species, the places birds fly to, where the sun rises, when the dew is heaviest—all these things were unknown to me. 44 Babel was a city boy. Abraham Cahan’s autobiographical narrator, who was born in a small shtetl in rural Lithuania, did not know the names for daisies or dandelions. I knew three flowers but not by their names. There was the round, yellow, brushlike blossom that turned into a ball of fuzz that could be blown into the wind. Its stem had a bitter taste. There was the flower that had white petals around a yellow button center. And the flower that looks like a dark red knob. When I grew older I learned their Russian names and, in America, their English names. But in that early time we didn’t even know their Yiddish names. We called all of them “tchatchkalech,” playthings. 45 This was not something Zagursky could fix. This called for Efim Nikitich Smolich, the Russian man who had a “feeling for nature” and could not stand the sight of splashing little boys being pulled to the bottom of the sea by “the hydrophobia of their ancestors—Spanish rabbis and Frankfurt money changers.” In the athletic breast of this man there dwelt compassion for Jewish boys. He presided over throngs of rickety runts. Nikitich would gather them in the bug-filled hovels of the Moldavanka, take them to the sea, bury them in the sand, do exercises with them, dive with them, teach them songs and, roasting in the direct rays of the sun, tell them stories about fishermen and animals. Nikitich used to tell the grown-ups that he was a natural philosopher. The Jewish children would roll with laughter at his tales, squealing and snuggling up to him like puppies. . . . I came to love that man with the love that only a boy who suffers from hysteria and migraines can feel for an athlete. 46 Most Pale of Settlement Jews who entered Russian life had their own mentors of things Apollonian, guides into neutral spaces, and discoverers of “divine sparks.” Babel the narrator had Efim Nikitich Smolich; Babel the writer had Maxim Gorky (to whom “The Story of My Dovecot” is dedicated). Abraham Cahan had Vladmir Sokolov, “the model of what man would be like when the world would turn socialist” and the person who introduced him, “on the basis of equality,” to “officers, students, several older persons and even a few ladies, most of them gentiles.” Moreinis-Muratova had her parents’ tenant, a naval