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GREENSTEIN /JEWISH PEGASUS
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structed the dovecot, dies cursing the Russians. Babel’s keen
eye for detailed observation resembles Chagall’s, bu t the w riter’s
tragic vision contrasts with the pa in ter’s comic wings.
Yet for all o f Babel’s hard-core realism, his story contains
a warning about the na tu re o f illusions. Part o f the boy’s rite
o f passage is his coming to grips with Russia’s constitutional
coming o f age and the tragedies o f anti-Semitism that form
his personal identity. Like the “chosen” people, his prize, choice
pigeons come un d e r attack by a crippled peasant avenging his
own winglessness. Instead o f a b ird ’s-eye view, the boy suffers
a g rounded blindness, his eyes closed both to the realities and
illusions su rround ing him. “This trampled earth in no way re
sembled real life, waiting for exams in real life. Somewhere far
away Woe rode across it on a great steed.” Boundaries between
equestrian and avian, real life and illusion, ea rth and body blur
as hoofbeats fade in the distance. This surreal b lur continues
th roughou t the story’s longest parag raph that winds like the
pigeon-guts, for without any transition the na rra to r shifts sud
denly from ground level: “I was walking along an unknown
street set on either side with white boxes, walking in a getup
o f bloodstained feathers.” Somnambulant, this painted bird ob
serves wires that had grown white above his head, a song o f
flying wood, and inflamed old women flying in fron t o f a p ro
cession o f banners with graveyard saints swaying above their
heads. With their surreal eye on a Russian Diaspora, Babel and
Chagall spot birds o f destiny and bear talmudic testimony.
B E N JAM IN ’S O U T LO O K
A slightly d iffe ren t twist to this ghetto cosmopolitanism, with
its po rtra it o f the Semite whose brow touches the heavens while
the rest o f him up to his neck remains mired in a cloaca, appears
in Walter Benjamin’s conception o f the angel o f history. Ben
jam in begins his ninth thesis on the philosophy o f history with
an epigraph from Gershom Scholem’s poem:
My wing is ready fo r flight,
I would like to turn back.
I f I stayed timeless time,
I would have little luck.
Listening to angels o f destiny with their winged words, Jews
have been perched and poised for diasporic flight. I f Hegel