{"id":15616,"date":"2011-05-12T17:17:02","date_gmt":"2011-05-12T21:17:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=15616"},"modified":"2022-03-07T12:49:37","modified_gmt":"2022-03-07T17:49:37","slug":"a-week-in-culture-barry-yourgrau-writer-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/05\/12\/a-week-in-culture-barry-yourgrau-writer-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"A Week in Culture: Barry Yourgrau, Writer, Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the second installment of Yourgrau\u2019s culture diary. Click here<\/a> to read part 1. <\/em><\/p>\n

DAY FOUR<\/h3>\n

11:00 A.M. <\/strong>To the Privoz, Odessa\u2019s signature sprawling bazaar market, alas now overly spruced up. Anya and her mom want to talk to the babushkas. Most of the stalls seem run by women\u2014huge-girthed, older, sharp of tongue (famously), sporting flowery headscarves and preposterously frilly French-maid aprons even while sawing lamb carcasses. The scene suggests a chaotic operetta with edible props. I sample five homemade Bessarabian wines from plastic water bottles, then a scrumptious brownish baked yogurt.<\/p>\n

One massive dame, a vast beauty like some folkloric monument to Ceres, asks if I\u2019m Anya\u2019s dad. When told I\u2019m her boyfriend she wisecracks that I must be very rich to be with someone so young and pretty. Anya and her mom guffaw at this notion (me and wealth). Anya compliments the lady on her looks, and the woman sighs, Nyet<\/em>, she\u2019s too fond of moonshine. With a few friends, she says, she can put away four liters. (That\u2019s a gallon and we\u2019re not talking pinot grigio.) Anya gasps in amazement.<\/p>\n

7:00 P.M. <\/strong>At the opera: a great gilded proscenium echoed by ranks of smaller gilded prosceniums, the boxes and balconies. Tchaikovsky’s Iolanthe<\/em> is the offering. The male voices are fine, but the lead soprano playing the blind princess has a vocal wobble of seismic intensity. Jabotinsky\u2019s 1935 novel of Odessa, The Five<\/a><\/em>\u2014only recently translated into English and supposedly an excellent portrait of the city a century ago\u2014opens with a scene here. Jabotinsky: \u201cThe beginning of my Zionist activity is connected with two influences. Italian opera and the idea of self-defense.\u201d I think of Walter Benjamin\u2019s line about fascism as the aesthetization of politics.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

DAY FIVE<\/h3>\n

1:30 P.M. <\/strong>In the World Odessit Club\u2019s comfy clutter to meet Alexander Rosenbaum, literary ethnographer and Babel authority. His nose is long and prominent; his air, agreeably haughty. He wears a suave tweed jacket (five pens peep from a pocket) and smokes super-slender cigarettes, tapping the ash off with a finger. I haul out my shoplifted paperback. \u201cGood,\u201d he approves. \u201cYou needed it more than the bookstore did!\u201d He cites the famous line about the power of a period from Babel\u2019s \u201cGuy de Maupassant.\u201d I respond with another \u201cGuy de Maupassant\u201d line about warming the sentence in hand like a lever. Glubovsky is with us, and we all break into shared grins.<\/p>\n

Rosenbaum is putting together a sequence of essays on Babel, including interviews with folk who knew Babel personally. Working title: The Magician of Odessa<\/em>. He suggests Babel wrote his Odessa tales of gangster Benya Krik and the like in part to soothe himself after the horrors he experienced with the Cossacks. Also, he sensed the character of his old raffish neighborhood, Moldavanka, disappearing with the Soviets.<\/p>\n

I forbear with my Mark Bernes gag. Rosenbaum, however, sees out with a sudden stream of corny jokes, turning from literary scholar to borscht belter. E.g., Waiter: Soda with syrup or without? Customer: Without. Waiter: Without cherry syrup or without peach syrup?<\/p>\n

5:00 P.M. <\/strong>I finally track down Odessa\u2019s former prestigious high school, the Academy of Commerce, just off the promenade heights. A quota on Jews was in force a century ago, making for hellish entry competition. Babel got in. Jabotinsky, according to my guidebook, tried four times but failed.\u00a0Anya\u2019s mom pleads with me to quit with the constant Jabotinsky references and wisecracks.<\/p>\n

7:30 P.M. <\/strong>Bulletin from another life. The new ranking<\/a> of the world\u2019s fifty best restaurants is out. Number one, again, is our friend Ren\u00e9 Redzepi from Copenhagen. The list is thick with the chefs and philosophy Anya has long championed as a critic. I figure I\u2019ve eaten at seven of the list\u2019s top ten. I want to boast about this (being a gastro-amateur, Anya\u2019s \u201cplus one\u201d); I settle for mentioning it here.<\/p>\n

Then I scan the tart piece<\/a> on the best-fifty competition in the Times<\/em> by our friend Lisa Abend, who\u2019s just brought out The Sorcerer\u2019s Apprentices<\/em>, an account of the kitchen apprentices at Ferran Adri\u00e0\u2019s El Bulli. Ferran is really the father of all that\u2019s been happening in the chef world, even when it appears opposed to him. We\u2019re supposed to eat at El Bulli a last time before it closes this summer. Question: who\u2019d play Ferran in the movie? Anya thinks Javier Bardem. But he\u2019s got the wrong nose, I think.<\/p>\n

DAY SIX<\/h3>\n

11:00 A.M. <\/strong>Tears in my eyes at the excellent Literary Museum, an old aristocratic cream-yellow manse near the Opera. Here, in the Babel display, are his iconic rimless eyeglasses, the ones he so heartbreakingly is without in his last photo, taken during his tortures at the Lubyanka. He would be murdered shortly after. Photographs show him as a new father, grinning with an infant in arms (Nathalie? Lydia?), and by grazing horses. There is an early copy of Red Cavalry<\/em>, before it was banned: a single black horseman on a white cover. A succession of guardian-babushkas naturally warn me not to take photos. Our guide turns up and upbraids them that I\u2019m a \u201czhournalist.\u201d In the museum\u2019s garden of comic sculptures, Babel crouches happily in a comic angel-winged group of litterateurs\u2014without his eyeglasses. No need for them in heaven, I\u2019m told.<\/p>\n

3:00 P.M. <\/strong>Potemkin Steps. I do a solo restaging (as director, cameraman, and actor) of the legendary movie’s massacre scene\u2014on the very steps themselves. Bewildered looks from general public. The steps were originally named the Boulevard Staircase. They\u2019re much wider at the bottom than the top\u2014not just to give the illusion of not diminishing, but also to provide support against landslides. Eight of the original two hundred steps have been lost to the avenue below, along which traffic goes blasting. A hideous eighties hotel tower rises on the wharf beyond. A large statue there depicts the city as a lumpy baby being hatched from some kind of egg. The kid is called little Nikita, after Khrushchev. The sculptor famously was harangued by Khrushchev at an art show decades before, but then was invited by the Khrushchev family to do the graveyard statue after Khrushchev\u2019s death.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A further Odessa connection per Battleship Potemkin<\/em>: Grigori Aleksandrov, Eisenstein\u2019s assistant director who also played one of the naval officers, later directed the first Stalinist movie musical comedy in the mid-thirties, the rollicking Jolly Fellows<\/em>. The picture earned prizes at the Venice Film Festival and was lauded by Graham Greene, among others. It\u2019s star: Odessa\u2019s jazzman Leonid Utyosov. Stalin joined in singing<\/a> one of Jolly Fellows<\/em>\u2019 hit songs at a famous congress of Stakhanovite workers.<\/p>\n

I sit by the statue of Utyosov lounging on a bench in the City Garden and place my hand familiarly on his knee.<\/p>\n

DAY SEVEN<\/h3>\n

2:00 P.M. <\/strong>An au revoir meal at Dacha, a table in the garden trees with Soviet oldies lilting through the still leafless trees. It\u2019s our third time here; we\u2019ve fallen in love with the place. Owner Savva tells us nobody cares anymore about Moscow with its glitz and brutality; if they travel, they go elsewhere. Great, we\u2019re headed to Moscow for three weeks. Anya is working on a book on the Soviet experience through all its decades, told via a family-food memoir.<\/p>\n

3:30 P.M. <\/strong>At Odessa\u2019s pocket airport, I decipher the Cyrillic sign at a poky area of caf\u00e9 tables: Business Class<\/em>. Chuckling, I snap a picture as a linguistic trophy. The lady attendant immediately descends. \u201cNYET.<\/em>\u201d I apologize, turn away. Not good enough. She angrily demand-mimes that I erase the photo! \u201cAre you joking?\u201d I demand in English. She isn\u2019t. I try to leave again. She grabs my arm. \u201cKontrol!\u201d she cries, threatening to haul me to security. I erase the photo under her scrutiny, seething. Cursing in English, I storm along to find Anya. She learns from the attendant that the business-class caf\u00e9 is private property: no pictures allowed by the non-business class! She laughs with delight.<\/p>\n

11:00 P.M. <\/strong>Moscow. Our rental is on the twenty-third\u00a0floor of a Brezhnevian\u00a0skyscraper. Below, across a bend of the Moscow River blazes the Hotel Ukraina, one of Stalin\u2019s seven \u201cwedding cake\u201d skyscrapers. To the right, Russia\u2019s White House parliament building, where Yeltsin first faced down a coup and later fired shells at his political opponents. Our tower block is pretty shabby on the outside, but the wide sidewalk in front is jammed with luxury SUVs.<\/p>\n

Tomorrow, Anya meets the chef at the Central House of Writers restaurant around the corner. From a balcony of the establishment\u2019s English neo-Gothic Oak Hall, Stalin\u2019s NKVD henchman Lavrenty Beria would scan the scene for girls. Beria oversaw Babel\u2019s execution in 1940. Jabotinsky died the same year, it turns out, of a heart attack, while inspecting one of his youth-movement martial camps in upstate New York. In the Catskills.<\/p>\n

Barry Yourgrau<\/a> is author of <\/em>Nastybook\u00a0and<\/em> The Sadness of Sex, in the movie version of which he starred. On May 19, in London, Yourgrau will be\u00a0reading<\/a> with Dan Rhodes at Idler Academy.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the second installment of Yourgrau\u2019s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 11:00 A.M. To the Privoz, Odessa\u2019s signature sprawling bazaar market, alas now overly spruced up. Anya and her mom want to talk to the babushkas. Most of the stalls seem run by women\u2014huge-girthed, older, sharp of tongue (famously), […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":169,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[2077,2265,2271,2272],"class_list":["post-15616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-culture-diaries","tag-barry-yourgrau","tag-isaac-babel","tag-mosco","tag-tchaikovsky"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Week in Culture: Barry Yourgrau, Writer, Part 2 by Barry Yourgrau<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"May 12, 2011 \u2013 This is the second installment of Yourgrau\u2019s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 11:00 A.M. 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