soul) to their mind, simplicity to their complexity, spontaneity to their consciousness, rootedness to their rootlessness. This relationship—often expressed in erotic terms—could be represented as mutual repulsion or perfect complementarity. The era of Populism, for both Russian and Jewish secular intellectuals, was a time of longing for an ecstatic and redemptive union with the “people.” Tolstoy’s self-reflexive Olenin, in The Cossacks , loves his “statuesque beauty” Maryanka, with her “powerful breasts and shoulders,” as ardently and as hopelessly as Babel’s hiccuping boy loves Galina Apollonovna. Or is it Babel’s boy who loves Maryanka? By the time the civil war came, Babel was admiring the beauty of the Cossacks’ “gigantic bodies” as ardently as Tolstoy had admired his “tall, handsome” Lukashka’s “warlike and proud bearing.” But perhaps not as hopelessly . . . 59 There was one more thing the Russian radicals and Jewish fugitives had in common: they were at war with their parents. Starting in the 1860s, the inability of “fathers and sons” (“fathers and children,” in Turgenev’s original Russian title) to talk to each other became one of the central themes in intelligentsia culture. Nowhere else did the rebellious Jewish youngsters meet as many like- minded peers as they did in Russia. Having abandoned their own blind fathers and “sad, fussy” mothers, they were adopted by the large fraternities of those who had left behind their gentry, priestly, peasant, and merchant parents. Hierarchical, patriarchal, circumscribed families were being replaced by egalitarian, fraternal, and open-ended ones. The rest of the world was to follow suit. All modern societies produce “youth cultures” that mediate between the biological family, which is based on rigidly hierarchical role ascription within the kinship nomenclature, and the professional domain, which consists, at least in aspiration, of equal interchangeable citizens judged by universalistic meritocratic standards. The transition from son to citizen involves a much greater adjustment than the transition from son to father. Whereas in traditional societies one is socialized into the “real world” and proceeds to move, through a succession of rites of passage, from one ascriptive role to another, every modern individual is raised on values inimical to the ones that prevail outside. Whatever the rhetoric within the family and whatever the division of labor between husbands and wives, the parent-child relationship is always asymmetrical, with the meaning of each action determined according to the actor’s status. Becoming a modern adult is always a revolution. 60 There are two common remedies for this predicament. One is nationalism, with the modern state posing as a family complete with founding fathers,