Odessa Stories (Pushkin Collection) Paperback – November 15, 2016

While one could read The King and conclude that Babel was a Russian Chandler, but his writings go beyond the melodramatic and assume an almost ethnographic quality. He gives a great feel for Day to day life in the port city in the early 20th century.

Isaac Babel is a great writer who is in the footsteps of Gogel and Pushkin. These are tails of life in Odessa just after the Russian Revolution. Tells of the difficult times of the Jewish people there.

Perfect

If you are wondering why this book is called Odessa Stories and not The Odessa Tales it is because it includes more than originally appeared in that book. Apart from the final tale here all the stories were originally printed in other publications, and as well as the actual tales we also have some pieces here written by Isaac Babel about his life growing up, and a short essay on Russian Literature. The final tale is one that was found really quite recently, although as the translator does point out, there is no authentication that it is a genuine piece by Babel, as it could well be a fake.

Anyway, all that aside this still makes for a great read, and there has probably never been a better Jewish writer in Russian. Odessa which lies in the Ukraine is a seaport that has some really lovely architecture, and although not really these days, once had a high proportion of Jewish settlers, and also had quite a multi-cultural feel.

Here we follow some wonderful characters that are anti-heroes as such, as they are linked with the Jewish Mob. We have the boisterousness of the area, the crime, and the heady mix of life and death as we see these people having to change to accommodate the Russian Revolution as opposed to the Tsarist regime before.

There is one piece here that does depict the horrors of anti-Semitism but even with that throughout this whole book and all the tales is a mix of pragmatism and Jewish humour, and all the stories read more like anecdotes and thus believable. It is like meeting someone from an area where you used to live, and catching up with what has happened since you left.

Vastly enjoyable and a pleasure to read it is also worth reading the translator’s introduction as well to perhaps gain a greater insight into the stories that are presented here.

I was very kindly provided with a free review copy by the publisher via NetGalley to base my review upon.

I had previously only had glancing experiences with Babel, so this was my first real dive into his work. The subject of his stories is Jewish life in Odessa in the early twentieth century, including the foibles and failures of his subjects. Especially the foibles and failures of his subjects, actually, as those were what made good stories. As such, the stories provide an insight into the lives of his subjects, but with a good deal of caricature. Most surprising to me was the significant role of gangsters in the ghetto.

At their best these stories are very good. The problem with inclusiveness is that not all of the stories are of equal interest. But none are particularly long, so there is not a big investment of time in discovering that a story is not much to your taste.

The publisher provided me a copy for review.

Maxim Gorky said of Isaac Babel that he had a ‘Baudelairean predilection for rotting meat.’ Babel’s Odessa Stories (and the stories in the more or less contemporary Red Cavalry), seem to support that point of view. There is much violence there, a multitude of lives suddenly ended, many forms of human degradation, and corruption of just about every kind.

In life, Babel didn’t go out of his way to avoid conflict. He went through three ‘marriages’ (only the first was formalized); he conducted an extended affair with the wife of the NKVD head, Nikolai Yezhov (‘Stalin’s executioner’) and showed remarkable defiance both when arrested and afterwards as his case advanced towards his perhaps inevitable execution. Yet two of his near relations have represented him to us as a quiet, gentle person, dedicated to reading and writing, and not much else.

The narrator in Odessa Stories has ‘glasses on his nose and autumn in his heart’. When relating stories of his childhood, this character represents himself as timid and physically frail. Babel doesn’t ask us to believe that is a true picture of himself, but there are some definite biographic similarities.

Not the least of those similarities is Babel’s experience of Odessa, the southern Ukrainian sea port with many correspondences to Marseille and New Orleans. Boris Dralyuk, the translator of this volume, quotes Jarrod Tanny’s suggestion of Shanghai and San Francisco’s Barbary Coast as also having similarities with old Odessa, ‘both venerated and vilified as a city of sin – heaven for some, hell on earth for others – a haven for smugglers, thieves, and pimps who boasted of their corruption through endless nights of raucous revelry’.

This aspect of Odessa is what we particularly find in Part I of Odessa Stories, ‘Gangsters and Other “Old Odessans”’. Babel’s gang boss Benya (The King) Krik owes his origin to the real life Mishka Yaponchik (1891-1919), a gangster active in Odessa not many years before Babel began writing and publishing these stories.

Babel’s Lyubka Shneyveys bears less resemblance to the still-celebrated Odessan criminal Sheyndlya-Sura Solomoniak (1846-1902), but she has somehow come to own a diverse property portfolio that includes a quarry and an inn incorporating a brothel. Lyubka frequently serves as an enabler, not least when a husband is required for the daughter of drayman Froim the Rook.

Froim runs a small haulage business to and from the docks. Through him we gain an insight into what would at the time have been an important activity. His daughter, Basya, whose mother has been dead since her birth, is practically minded and capable, but she is, to say the very least, a strapping lass and unhesitatingly outspoken.

Lyubka comes up with a brainwave: why not marry her to Benya Krik? Benya happens to be on Lyubka’s premises at the time, but he is with one of Lyubka’s girls and Froim has to wait. The wait is long. This story, ‘Father’, is one of the funniest in the book.

The surprise for anyone new to Odessa Stories is likely to be that all of the most prominent characters are Jewish. At the time, Odessa was home to 140,000 Jews, 35 per cent of its total population.

Under the Russian Empire, Odessa’s Jews were subject to successive pogroms. Babel’s ‘The Story of My Dovecote’ recounts one of those pogroms through the eyes of a young boy. Babel is specific about the year; it was 1905. The boy’s elderly great uncle was murdered, the family shop broken-into and looted (as were many others), and the boy himself assaulted; his precious, newly-purchased doves killed.

Dralyuk rounds-off his volume with a section entitled ‘Loose Leaves and Apocrypha’. This includes a 1916 essay warmly celebrating Odessa; a short story set on board a ship in Odessa’s port on the day of Lenin’s funeral; and ‘Esther’s Ring’, a story that was quite possibly not written by Babel but is sufficiently close to his style to have convinced many. Given Odessa’s reputation to this day for the production of counterfeit goods, it is a nice irony if ‘Esther’s Ring’ is indeed ‘a knock off’

Isaac Babel was born in a heavily Jewish area of Odessa. He was interested in that city’s Jewish gangsters, and nine of this volume’s seventeen short stories, collected from various journals and newspapers, deal with them; five deal with his childhood and youth.

The blurb on the cover says, “this collection of stories is considered one of the great masterpieces of twentieth-century Russian literature”, and Babel certainly has some vivid ways of expressing himself. Just one example: “Sounds flake from my violin like iron filings”. He conveys atmosphere very well. But I found most of these stories curiously unfocussed, often starting with one character and then moving off at a tangent to another. I’m afraid I didn’t really take to most of them.