How Things Were Done in Odessa

Isaac Babel was a master of the Russian short story whose painstakingly crafted work centered on Jewish life in a mythic prerevolutionary Odessa and an all-too-real Civil-War-era and revolutionary Russia. Babel was born in Odessa to a middle-class Jewish family and, while deeply connected to the Jewish milieu, oriented himself early on to becoming “the Russian Maupassant.” Beginning his literary career during World War I with several stories centering on autobiographical themes and Russian-Jewish relations, Babel entered the mainstream of Russian and early Soviet culture with wrenching sketches about the difficulties of life during the first years of the Russian Revolution written for the Russian-turned-Soviet writer and cultural authority Maxim Gorky. Babel came into his own as a writer between 1923 and 1926 with Red Cavalry, his world-famous cycle of stories, terrifying, shocking, and intermittently beautiful and reflective, about the 1920 Soviet-Polish war against the backdrop of Russia’s ruthless Civil War. Based on his own experience as a Soviet war correspondent in 1920—a war diary published much later shows just how extensively the stories drew on real events—these stories place at their center the terror- and violence-ridden experience of borderland Jews caught between Soviet, Polish, and White Russian forces and the painful process by which a Babel character, the Jewish correspondent Lutov, negotiates his relation to the Russian Revolution. His other two great cycles of stories, written in the 1920s and 1930s, feature colorful, violent, and mythic stories of prerevolutionary Odessa Jewish gangsters, as well as semiautobiographical writing about his childhood in Odessa. Babel also wrote plays, including adaptations from Sholem Aleichem’s work. Politically, Babel aligned with the revolution and new regime, but he did not easily find a place in the emerging new order, particularly with the rise of Stalin; several stories from an uncompleted 1930s story cycle seem to allude to the horrors of Soviet collectivization unfolding in Ukraine. Increasingly silenced by censorship, he was arrested in 1939 and executed a year later.