About the performance
Babel's Odessa Stories are inspired by the Bible. From the Old Testament comes the conflict between the chosen Jewish people and the Russian state, which was destroying in pogroms the civilisation of a biblical people condemned for all time as criminal because the Jews had betrayed and condemned the Christian saviour. On this historical destiny, the Jews of Odessa built their New Testament paradise on earth, or rather in the underworld of Odessa: a paradise ruled by the laws of bandits and smugglers. Babel described the Odes bandits and their brutal reckonings; everyone was involved in terror and death, from the gang members to the craftsmen, the disabled old men and the child violin virtuosos of ethnically mixed Odessa. Jewish old men, mothers, fathers and children became the heroes of a new literary mythology, replacing the celestials of the old religion.
The writer saw both the cruelty of life and the enchantment of everyday birth and love, both the ugliness of violent death and the beauty of the sublime reality manifested in weddings, celebrations and religious customs. In this hell between the Tsar's army and domestic banditry, Babel's Jews were saved by their faith in the chosenness of the people and by the incredible fertility that substituted birth for death. Thus a heterogeneous mix of human characters emerged, belonging to the different nations of Odessa: the descendants of the ancient peoples were joined throughout history by the heirs of the conquerors, the Mongols, and then by members of Asian and European nations, from the Greeks to the Armenians, from the Jews to the Cossacks, from the Russians to the French, from the English to the Italians. Isaac Babel was an extraordinary stylist. He carried his prose around with him in his luggage, filing and carving it like a carver carves his statues - wherever he went, on the road and at rest. His metaphors are as picturesque as Jewish clothing and religious rituals; they express the writer's soul, which now yearns for a better life like a child, and now revels in the sight of the bleeding victims of pogroms and banditry. Birth and death are Babel's main themes, present in short, broken sentences from the beginning to the end of each story, and thus of the whole collection of Odessa Stories. With them, Babel - alongside Zamyatin, Pilnyak, Bulgakov and Platonov - became a pillar of stylised Russian prose between the two world wars.
The Story of My Dovecote is one of the most beautiful stories of childhood in all world literature, although, contrary to the traditional conception of this period as a lost paradise, it contains a surprising bitterness and a painful recollection of young years committed to a strict traditional upbringing. Overwhelmingly, the world around him is also still threatened by violence - 'a world in which the world of the child who went after the pigeons and survived the pogrom is not fulfilled, but melted away. The pigeons, of course, represent innocent dreams and desires, and the mutilated man the vain world that tramples them.
Babel is certainly not a larpurlartist. He was executed in the early 1940s for his social engagement and his criticism, which was in fact mostly a mirror. It is a historical fact that at its peak, Odessa was home to around 60,000 Jews. After the Second World War, they were practically gone. Anti-Semitism has a long tradition in Europe and there was no shortage of violence and intolerance towards Jews even before the Holocaust. Babel must have had a strong reason for writing such bitter and sad stories as its mentioned above. We have the typical Jewish hope to console us. For example: despite all the hardships of life at that time, the boy we meet in the story sees a future for himself. He wants to be a writer. He tries his hand at the violin. The Odessa Stories preserve human sobriety in the face of events worthy only of mad thoughts.
Robert Waltl celebrates his 35 years of artistic work in the theatre with this performance.
