has the requisite five children. Marusia was born for love and warmth but dies in flames, like a moth; Marko, the dreamer, drowns senselessly in an attempt to save a Russian who does not need or want to be saved; Serezha, the prankster, is blinded by acid; Torik, the careerist, converts to Christianity and disappears without a trace. Only Lika, the Bolshevik and Cheka executioner, is alive and well at the end of the novel. Many young Jewish intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s disagreed with Jabotinsky’s indictment of the revolution: as far as they were concerned, it was Marko, Marusia, and maybe even Serezha (duly “reforged” and reeducated) who had, along with Lika (having first shipped Torik to America), risen to positions of power in Soviet Russia. More important, however, they saw nothing wrong with Lika the Cheka executioner because Lika was both “necessary” and righteous—accepting as she did “personal responsibility” for the pure violence of the socialist revolution. Such was the official view of early Soviet literature and the more or less official view of the non-Soviet Jewish intellectuals. As Walter Benjamin—with glasses on his nose, autumn in his soul, and vicarious murder in his heart—wrote in 1921, “If the rule of myth is broken occasionally in the present age, the coming age is not so unimaginably remote that an attack on law is altogether futile. But if the existence of violence outside the law, as pure immediate violence, is assured, this furnishes proof that revolutionary violence, the highest manifestation of unalloyed violence by man, is possible, and shows by what means.” Over the next fifteen years, Benjamin would become much more direct in his admiration for Lika and her violent religion (he called it a “critique of violence”). He kept planning to go to Jerusalem but traveled to Moscow instead (on a brief excursion: the actual goose killing was Lika’s job). 14 Of the three Jewish utopias, one was in power. Many Jews who did not go to Moscow wished they had. Most young Jews who did go to Moscow pitied or despised those who had not. Roziner’s father came back from Palestine and named his son Feliks (after the founder of the Soviet secret police). Agursky’s father came back from America and named his son Melib (Marx-Engels- Liebknecht). Mikhail Baitalsky moved from Odessa to Moscow and named his son Vil (Vladimir Ilich Lenin). My great-aunt Bella arrived from Poland and named her son Marlen (Marx-Lenin). The mothers of two of my closest friends (second-generation Muscovites of “Jewish nationality”) are named Lenina and Ninel (“Lenin” read backward). Such was the Hebrew of the international proletariat—the true language of paradise. 15