nationalism—the reassurance that the new state belonged to them even as it seemed so alien; that modernization and homelessness were their gain, not loss; that universal Mercurianism was in fact revitalized Apollonianism. The protection the peasant migrants to the cities did receive (in the form of anti- Jewish restrictions) tended to be mostly counterproductive. The cities of the Pale were dominated by Jews, and more and more of their children, kept there by force and excluded ineffectively from neutral spaces, were joining the rebellion against God and Tsar. The ones who paid the price were people like Babel’s narrator’s father, a small shopkeeper who was robbed and humiliated the day his little boy felt such bitter, ardent, and hopeless love for Galina Apollonovna. Through the window I could see the deserted street with the vast sky above it and my father with his red hair walking down the road. He did not have a hat, and his thin, flyaway red hair was sticking up; his paper shirtfront was all askew and fastened by the wrong button. Vlasov, an eternally drunken workman in wadded soldier’s rags, followed closely on my father’s heels. “Don’t you see,” he was saying in a hoarse, earnest voice, while touching my father gently with his hands, “We don’t need freedom if it gives the Jews freedom to haggle . . . Just give the working man a little bit of life’s brightness for his toil, for all this terrible hugeness . . . Just give him some, friend, just give him some, okay . .” The workman kept touching my father and imploring him about something, while on his face, flashes of pure drunken inspiration alternated with dejection and sleepiness. “We should all live like the Molokans,” he muttered, as he swayed on his unsteady legs, “we’ve got to live like the Molokans, but without that Old-Believer God of theirs. It’s only the Jews who profit from him, the Jews and nobody else . . . ” And Vlasov started shouting in wild desperation about the Old-Believer God who had taken pity only on the Jews. Wailing and stumbling, Vlasov was still chasing after that mysterious God of his, when a Cossack mounted patrol appeared in front of him. The Cossacks ignored both of them—the drunken pursuer who felt like a victim and begged his prey for mercy, and the tormented victim whose son was triumphing over the Russian boys with fat cheeks even as they were beating