explaining anything!” And so we started looking into our past, trying to determine when it had all started. 93 The Ulanovskys were looking into their past in their own apartment; most of their friends and colleagues were doing it in their interrogation cells. Every prison confession was a (coauthored) attempt to determine the sources of treason, and every public pronouncement was a comment on the origins of perfection. As Babel had said in his speech at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, In our day, bad taste is no longer a personal defect; it is a crime. Even worse, bad taste is counterrevolution. . . . As writers, we must contribute to the victory of a new, Bolshevik taste in our country. It will not be an insignificant political victory because, fortunately for us, we do not have victories that are not political. . . . The style of the Bolshevik epoch is calm strength and self-control; it is full of fire, passion, power, and joy. Who should we model ourselves on? . . . Just look at the way Stalin forges his speech, how chiseled his spare words are, how full of muscular strength. 94 Babel was executed for bad taste—for not mastering the style of the epoch, not having enough calm strength and self-control, not being able to forge himself like Stalin. Because, unfortunately for him, there was nothing in Stalin’s Soviet Union that was not political and muscular. Babel was executed by his own creatures and his only true love: those who could “shuffle their fathers’ faces like a fresh deck of cards”; those “whose fury contained within it everything that was necessary to rule over others”; those who had “murder in their souls”; those who had mastered “the simplest of skills—the ability to kill a man.” The name of Babel’s first interrogator was Lev Shvartsman. Mikhail Baitalsky was arrested and sent to a camp. My grandmother’s brother Pinkus, a visiting businessman from Poland, was arrested and sent to a camp. My grandfather, Moisei Khatskelevich Goldstein, was arrested, tortured, and released a year and a half later, after Ezhov’s ouster. Tsafrira Meromskaia’s childhood ended when her parents were arrested. And so did Inna Gaister’s. Of Grandma Gita’s children and in-laws gathered around the table at her welcome dinner, at least ten were arrested. After the arrests of Lipa and my mother, Grandma Gita had been living with Adassa. After Adassa was taken to prison, Grandma had moved in