Compare the below excerpt from Isaac Babel’s How Things were Done in Odessa to the opening scene from Woody Allen’s film Manhattan.

In this passage, Babel’s narrator asks Reb Arye-Leib why Benya Krik, the gangster star of Babel’s Odessa Tales, was able to “climb to the top of the ladder while everyone else was clinging to the shaky rungs below?” (Babel, 146). Reb Arye-Leib’s answer is as follows:

“Why him?  Why not the others, you want to know? Well then, forget for a while that you have spectacles on your nose and autumn in your heart. Forget that you pick fights from behind your desk and stutter when you are out in the world! Imagine for a moment that you pick fights in town squares and stutter only among papers. You are a tiger, you are a lion, you are a cat. If you spend the night with a Russian woman, you’ll leave her satisfied. You are twenty-five years old. If the sky and earth had rings attached to them, you would grab these rings and pull the sky down to the earth. ”- Isaac Babel, How Things were Done in Odessa

Now, compare the above passage to the below clip, the opening for Woody Allen’s film Manhattan. It is as if Isaac Babel’s character Reb Arye-Leib was speaking directly to Allen’s narrator in the film, guiding him as he formulated his introductory lines.