girl, she loved Tolstoy, Turgenev, and her grandfather, the rabbi. She dreamed of going to the university and then “straight to Siberia or the gallows.” Everything about our shtetl annoyed and outraged me. . . . I wanted to fight for the revolution, the people. But “the people” was a rather abstract concept for me. The Jews who surrounded me were not the people—just a bunch of unpleasant individuals, some of whom I happened to love. But the muzhiks, who came to the shtetl on market days, got drunk, swore, and beat their wives, did not look like the people I read about in books, either. It is true that the shtetl Jews were kinder than the Ukrainian peasants, did not beat their wives, and did not swear. But the Jews represented the world I wanted to get away from. 99 When she was thirteen, she moved to Odessa and joined the “Young Revolutionary International,” most of whose members were Jewish teenagers. They already had one Vera (Faith) and one Liubov (Love, or Charity), so Esther became Nadezhda (Hope). “My name Esther (‘Esterka’ at home), and even its Russian version, Esfir, sounded bad to me. Back in the shtetl everyone had tried to adopt a Russian name; in Odessa, a Jewish name was a sign of frightful backwardness.” The civil war provided all those who wanted to escape backwardness—but would never have reached Siberia or the gallows—with the opportunity for self-transformation, self-sacrifice, and ritual slaughter. Vera, Nadezhda, and Liubov, among many others, were moved by the desire to “avenge their comrades and, if necessary, die fighting.” At one point, they entered a village, proclaimed Soviet power, and set up a blockade to prevent the peasants from taking their produce to town. There were about a hundred of them, and they were well armed. “I don’t know why we needed that blockade,” wrote Nadezhda many years later. “I did not question anything and did not notice that the peasants were becoming unhappy.” Nadezhda and her friends were fighting for the people in general and no one in particular. Many of them died fighting. Nadezhda survived and went on to become a Soviet secret agent in China, Europe, and the United States. 100 Babel’s narrator (like Babel himself, in December 1917) also escaped pogroms to join the secret police, or the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage. There, at the end of “The Road” (as the story is called), he found “comrades faithful in friendship and death, comrades the likes of whom are not to be found anywhere in the world except in our country.” They would remain friends until Babel’s death at their hands in