emergence of the Jews as the Mercurians of a new multinational empire. The Russian Revolution was a combination of popular uprisings, religious crusades, ethnic wars, colonial conquests, and clashing coalitions. One part of the mix was the Jewish Revolution against Jewishness. Wartime massacres and deportations accompanied by the militarization of apocalyptic millenarianism— anarchist, nationalist, and Marxist—transformed the decades-old rebellion of Jewish children into a massive revolution. During Russia’s Time of Troubles of 1914–21, most Jews hid, fled, or moved; tens of thousands were killed. But among those who took up arms, the majority did not stay to defend their parents’ lives and property. They had universal brotherhood to fight for. 91 When Babel’s narrator arrived with the Red Cavalry in Galicia, he found “eyeless, gap-toothed” synagogues “squatting on the barren earth”; “narrow- shouldered Jews loitering mournfully at the crossroads”; “hunched-shouldered Jews in waistcoats standing in their doorways like bedraggled birds”; and the all- pervasive smell of sour feces and rotten herring. “The shtetl stinks in the expectation of a new era, and walking through it, instead of human beings, are faded outlines of frontier misfortunes.” It was there, in the “stifling captivity” of Hasidism, among “the possessed, the liars, and the idlers” at the court of “the last rebbe of the Chernobyl dynasty,” that he discovered the true prophet of the last exodus. Behind Gedali’s back, I saw a youth with the face of Spinoza, the powerful brow of Spinoza, and the faded face of a nun. He was smoking and shivering like a runaway prisoner who has just been returned to his cell. Suddenly, ragged Reb Mordche [“a hunchbacked old man no taller than a boy of ten”] crept up to him from behind, tore the cigarette from his mouth and darted back toward me. “That’s Elijah, the Rebbe’s son,” Mordche wheezed, as he brought close to me the bleeding flesh of his exposed eyelids, “the accursed son, the last son, the disobedient son . . .” And Mordche shook his small fist at the young man and spat in his face. 92 This is act 1 of the Jewish Revolution as portrayed by the prophet’s “brother,” himself a prophet whose “stories were meant to outlive oblivion.” 93 Another brother—the official “Young Communist Poet” Eduard Bagritsky (Dziubin)— remembered his own childhood: