Short Fiction · Chapter
The Outrage explained
A professional thief, acting as a delegate for an organized association of thieves, delivers a passionate speech to a committee, defending thievery as an art and a vocation.
What happens
A professional thief, acting as a delegate for an organized association of thieves, delivers a passionate speech to a committee, defending thievery as an art and a vocation. He argues that theft requires skill, inspiration, and courage, and vehemently denies accusations that thieves participated in pogroms, instead blaming the police for organizing them. He demonstrates the group's skills by having a safecracker and a pickpocket perform tricks, and declares the committee's property inviolable in return for their attention.
Themes in this chapter
Art and Artifice
The thief orator argues that thievery is an art form, requiring vocation, inspiration, fantasy, and skill, and that it closely approaches the idea of art.
Social Class and Hierarchy
The speech critiques the bourgeois paterfamilias and capitalist society, contrasting the thieves' cunning with the protection of law and property enjoyed by the upper classes.
Cruelty and Suffering
The orator describes torture by police detectives, the suffering of Jews in pogroms, and the brutal treatment of thieves in prison, highlighting systemic cruelty.
Characters to notice
- Yasha
A young pickpocket with a swagger, dressed in a blue silk blouse and glacé boots, who demonstrates his skill for the committee.
- Sesoi the Great
An enormous, stooped safecracker with hands reaching his knees, who opens and locks a door in seconds to demonstrate his expertise.
Key passages
“We are the foxes, and society—is a chicken-run guarded by dogs.”
Thieves are like clever foxes, while society is a vulnerable chicken coop protected by dogs (the police and laws).
The orator uses this metaphor to contrast the thieves' cunning with society's defensive measures.
“But we despise and hate it three, ten times more—not because many of us have been tortured in the detective departments, which are just chambers of horror, beaten almost to death, beaten with whips of ox-hide and of rubber in order to extort a confession or to make us betray a comrade.”
We hate the police far more intensely, not only because they have tortured us in their horrific interrogation rooms, beating us nearly to death with whips to force confessions or betrayals.
The orator expresses the deep hatred thieves feel for the police due to brutal torture methods used to extract information.
“If I were told that I will be spared a fourth flogging only by shaking hands with a chief of the detective police, I would refuse to do it!”
Even if I could avoid a fourth beating by simply shaking hands with the police chief, I would refuse.
The orator declares his absolute refusal to cooperate with the police, even to escape severe punishment.