Jewish old men. The Cossacks “sat impassively in their high saddles, riding through an imaginary mountain pass and disappearing from view as they turned into Cathedral Street.” The little boy was in Galina Apollonovna’s kitchen. Earlier that day, he had been hit in the temple by a legless cripple with “a coarse face composed of red meat, fists, and iron.” He had been hit with the very dove he had bought to celebrate his admission to the gymnasium . Owning doves had been the dream of his life. His dovecote had been built for him by his grandfather, Shoil, who had been murdered earlier that day. A goose was frying on the tiled stove; the walls were lined up with pots and pans; and next to the pans, in the cook’s corner, was Tsar Nicholas, decorated with paper flowers. Galina washed off the remains of the dove that had dried on my cheeks. “You’ll grow up to be a bridegroom, my pretty little one,” she said, kissing me on the mouth with her full lips and turning away. 83 Babel’s narrator would, indeed, grow up to consummate his love for a Russian woman. But Galina Apollonovna was not the only Russian who loved him. There was Efim Nikitich Smolich, in whose athletic breast “there dwelt compassion for Jewish boys,” and Piatnitsky, the old gymnasium inspector who loved Jewish boys for their love of Pushkin. When, after the exam, Babel’s little boy “began to wake up from the convulsion of his dreams,” he found himself surrounded by some “Russian boys.” They seemed to want to push me around or perhaps just to play, but then Piatnitsky suddenly appeared in the corridor. As he passed me he halted for a moment, his frock-coat flowing down his back like a slow, heavy wave. I glimpsed confusion in that vast, fleshy, lordly back of his, and approached the old man. “Children,” he said to the schoolboys, “I want you to leave this boy alone,” and he put his plump, tender hand on my shoulder. 84 And then there were those—a small minority—who did not pity the Jews for their weakness and their love of old Russia but admired them for their strength and their iconoclasm—those who welcomed the rise of the Modern Age and praised the Jews for bringing it about. They were the Marxists—the only members of the Russian intelligentsia who despised the Russian peasant and the Russian intelligentsia as much as they despised “rotten” liberalism. For them, the