223 pages

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Cornell University Press - Vladimir Jabotinsky ,
traduit par R. Katz Michael

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223 pages

English

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"The beginning of this tale of bygone days in Odessa dates to the dawn of the twentieth century. At that time we used to refer to the first years of this period as the 'springtime,' meaning a social and political awakening. For my generation, these years also coincided with our own personal springtime, in the sense that we were all in our youthful twenties. And both of these springtimes, as well as the image of our carefree Black Sea capital with acacias growing along its steep banks, are interwoven in my memory with the story of one family in which there were five children: Marusya, Marko, Lika, Serezha, and Torik."-from The Five The Five is an captivating novel of the decadent fin-de-siecle written by Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940), a controversial leader in the Zionist movement whose literary talents, until now, have largely gone unrecognized by Western readers. The author deftly paints a picture of Russia's decay and decline-a world permeated with sexuality, mystery, and intrigue. Michael R. Katz has crafted the first English-language translation of this important novel, which was written in Russian in 1935 and published a year later in Paris under the title Pyatero.The book is Jabotinsky's elegaic paean to the Odessa of his youth, a place that no longer exists. It tells the story of an upper-middle-class Jewish family, the Milgroms, at the turn of the century. It follows five siblings as they change, mature, and come to accept their places in a rapidly evolving world. With flashes of humor, Jabotinsky captures the ferment of the time as reflected in political, social, artistic, and spiritual developments. He depicts with nostalgia the excitement of life in old Odessa and comments poignantly on the failure of the dream of Jewish assimilation within the Russian empire.

Sujets

Eastern Europe

Judaism

History of religions

History of Europe

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Publié par	Cornell University Press
Date de parution	19 septembre 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780801471636
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,7500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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T H E F I V E QQQQQ

T H E F I V E

A Novel of Jewish Life in Turn-of-the-Century Odessa

Vladimir Jabotinsky Q Translated from the Russian and annotated by Michael R. Katz

Introduction by Michael Stanislawski

c o r n e l l u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s i t h ac a a n d l o n d o n

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 2005 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2005

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jabotinsky, Vladimir, 1880 –1940. [Piatero. English] The five : a novel of Jewish life in turn-of-the-century Odessa / Vladimir Jabotinsky ; translated from the Russian and annotated by Michael R. Katz ; introduction by Michael Stanislawski. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8014-4266-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8014-8903-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) I. Katz, Michael R. II. Title.

PG3470.Z4P513 2005 891.733 —dc22

2005002723

Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publish-ing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.

Cloth printing Paperback printing

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Contents

Translator’s Preface Introduction by Michael Stanislawski Principal Characters Instead of a Preface i. Youth ii. Serezha

iii. In the Literary Circle

iv. Around Marusya

v. The World of Business vi. Lika vii. Marko viii. My Porter ix. The Alien

x. Along Deribasov Street

xi. A Many-Sided Soul

xii. The Arsenal on Moldavanka

xiii. Something Like the Decameron

xiv. Inserted Chapter, Not Intended for the Reader

xv. Confession on Langeron

xvi. Signor and Mademoiselle

xvii. The Godseeker

vii ix xv 1 3 7 13 20 26 32 38 44 49 56 62 68 76 83 89 97 106

xviii. Potemkin Day

xix. Potemkin Night

xx. The Wrong Way

xxi. Broad Jewish Natures

xxii. One More Confession

xxiii. Visiting Marusya

xxiv. Mademoiselle and Signor

xxv. Gomorrah

xxvi. Something Bad

xxvii. The End of Marusya

xxviii. The Beginning of Torik

xxix. L’envoi

Selected Bibliography

115 122 130 136 142 148 157 165 173 180 188 197 203

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Translator’s Preface

Vladimir (Ze–1940) is best known as an orator,ev) Jabotinsky (1880 politician, and militant Zionist. He was also an extremely gifted lin-guist as well as a talented and prolific writer whose literary activity began early and continued throughout his life. The annotated col-lection of his complete work, including letters and speeches, was published in Hebrew and fills eighteen volumes. Born into an accul-turated and assimilated middle-class Jewish family in the Black Sea port city of Odessa, he left in 1898 to become a foreign correspondent for a Russian newspaper in Italy and later in Switzerland. Pyatero(The Five) was Jabotinsky’s second novel written in Rus-1 sian. Written in 1935, it has been consistently omitted from the canon of Russian literature (including Western surveys and reference works) 2 most likely because the author was “Jewish,” not “Russian.” It has also been relatively neglected in the field of Jewish studies, probably because the novel was written in Russian, not Yiddish or Hebrew. And yetThe Fiveoffers a powerful portrait of Jewish life in Odessa at the turn of the century, as well as a poignant account of the tempo-rary success and ultimate failure of Jewish assimilation in the Rus-sian empire. Like many other Russianists, I was unaware of the existence ofThe Five.Then I came across a reference to Jabotinsky’s “two” novels in Ruth Wisse’s survey,The Modern Jewish Canon.In the section on Babel, she refers to Jabotinsky as “the author of several Russian novels about 3 assimilating Jews of Odessa and ancient Israel (The Five, Samson).”

1 His first Russian novel,Samson Nazarit(Samson the Nazarite)was published in 1926 and first translated into English in 1930. 2 For example, there is no entry on Jabotinsky in theHandbook of Russian Literature edited by Victor Terras and published by Yale University Press in 1985. 3 Ruth Wisse,The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Literature and Culture (New York: Free Press, 2000), 102.

vii

viii

A footnote led me to Alice Nakhimovsky’s bookRussian-Jewish Liter-ature and Identity.One sentence in her chapter on Jabotinsky was par-ticularly intriguing: “UnlikeSamson, The Fiveis not simply a novel 4 written in Russian, but a Russian novel.” Originally published in Paris in 1936,Pyaterowas republished in New York in 1947 by the Jabotinsky Foundation. This is the text I have chosen to translate, the first rendition of the novel into any Western 5 language. Three editions of the work in Russian were published in Jerusalem (1990), Odessa (2000), and Moscow (2002). Only after I had begun work on my translation did I discover Michael Stanislawski’s bookZionism and the Fin de Sièclewith its comprehensive section on 6 Jabotinsky and its excellent analysis ofThe Five. I am grateful to the work of Wisse, Nakhimovsky, and Stanislawski for leading me to and guiding me through this translation; I am es-pecially indebted to Michael Stanislawski for his willingness to write an introduction to this edition. I wish to acknowledge the assistance of colleagues at other institu-tions: Otto Boele (IDC Publishers, Amsterdam), Brian Horwitz (Uni-versity of Nebraska), Judith Kornblatt (University of Wisconsin), and Harriet Murav (University of Illinois); my colleagues at Middlebury College: Alya Baker, Sergei Davydov, Stephen Donadio, David Macey, Judy Olinick, Joy Pile, Ira Schiffer, Robert Schine, Joshua Sherman, and Tanya Smorodinskaya; and two extraordinary colleagues in Odessa: Anna Misyuk and Mark Naidorf, without whose generosity, exper-tise, and support this project could never have been completed. Finally, I dedicate this annotated translation to my wife and help-mate, Mary Dodge.

The system of transliteration is that used in the Oxford Slavonic Pa-pers with the following exceptions: hard and soft signs have been omitted, and conventional spellings of names have been retained.

Cornwall, Vermont

Michael R. Katz

4 Alice Nakhimovsky,Russian-Jewish Literature and Identity: Jabotinsky, Babel, Gross-man, Galich, Roziner, Markish(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 68. 5 The Fivewas translated into Hebrew and published in Jerusalem under the title Hamishtamin 1946. 6 Michael Stanislawski,Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and National-ism from Nordau to Jabotinsky(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 121–236.

Translator’s Preface

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Introduction

Michael Stanislawski

This first-ever translation into English of Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Rus-sian-language novelPyatero(The Five) is a milestone in Jewish literary and political history, for it makes available to readers with no access to the original (or access only to the heavily censored and misleading Hebrew translation), a fascinating and crucial source in the develop-ment of modern Jewish literature, modern Jewish politics, and per-haps most broadly, what we might call modern Jewish self-fashioning. Vladimir Jabotinsky was arguably the most controversial Jewish leader and public personality of the twentieth century. Born into the highly russified Jewish upper-middle class of Odessa, Jabotinsky at first resembled a member of the highly dejudaized upper bourgeoisie of twenty-first-century America more than the stereotypical Eastern European Jew of the nineteenth century: he knew no Yiddish or He-brew to speak of, except for snippets gleaned from grandmothers’ talk or from meaningless bar mitzvah preparations in which “read-ing” Hebrew was then, as now, a euphemism for its vocalized con-sonants with no consideration for their meaning. He was schooled at a prestigious, private Russian-language academy that was required by law to dedicate a few hours per week to teaching Judaism to the Jewish pupils, a practice which left no mark on its students’ consciousnesses, save a vague feeling of stigma vis-à-vis the Russian-Orthodox student majority. Yet because this was fin-de-siècle Rus-sia—or more precisely, the Russian Empire, for Odessa was and is one of the major cities of Ukraine—Jabotinsky knew in his heart of hearts that he was not a Russian by nationality or religion, but a Jew, even though the latter concept had no precise content or connotation. Rather, his entire linguistic and ideational world was Russian, and his aspiration in life, from his early teens on, was to become a Rus-sian writer and a contributor to Russian literature.