with my mother, but they did not understand. Then I attempted to represent visually my desire to leave by using my middle and index fingers to imitate walking across the table. Suddenly, Grandfather opened a chest drawer and pulled out a black- and-yellow shawl. He threw it over my shoulders, and made me repeat after him words composed of unfamiliar noises. But then, annoyed by my babble, he became angry and shook his head in disapproval. I felt frightened and suffocated. I do not remember how my mother rescued me. 51 Modernity meant universal Mercurianism under the nationalist banner of a return to local Apollonianism. The Jews marched under the same (i.e., somebody else’s) banner; for them, the joyous return to Russian togetherness meant a permanent escape from the Jewish home. It meant becoming Apollonian—even as they triumphed over the Russian boys with fat cheeks in the marketplace of universal Mercurianism. Their image of home abandoned (regardless of whether they ended up as socialists, nationalists, or trained specialists) was an abridged version of the traditional Apollonian view of Jewish life as babbling, clannish, bad-smelling, pointlessly intricate, lifelessly rational, relentlessly acquisitive, and devoid of color. Babel’s grandmother in Odessa was far from Mandelstam’s in Riga, but the staging is painfully familiar: “the darkening room, Grandmother’s yellow eyes, her small figure wrapped in a shawl, bent and silent in the corner, the hot air, the closed door . . .” And the dream of conquering the world while remaining locked up: “ ‘Study,’ she says with sudden vehemence. ‘Study, and you will achieve everything—wealth and fame. You must know everything. All will prostrate and abase themselves before you. Everyone should envy you. Don’t trust people. Don’t have any friends. Don’t give them any money. Don’t give them your heart.’ ” 52 What matters is not whether Babel’s grandmother really said anything of the sort; what matters is how Babel, Mandelstam, and so many others remembered their grandmothers. Lev Deich believed that Jews provided “sufficient reasons for the hostility against them” because of their “preference for unproductive, light, and more profitable occupations.” Vladmir Yokhelson, as a student at the Vilna Rabbinical Seminary, considered Yiddish artificial, Hebrew dead, Jewish traditions valueless, and Jews in general a “parasitical class.” I. J. Singer, in The Brothers Ashkenazi , represented Jewish religion and Jewish business as equally “devious,” built on “snares, loaded questions, contradictions,” and mostly concerned with “promissory notes, reparations, contamination, and purity.” And Lev Trotsky was probably at his most orthodox as a Marxist when he said about