A boy from the Moldavanka
Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel was born in Odessa on July 13, 1894 (July 1 in the Old Style calendar then used in Russia), into a Jewish family on the Moldavanka, a crowded, raucous district on the city’s edge, famous for its traders, carters and gangsters. His father, Manus (Emmanuil) Babel, sold agricultural machinery; Babel later portrayed him as a struggling shopkeeper, though his daughter Nathalie recorded that he had in fact owned a large warehouse. His mother was Feyga Babel.
Soon after his birth the family moved to Nikolaev, another port on the Black Sea, and returned to Odessa in 1906. Odessa was then one of the great Jewish cities of the world, a busy, multilingual, irreverent place where Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian and Hebrew mixed on the street. That world, its humour, its violence and its music, would become Babel’s great subject.
Quotas and a literary apprenticeship
Babel was a quick, bookish child. Because of the Russian empire’s quota on Jewish students, he was refused a place at the Odessa Commercial School and was tutored at home, studying Hebrew, the Bible and the Talmud alongside secular subjects. He read French literature avidly and wrote his first stories in French, in admiration of Flaubert and Maupassant. Barred by the same quotas from the University of Odessa, he studied at the Kiev Institute of Finance and Business, graduating in 1915.
That year he moved to Petrograd, determined to become a writer. There he found a crucial patron in Maxim Gorky, the most famous Russian writer of the day, who published two of his stories in his journal Letopis in 1916. Gorky also told the young man that he did not yet know enough of life, and advised him to go out into the world before writing more.
Revolution and war
Babel took the advice. He served on the Romanian front until December 1917; by his own later account, he worked as a translator for the Petrograd Cheka, the new Bolshevik secret police. From March 1918 he reported for Gorky’s newspaper Novaya Zhizn until Lenin closed it that July. During the Civil War he held a string of jobs, in food requisitioning, in the People’s Commissariat for Education and in publishing in Odessa. On August 9, 1919, he married Yevgenia Gronfein, the daughter of a well-to-do Jewish family from Kiev.
In 1920, with war correspondent’s credentials from the Bolshevik party in Odessa, Babel joined Semyon Budyonny’s First Cavalry Army as it rode west in the Polish–Soviet War. To blend in among the Cossacks, who were notorious for their hatred of Jews, he travelled under the Russian name Kirill Vasilievich Lyutov. Through the summer of 1920 he rode with the army through eastern Galicia and Volhynia, regions of ancient Jewish communities, and recorded what he saw in a diary: looting, rape, pogroms, the killing of prisoners, and the misery of the shtetls caught between armies.
Red Cavalry
From that diary Babel created his masterpiece. Red Cavalry, published as a book in 1926 after the stories had appeared in magazines, is a cycle of 34 short stories, many only a few pages long. Its narrator, Lyutov, is a bespectacled Jewish intellectual among the Cossacks, longing to be accepted by men who despise everything he is, and appalled and fascinated by their violence. In the most famous story, “My First Goose” he wins the Cossacks’ approval only by brutally killing a goose. In “Gedali” an old Jewish shopkeeper in Zhitomir asks on the eve of the Sabbath where the sweet revolution is, and begs for an “International of good people.”
The stories were written in a prose of extraordinary compression, in which beauty and horror sit side by side in a single sentence, and they made Babel famous across the Soviet Union and soon abroad; the book appeared in English in 1929. They also made him enemies. Budyonny furiously attacked the book as a slander on his army, and recent research suggests he demanded Babel’s execution. Gorky defended him publicly, and his protection helped keep Babel’s work in print. The diary itself was published only in 1990.
Odessa Stories
Babel’s other great cycle, the Odessa Stories, turned his native Moldavanka into legend. Its hero is Benya Krik, “the King” a flamboyant Jewish gangster who runs the district with style, wit and a kind of rough justice, and whose wedding feasts, raids and funerals are described with comic grandeur. Against the image of the Jew as a helpless victim, Babel set Jews who were strong, earthy and unafraid. The stories became classics of Russian literature and of Jewish humour.
Babel also wrote for the stage and screen. His play Sunset, about the Krik family, was performed in the late 1920s, while his later play Maria was blocked from production in the Soviet Union. He worked on film scripts, including with Sergei Eisenstein on Bezhin Meadow.
The genre of silence
Babel’s private life was divided between countries and households. Yevgenia emigrated to Paris in 1925, and their daughter Nathalie was born there in 1929; Babel visited them several times but would not settle abroad. With the actress Tamara Kashirina he had a son, Emmanuil, born in 1927, who was later adopted by the writer Vsevolod Ivanov and, as Mikhail Ivanov, became a noted painter. From 1934 he lived with the engineer Antonina Pirozhkova, with whom he had a daughter, Lydia, in 1939.
As Stalin tightened his grip and socialist realism became compulsory, Babel published less and less. Speaking at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, he joked that he had become a master of a new literary genre, the genre of silence. He travelled to Paris in 1935 for the International Congress of Writers in Defence of Culture and could have stayed in the West, but he returned to Moscow. He still enjoyed privileges, including a dacha in the writers’ colony at Peredelkino, but his writing, slow and endlessly revised, increasingly went into his drawer.
Arrest and execution
On May 15, 1939, officers of the NKVD arrested Babel at Peredelkino. His papers, including unpublished manuscripts, were seized and never recovered. His file, Case No. 419, accused him of Trotskyism, terrorism and spying for France and Austria. Babel had known Nikolai Yezhov, the former head of the NKVD who had just fallen from power, and his wife, and many historians believe that connection helped seal his fate. Under interrogation, almost certainly under torture, he signed a confession, which he later retracted.
In January 1940 Lavrentiy Beria submitted to Stalin a list of 346 prisoners recommended for execution, Babel among them. His closed trial lasted about twenty minutes. He declared that he was innocent and had never been a spy, and asked only to be allowed to finish his work. He was shot on January 27, 1940, aged 45, and his ashes were thrown into a common grave at Moscow’s Donskoy Cemetery. For years his family was told nothing of his death. He was officially rehabilitated on December 23, 1954.
A Jewish writer in Russian
Babel wrote in Russian and served, for a time, a revolution that promised to abolish the old divisions of religion and nation. Yet he has been called the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry. His stories are saturated with Jewish life: the Hasidim of Volhynia mourning their dead rebbe, the Jewish poor of the shtetls stripped bare by armies, the boisterous Jews of Odessa. Red Cavalry is one of the most searching works ever written about a Jew’s place in a violent world, its narrator torn between the Jewish conscience he cannot escape and the revolution he wants to join.
His childhood stories, such as “The Story of My Dovecote” which recalls the pogroms of 1905 through a boy’s eyes, are among the most powerful accounts in literature of what antisemitic violence meant for the children who survived it.
Legacy
After his execution, Babel’s name vanished from Soviet literature until his rehabilitation. Since then, his reputation has only grown. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest short-story writers of the twentieth century. Konstantin Paustovsky called him the first truly Soviet writer; Jorge Luis Borges praised the music of his style; and writers including James Salter and George Saunders have cited him as a master. His widow Antonina Pirozhkova’s memoir, At His Side, and his daughter Nathalie’s editions of his work brought his life and writing to new readers.
In Odessa a monument to him was unveiled in 2011, and his Moldavanka lives on in literature as vividly as any real place. Babel published comparatively little, but each of his stories, polished through dozens of drafts, remains a lesson in how much can be said in a few pages, and his death stands as one of the starkest examples of how Stalin’s terror destroyed the writers who might have told its story.
Sources & further reading
Isaac Babel, Wikipedia · Isaac Babel: My First Goose, Sapir Journal · Admired by Hemingway, University of Oslo · Isaac Babel, Wikiquote · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.