- Person
- Isaac Babel
- Lived
- 1894–1940
- Field
- Short fiction
- From
- Russian (Soviet)
The story
Isaac Babel grew up in Odessa in a Yiddish-speaking milieu, at a time when the city was a great centre of Yiddish and Hebrew literature. Until he was 16 private tutors taught him Hebrew, the Bible and the Talmud. Although he wrote in Russian, his work never left the Jewish world he knew, and he felt a deep kinship with its greatest storyteller, the Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem.
In the 1920s Babel turned to the new art of cinema. Wikipedia records that he wrote the intertitles for the 1925 silent film Jewish Luck, directed by Alexander Granovsky from a screenplay based on Sholem Aleichem. The film follows Menahem-Mendl, Sholem Aleichem's hopeless dreamer, whose schemes in insurance and the haberdashery trade all fail until he decides to become a matchmaker. Babel also wrote the screenplay for Wandering Stars, based on Sholem Aleichem's novel and filmed in 1927, and the screenplay for Benya Krik (1927), drawn from his own Odessa Stories.
His ties to Jewish culture never ceased. In 1926 six of his stories appeared in Hebrew translation in Bereshit, a Hebrew literary almanac. Though not religious, he went to synagogue on the Day of Atonement and celebrated the Passover seder with friends. In 1937, according to the Jewish Virtual Library, he was given the task of preparing a jubilee edition of Sholem Aleichem's works.
In his last years he translated Sholem Aleichem's writings from Yiddish into Russian. His widow, Antonina Pirozhkova, recalled that he worked on Sholem Aleichem to "feed his soul" at a time when he published little of his own. Those manuscripts were seized when he was arrested in 1939. After his rehabilitation Pirozhkova spent decades asking for them back, and in 1987 two KGB agents told her they had been burned.
The translations are lost, but the connection endures. The University of Oslo places Babel alongside Sholem Aleichem, whose stories inspired Fiddler on the Roof, as one of the most famous Jewish writers from Ukraine. His film Benya Krik is still available to viewers through the National Center for Jewish Film.
Why it matters
Babel helped carry Yiddish storytelling to Russian-speaking audiences and to the new art of cinema.
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 Odessa Stories created the gangster Benya KrikIsaac Babel's Odessa Stories, published in 1921–1924 and collected in 1931, brought Odessa's Jewish Moldavanka district to life through the gangster Benya Krik.
- 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.
Sources
- Isaac Babel Wikipedia
- Isaac Babel Jewish Virtual Library
- Jewish Luck Wikipedia
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