“And you landed in Kovel, Elijah?” “I ended up in Kovel!” he screamed out in desperation. “The damned kulaks broke through our defenses. I took command of a scratch regiment, but it was too late. I didn’t have enough artillery. . . .” Elijah breathed his last. In his little trunk, “all kinds of things were piled up together—the Party propagandist’s guidelines and the Jewish poet’s notebooks. The portraits of Lenin and Maimonides lay side by side. . . . A lock of woman’s hair was inserted in the book of the resolutions of the Sixth Party Congress, and the margins of Communist leaflets were crowded with the crooked lines of Hebrew verses.” 97 That there was a connection between Lenin and Maimonides (and the two Elijahs, of course) is Babel’s conjecture; that there were many rebbes’ sons in the Red Army is a fact. They fought against ancient backwardness and modern capitalism, against their own “chimerical nationality” and the very foundations of the old world (to paraphrase the “Internationale”). They had no Motherland; they had nothing but their chains to lose; and—unlike many other revolutionaries—they seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of proletarian consciousness, or Social Democratic patriotism. When M. S. (Eli-Moishe) Altman, the future classicist, was nine years old, he organized a strike against autocracy in his heder. When he was a fourth-grade gymnasium student, he wrote a prizewinning essay about Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman.” And when he was in Chernigov as a twenty-two-year-old medical student, he caught up with the revolution. I foresaw the Bolshevik victory long before the end of the war and printed a special leaflet warning the population of that fact. “We have come to stay!” I wrote in that leaflet. When the Bolsheviks finally did come, they were impressed by the leaflet and, having found out who the author of the warning was, appointed me, a nonmember, as the editor of their official newspaper, The News of the Executive Committee of Chernigov Province . My life changed completely. I became a fanatical believer in Lenin and the “world revolution” and walked around with such a revolutionary look on my face that the civilian population did not dare come near me. When “we” (the Bolsheviks) took Odessa, I remember staggering down the street like a drunk. 98 Esther Ulanovskaia grew up in the shtetl of Bershad in Ukraine. As a little