and hundreds of obscure provincial towns and shtetls? The streets are paved but unprepossessing and unbelievably dirty, while the strong admixture of Italian, Negro, and Greek-Armenian elements serves only to bring back the memory of the old Moldavian, Gypsy, and the same Greek-Armenian proximity.” 7 Palestine and Soviet Russia were real New Worlds—worlds built for a new breed. If Tevye and Menachem Mendl had been compelled to go there, they would have become silent and invisible both in their children’s homes and in the public rhetoric of the two movements (with the possible exception of a brief career for Menachem as a NEP speculator). Palestine and Soviet Russia were the centers of apparently victorious Jewish revolutions against God, patriarchy, strangeness, and everything else Tevye stood for. Both were on the cutting edge of the great European rebellion against universal Mercurianism—a rebellion that included a variety of fascist and socialist movements and was led by Mercurians who desperately wanted to become Apollonians (again). Zionism and Bolshevism shared a messianic promise of imminent collective redemption and a more or less miraculous collective transfiguration. As David Ben-Gurion wrote to his wife Paula in 1918, “I did not want to give you a small, cheap, secular kind of happiness. I prepared for you the great sacred human joy achieved through suffering and pain . . . . Dolorous and in tears you will arise to the high mountain from which one sees vistas of a New World, a world of gladness and light, shining in the glow of an eternally young ideal of supreme happiness and glorious existence, a world only few will be privileged to enter, for only rich souls and deep hearts are permitted entry there.” 8 The eternally young ideal was to be realized by eternally young idealists. Both Zionism and Bolshevism labored on behalf of the “next generation” and celebrated full-blooded youthful vigor disciplined by work and war. The youngest of the idealists (who were going to inherit the land or the Earth, depending on the location) were trained for both work and war in various young pioneer organizations that promoted group hiking, marching, singing, and exercising. Boys were to turn into young men (the fate of the girls was, in the early days, not entirely clear); young men were to stay young forever by sacrificing themselves for the cause or stopping time altogether. Both Zionism and Bolshevism exalted well-tanned muscular masculinity and either despised old age or willed it out of existence. The most valued qualities were Apollonian (proletarian or Sabra) solidity, firmness, toughness, decisiveness, earnestness, simplicity, inarticulateness, and courage; the most scorned were Mercurian