- Person
- Isaac Babel
- Lived
- 1894–1940
- Field
- Short fiction
- From
- Russian (Soviet)
The story
Isaac Babel was born in 1894 in Moldavanka, a poor and colourful district of Odessa, a port city that was then a great centre of Jewish life. After serving as a war correspondent with the Red Cavalry in 1920, he fell ill with asthma. While recovering in Odessa and the Caucasus between 1921 and 1924, he wrote most of the stories that would become the Odessa Stories, also known as Tales of Odessa.
Published one by one in Soviet magazines between 1921 and 1924 and gathered into a book in 1931, the four core stories describe the Jewish underworld of Moldavanka before and after the October Revolution. At their centre is the gangster Benya Krik, known as the King, a romanticised "gallant thug" loosely based on the real Odessa gang leader Mishka Yaponchik. Wikipedia calls Benya Krik one of the great anti-heroes of Russian literature.
Babel's Odessa is crowded with unforgettable people: a formidable woman who runs a den of thieves, dignified bearded beggars who look after the Jewish cemetery, drivers, merchants and policemen. The Jewish Virtual Library compares his scenes of lavish Jewish weddings and grand funerals to the canvases of Breughel. His characters speak a Russian full of Yiddish turns of phrase, and he could capture a person in a single odd word. The University of Oslo describes the collection as a realistic but also humorous and exotic picture of the city's underworld, and notes that Babel wrote about Jews with cleverness, humour and warmth from the start.
Unlike the pitiable Jews of some earlier literature, Babel's Jewish characters are bold, theatrical and full of life. Yet the colourful world he described was already disappearing, swept away by secularism, pogroms and revolution, and his stories preserved it.
The stories quickly reached the screen and stage. Babel adapted them into the screenplay for the silent film Benya Krik, released in 1927, and into his play Sunset, which premiered the same year. Later Soviet films, including a 1989 musical, returned to the same material, and new English translations, such as Boris Dralyuk's Odessa Stories (2016), continue to introduce the King of Moldavanka to readers.
Why it matters
The Odessa Stories preserved the colour and humour of a vanished Jewish world and gave Russian literature one of its most memorable characters.
About Isaac Babel
Odessa-born master of the short story whose Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories transformed Russian prose, before Stalin’s secret police arrested and shot him in 1940.
More about Isaac Babel
- Isaac Babel's Complete Works appeared in English in 2002In 2002 W. W. Norton published The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, translated by Peter Constantine, edited by his daughter Nathalie and introduced by Cynthia Ozick.
- Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry told the truth about warIsaac Babel's Red Cavalry stories, drawn from the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, showed readers the brutal realities of war, far from the propaganda of the time.
- Isaac Babel's play Sunset reached the Moscow Art TheatreIsaac Babel's play Sunset, set in Odessa's Jewish Moldavanka, premiered in Baku in 1927 and was staged at the Moscow Art Theatre; Boris Pasternak called it remarkable.
- Isaac Babel's 1920 Diary documented the horrors of warIsaac Babel's 1920 Diary, kept during the Polish-Soviet War, recorded the horrors he witnessed; it was finally published in 1990.
- Isaac Babel brought Sholem Aleichem to Russian filmIsaac Babel translated Sholem Aleichem from Yiddish into Russian and wrote for early Soviet Yiddish-themed films, including Jewish Luck (1925) and Wandering Stars.
Sources
- Isaac Babel Wikipedia
- Admired by Hemingway: the war in Ukraine has given Isaac Babel new relevance University of Oslo
- Isaac Babel Jewish Virtual Library
- Benya Krik Wikipedia
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