Customer Reviews

The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel

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I stumbled across Isaac Babel because of a single line quoted in Paul Johnson's "History of the Jews". And then I was forever hooked.

First, a caveat. Be sure you understand when reading Babel's short stories that you are not reading his autobiography or journal. He did in fact listen to our creative writing teachers; he wrote what he knew. He knew the Russian revolution. He knew the Cossacks. He knew war. He knew living inside and outside the pale. His world jumps off the page because he lived it first.

The stories contain autobiographical material, actively mixed with the yeast of fiction. Use this aspect of his writing to chase rabbits. Follow up this book with his biography or find out more about the Russian revolution. Both of those topics will make more sense after reading his collected stories.

As a writer, I stand in awe of Babel's stingy use of words. Some scenes are so hugely horrible that I would have been tempted to throw in appropriate adverbs and adjectives in an attempt to convince you, my reader, just how hugely horrible it really was. Babel simply tells the story, and you gasp when you are done, horrified when you peak through the keyhole (and I would have blasted a hole in the wall).

When you read Babel, you must be willing to go at the stories with an open mind, not expecting him to flatten the Commies, defend the Jews, or paint the picture the way you want him to. He will not do that, no matter how many times you try to make it so. You will hear no overtones of right or wrong, get no definitive answers about the people on either side of the Russian revolution.

For that, I am most grateful to Isaac Babel. Nothing about our world can be easily distilled into sharp black and white. His stories give us the real world in astounding color.

The Red Cavalry story sequence is one of the great works of 20th century literature. It is reportedly based on Babel's experience as a Commissar in the Red Army during the post-revolutionary invasion of Poland. Babel's autobiographical narrator reflects profound ambivalence. An urban Jew and intellectual serving with peasant Cossack soldiers whose conduct would have been normative during the 30 Years War, Babel's narrator exemplifies and documents the profound contradictions of the Russian Civil War and revolutionary effort. The stories contain multiple scenes of great power, horror, and punishing irony. Other reviewers, see below, have commented on the unpleasant nature of these stories. These reactions are a tribute to Babel's capacity as a writer. Why should we expect anything pleasant from this subject? This work is intended to be profoundly disturbing. Babel aimed to show clearly some of the horror of his time and did so in a way that no factual chronicler can equal.

A superbly written insider's look at the Russian revolution. Babel can convey the horrors of war with very few words. I enjoyed the best his sarcastic treatement of the bombastic communist rhetoric in such stories as "Salt" and "Treason" (maybe because I was exposed to it myself at one time).

The frightfully ugly picture on the cover of this edition (what in the world were the publishers thinking?) might keep a lot of people away, but the few brave souls that look inside will find one of the great 20th century craftsmen of prose. I can't think of another writer than chooses his words more carefully, that can pack more into a single sentence. "Pierced by the flashes of the bombardment, night arches over the dying man." Single words can take your breath away - the choice of "arches" is the one that does it for me - but you'll probably have others. The brutality of the world he describes may seem foreign, but it never becomes oppressive, mainly because the writing is so good. The stories themselves are rather difficult to love - there is very little hope to latch on to, there are very few characters one can feel close to; there are very few real characters at all, except the narrator. Even under these horrific circumstances, though, Babel creates emotions than one can identify with - pride, love, lust, anger. He has a thorough understanding of human character. It is apparent that the circumstances of war don't create new emotions, they just amplify things we feel anyway.

This book is a necessary read for anyone that wants to learn how to write poetically without being florid, compress pages of description into a few words. This compression is one of the reasons that the stories stay in mind long after they've been read. Buy the book - or get the other edition in a used book store, so you don't have to look at that awful picture.

Reading Babel is no picnic in the park. His words are often hard to understand, let alone relish. In Red Cavalry, as he evokes heartrending scenes of torture, deprivation, and corruption, it is often hard to read without almost begging the author for a point of view, a call to arms. Yet in his sharp, vivid--yet terse, accounts (somewhat naturalistic as characters succumb to the hideous corollaries of civil stife--hunger, unbridled violence, senseless cruelty, inhumanity) his compact, frugal stories are never sentetious or tendetious.

The Odessa Tales, the second part of his ouevre, is nearer and dearer to my heart. Immediately, I fell in love with a rabbi's narration of mythical gangster hero Benya Krik. Benya, a Jewish thug with a code of values, who no doubt has the power to empower the young minds of Jewish boys, commands respect as a charismatic desperado, so alien to the preconceptions of Jews as victims and middle-class pushovers, always dependent on the mercy of the ruling elite. Benya wends his way around authorities--whether monarchist or Bolshevik, not only marching to the beat of a different drum, but subjugating others to the beat. Scenes of Odessa, my hometown, are sumptuous though sparing in descriptions of wealthy and lowly merchants, sailors, criminals, and lackeys.

Having read these and other stories in Russian, I look forward to reading the translation in hopes of better understanding them in my adopted tongue. Babel is not the most facile read, but an important and long ignored voice in the Soviet literary canon. Enjoy.

Some of the most brilliant and influential stories of the twentieth century. "Red Cavalry" is the most successful example of the linked-short-story form, a war illuminated in lightning flashes of gruesome brilliance. "Guy de Maupassant" also contains some of the best advice on writing ever put to paper. I read Babel every couple of years to keep me honest. Essential stories for any serious reader, and certainly for anyone who aspires to write.

I am sorry, but I don't think Babel ever questions the revolution or war in general. Traumatized to a nervous shock by a pogrom in Nikolaev ("The Story of my Dovecot"), he carried this trauma to the end of his life. I know him well, I myself was there (and to some degree still am): this fear of the brutes and envy of them, envy of their devil-may-care freedom to kill and to spare life, of the epic quality of their horrible deeds and attitudes (straight out of the Illiad, the Nibelungenlied, the epics of Shevchenko and just about any other epic). This fear of a miserable little cultured Jew of the primal forces all around him, in all their brutality and ugliness. And the envy. When given a half-chance (and a false half-chance) to become one of them, he throws away his culture, his principles and his morals and grabs it with both hands. He knows that our most basic civilization, our civility, our peacefulness, our culture, mercy, compassion don't stand a chance when confronted by an idiot with a gun. He knows that violence is what really rules.
But he has trouble remaking himself. Though he wants to brutalize, at first he cannot. His upbringing is too deep within him. Others feel it too, and stay away from him. He is very dedicated to ideas of revolution, he is as friendly and supportive of the "revolutionaries" (i.e. bandits) around him, but they now he is not one of them. He begins to realize that not being "one of them" has become enough to get a bullet. Finally he takes a peasant woman's goose, kills it for no reason, then tells the peasant woman to kook it ("My First Goose"). This wins him a bit of respect from the others. But not much. To win real respect, a person must be killed or raped for no reason. Even then, Babel for a short while celebrates this victory over his humane side. Only his heart hurts, bun no one cares about that, not even he.
Who knows what else there was? Did Babel manage to kill someone for no reason? If he did, he does not write about that. Perhaps through some encounters with better people ("Gedali"), Babel begins to realize that his new friends are not exactly the best of humanity. But it is too late. He is now too mired to have a clean look at the work of his hands. So he tells Gedali that the International (the Communist anthem) is eaten with gunpowder and spiced with blood, and invents himself a new lie: "These people are trash, but The Party [the Communist Party] will set them straight".
And so on goes the story of this brilliant and pathetic man, who allowed a pogrom to define his life and who wasted it in service of the revolution that killed him. Brilliantly written, both extremely poetic and extremely documentary, the book is an ultimate testament both to the obscenity and the savagery of the epic and to the epicity of the obscene and the savage. It is a great irony that Babel was murdered by the same revolution he fought for, that his International became spiced with his own blood. But the greatest irony is that now his sincere pro-revolutionary book has become the greatest testament against revolutions and wars. This is a legacy, but not the one he was trying to achieve.
What does all this have to do with our contented life in America? A great deal. Imperial Russia too was considered a civilized country, until revolution and civil war changed its face. When 500,000 Jews were killed just in Ukraine by just one army (Petlyura's), the world remade its image into that of an eternal savage. We here are also capable to become the same brutes as Babel's co-fighters. Here too there are places where one wins respect by killing and not by mercy. Here too people waste their lives in service to false gods. Here too some get into false freedom of devil-may-care attitude and into epic savagery and obscenity. And underneath it all, violence rules us all.

How late I learned the essential things in life! In my childhood, nailed to the Gemara, I led the life of a sage, and it was only later, when I was older, that I began to climb trees"
So we have the image of Babel the pale scholarly youth with 'spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart" He after Chekhov is the great Russian short story writer.
Babel's greatness as a short-story is related to his realistic precision, and observational power. He sees often it seems into the heart of his characters with an objective and penetrating eye. He portrays soul- wrenching scenes of great violence, deprivation with a kind of detached objectivity. His stories like those of Chekhov perhaps like those of Russian writers especially often involve incidents of great cruelty.
It is interesting that the opening story tells of an eighty-six year old old-time Jew who living with his son and daughter- in law.The son is about to adopt the new faith of the Revolution.The old man realizing that he will have no place in the new order hangs himself- an act which Babel portrays as an act of courage and faith in God. And this while it seems to me showing a certain regrettable contempt for the Torah world to which the old man is bound.
Babel's early stories , the childhood tales of which the most famous is 'On a Dovecote'already have his characteristic realistic precision. The stories which make him most known , "The Red Cavalry " stories in which he tells of the Cossacks he rode with are another important part of the oeuvre.Here there is felt especially the great division in Babel between the world of power and physical force, and a kind sensitive inner life.Then there are the Odessa stories of Benya Krik, the world of Jewish gangsters, and of a colorful and yet cruel life once again precisely observed.
The tale of Babel's later years when under the shadow and threat of Stalin he spoke of himself writing 'in the genre of silence', and of his being murdered is the tale of a great writer cut down too soon.
We don't have all the stories we might have from this great master. But what we do have are the axe which breaks through the icy soul within.

There is little more I can say about this astonishing piece of work that has not already been said, but I will add my piece in the hope that it will encourage more people to read what is a genuinely important piece of writing.
Buy this book to appreciate Babel's portrayal of real and raw emotion, his comprehensive understanding of human character, his sparse, tight writing style that is both painfully lucid and beautifully poetic.

The one new thing I think has to be said is a defence of the picture on the front. What has to be understood is why this picture is there and why it looks the way it does; The cheek and mouth are sticking out that way for a very good reason! My only advice is to say if you do not know the full story don't comment on it. In any case, this is a wonderful, life-changing book that needs to be read by everyone.

Through his depictions of the Polish-Soviet war, Isaac Babel questions the "rightness" of the Bolshevik Revolution and war in general. His attitude to the atrocities committed is uncompromising and i feel that this is ,as a comment on War and its effects, unparalleled. It takes no prisoners and leaves the reader asking for more.