These scented handkerchiefs are the most intimate detail in the book, and they disturb our psyche as we imagine how much Babel, a prisoner of the State, had to pull from so little, how the artifacts of his life had been narrowed down to a trace of perfume, the last semblance of sanity in a world where, deprived of his eyeglasses and his belt, he had to grope around half-blind and clutch at his pants, confessing to crimes he couldn’t have committed, so that Antonina and their little daughter, Lydia (born in 1937), wouldn’t be touched.
In 1940 she was told by one of the military prosecutors that Babel had been sentenced to ten years without the right of correspondence, which meant in the Cheka’s coded language that Babel was already dead, but Antonina didn’t have the means of breaking this code, and she continued to believe that he was at some camp. She would make yearly inquiries, and the same curt note would come back from the Cheka: “Alive and well in the camps.” The secret police began sending ex-cons or zeks to Antonina with tales of having come across Babel in their travels from camp to camp. An elaborate fiction was woven right around her.
Antonina was given her own godfather, Y. E. Elsberg, an editor at a Moscow publishing house whose specialty was spying on writers. Even before Babel’s arrest, Elsberg had been Antonina’s helpmate. “If I mentioned that a plug had gone bad, an electrician would show up the very next day.” He would escort Antonina to the Bolshoi, bring her a bag of oranges before the intermission, take her home “in a stylish black car.” And while Babel sat in the Lubyanka, Elsberg “would come by all dressed up like a suitor,” with gifts for Antonina’s little girl. . . .
Antonina was allowed to live in Babel’s flat, but a Cheka magistrate moved into Babel’s “sealed room” and sat for seventeen years without a single book, like some nagging devil put there to taunt Antonina. Babel’s comrades from the Writers Union were even worse than this demon. They began to fight over Babel’s dacha within a month of his arrest. . . .
There was a “thaw” in the affairs of renegade writers, dead or alive, after Stalin’s own death in 1953, and the case against Babel was dismissed, but Antonina still couldn’t get much out of the Cheka. Babel’s death certificate read:
PLACE OF DEATH—Z; CAUSE—Z.
In 1955 one of Babel’s fellow writers, whom Antonina calls K, told her that his own father, who’d been the warden at a certain Siberian camp, had once befriended Babel. The prisoners “made Babel a dark-green canvas cloak, which he wore regularly. . . . Babel had his own room in this camp; they did not force him to work, so he was able to write.”
According to K, Babel’s cell was next to the warden’s quarters, with a common balcony. “K’s mother would make meat dumplings for Babel.” And it was on the warden’s “black vinyl sofa that Babel had died of a heart attack.”
We begin to wonder about this monstrous fabulation, this assembly of lies, as if the Cheka’s central concern was the spinning out of myth within their private matrix, where reality could be qualified according to their own wish. These lies had little to do with Babel. The machine just couldn’t stop. It had to blunt and obscure the simple fact that Babel had died for nothing, that his imprisonment was a theater piece staged for Stalin (the Boss was aware of every single arrest).
But Antonina had her own fierce will. She labored to get Babel’s work republished “in his native land.” It wasn’t until 1990 that a “complete” edition appeared. I met Antonina in Paris around this time. It was at some seminar devoted to Babel. I remember a woman with a gorgeous smile that not even Stalin and his Cheka could corrupt. She wasn’t a poetess or a literary critic who kept the cadence of Babel’s stories inside her head. She was an engineer who was building a new kind of subway out of Babel’s books, a subway of readers. Babel had badly needed an engineer like her to forage in a bewildering bureaucracy of publishers and unearth diaries and stories that had been squirreled away in some city where Babel had once toiled as a screenwriter or a journalist, writing in a secret little room that the Cheka had never known about; he adored such closets. I told her in the little Russian I had left from graduate school that Babel was a writer I adored. The beautiful Antonina blushed, and her eyes ripped with delight; her love of Babel was much larger than any Soviet myth machine.
INTRODUCTION: ISAAC BABEL
IT’S THE ONE BOOK I HAVE TWO COPIES OF. THEY SIT side by side. The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel (circa 1960), with Milton Glaser’s cover of three Cossacks on horseback wiggling against a white background like quarks or some other magic material suddenly visible to the eye. Glaser has caught both the ferocity and the fragile charm of Babel, whose language seems to slice at us while his characters float across our field of vision. Babel is dangerous; he disturbs our dreams. He’s cruel and tender, like some kind of crazy witch. Each of his best stories—“The King” or “Di Grasso” or “Guy de Maupassant”—is like a land mine and a lesson in writing; it explodes page after page with a wonder that’s so hard to pin down. The structure of the stories is a very strange glass: we learn from Babel but cannot copy him.
I’ve lived with him nearly all my adult life. I discovered Babel after I’d written a novel and read Nabokov, Faulkner, Hemingway, James Joyce, Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley. I was sitting with my editor in an Italian restaurant filled with mafiosi. He himself was a novelist, and every other editor in New York feared him, because he was a pirate who ransacked publishers’ lists and stole authors at will. He didn’t have to steal me. I was his single discovery, his one dark horse. And for a short period, just before my first novel was published, while he bickered with book clubs and lined up blurbs that he himself would write and then ask one of his stolen authors to sign, I remember having lunch with him every day of the week.
He happened to compose one of the blurbs while we were finishing our hazelnut cake (reserved for him and me) and coffee with lemon peel. “Incomparable,” he scribbled on the tablecloth. “Stupendous.” I was embarrassed at his flamboyance, and the liberties he took with the restaurant and its tablecloths. “Babel is the one and only writer who comes to mind.”
“Couldn’t you be a little less exotic? Who’s this Babel?”
He revealed his disappointment by crushing the lemon peel and canceling all our other lunches. He wouldn’t talk to me (or write another blurb) until I’d read Isaac Babel. I was whisked into another dimension where everything to do with my book stood still. I had a book jacket with my name on it but with the title missing. I had a photograph of me with half a face. I had the proofs of every fifth chapter. I found Babel’s stories in a book-shop, but I resisted reading him until I fell upon “The King” and its perverse outlaw in orange pants who reigned over Odessa and disposed of his enemies by firing bullets into the air. He was called Benya Krik, and he was so recognizable that I suffered through palpitations of pleasure and pain.
Benya’s native territory was a Jewish slum, the Moldavanka, home of gangsters and grocers and mythical draymen, a ghetto of dark streets that seemed outside ordinary time, suspended in the reader’s own imagination. I’d met this Benya before, many times, in my Moldavanka, the East Bronx, where he was always defiant in his orange pants. He wasn’t a drayman. His shoulders weren’t broad, but he walked with his own marvelous ballet, giving out candy to all the kids. His nails might be dirty, his shoes unshined, but he was still a gallant. He didn’t seek wealth, but a kind of feudalism, a fief that belonged to him and him alone. The grocers gave him food, and no one would dare steal a solitary fig from them. We never took our problems to the police—they were from another planet, aliens who didn’t bother to understand our sins. The important thing was that our Benya with the dirty fingernails had no fear of them. He ruled even if he never got rich. He was the lord of empty space, prince of those without a language other than the glaring musicality of his orange pants. . . .
I read on and on. I found myself going back to the same stories—as if the narratives were musical compositions that one could never tire of. Repet
ition increased their value. Babel was involving me in merciless fairy tales that evoked the first books I’d ever read. With each dip into Babel I discovered and rediscovered reading itself.
I bought another copy, savored it, put it on my shelf. I wouldn’t travel anywhere with my two Babels. I didn’t want the binding to break. I knew nothing about him until I read the introduction beneath Milton Glaser’s cover of the three wiggling Cossacks. Babel died in a concentration camp in 1939 or 1940, according to Lionel Trilling (he was murdered in the cellars of the Lubyanka; his executioner didn’t fire into the air, like Benya Krik). “It has been said that he was arrested when Yagoda was purged, because he was having a love-affair with Yagoda’s sister.” I put a check near that sentence; the name Yagoda seemed poetic and sinister at the same time. And I couldn’t stop thinking about Yagoda’s sister. Yagoda himself was chief of the Cheka (Stalin’s secret police). And I couldn’t have known it then (few people did), but Trilling had the wrong police chief and the wrong relative. Babel had had an affair with Evgenia Yezhova, wife of Nikolai Yezhov, the Cheka chief who came after Yagoda. Yezhov was one of the great killers of the twentieth century, next to Stalin. And Evgenia and Babel died because of Yezhov, a little man with a limp. But I only learned that years after my original romance with Babel. . . .
My pirate of a publisher never took me back into the fold. He disclaimed me as his one dark horse. My novel appeared, but only with a minor hiccough from a book club, and no blurbs. I had my compensation: Babel. In 1937, at the height of Stalin’s terror machine, with Yezhov in power, Babel was obliged to give an interview before the Soviet Writers Union. The questions asked of him were absurd. I offer one in particular: Why was Babel interested in the exceptional?—as if this were a crime. It was a crime under Stalin. But without the exceptional, we would have no Benya Krik, no stories about Babel’s own ride with the Red Cavalry, no sense of a poetic, troubled language that reverberates in every direction, bathes us in the blood of verbs and nouns.
Babel had to give an answer. It was as absurd as the question, but with a little tongue of truth. Tolstoy, he said, “was able to describe what happened to him minute by minute, he remembered it all, whereas I, evidently, only have it in me to describe the most interesting five minutes I’ve experienced in twenty-four hours. Hence the short-story form.”
And I carry Babel’s “five minutes” in my head wherever I go. It has nothing to do with Tolstoy, with War and Peace versus Red Cavalry, or with large canvases versus small. Babel’s “five minutes” were about creating volcanoes with each sentence, about conjunctions on the page that are closer to jazz riffs than to any writer (including Tolstoy), about a strange autobiographical journey in which Babel mingles with killers and rabbis, Cossacks and painters of icons, the beautiful wife of a Petersburg banker whose only dream is to translate Maupassant, philosophers with their eyes plucked out, Marxists with bullets wrapped in phylacteries; he takes us where we’ve never been and where we could never go—into the incredible lost land of art that Milton Glaser captures with his three cavaliers.
ACCORDING TO CYNTHIA OZICK, Babel “was devoured because he would not, could not, accommodate to falsehood.” Yet his entire life is about falsehood, about evasion, about manufacturing myths. And because the simplest facts of his life are confusing—Babel loved to invent and revise his own biographical data—a chronology, with its own cast of characters, might provide a frame or a picture window through which we can observe Babel, hold him for an instant under our very own looking glass.
1894 Isaac Babel, son of Emmanuel (Manus) and Fanya Babel, is born in the Moldavanka, Odessa’s Jewish quarter, on June 30. Odessa was unlike any other town in the Russian empire. A port on the Black Sea, it was flooded with foreigners, and swollen with Jews from the shtetls of the Ukraine, where Manus and Fanya’s people had come from. It resembled Coney Island or Brighton Beach, with its parade of petty Jewish gangsters and shop owners by the sea. The Babels moved to Nikolaev, another port town on the Black Sea, a little after Isaac’s birth.
1899 Babel’s “silent sister,” Maria, is born to Manus and Fanya in Nikolaev. She will never appear as a character in his fiction. But some of his most poignant letters were written to Maria after she moved to Brussels in 1924.
1905 One of the most turbulent years in Russian history. Russia is defeated by the Japanese after a short, humiliating war. It endures a revolution and a general strike, spurred on by this defeat. The tsar makes certain concessions in his October manifesto to the people, promising a constitutional monarchy. A pogrom breaks out in southern Russia that same October, encouraged by the tsar and his ministers. Russia had had a history of pogroms ever since the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Accused of having planned Alexander’s death, Jews were attacked in over two hundred towns. The government saw this bloodletting as a means of controlling and “calming” the people, and would often help choreograph the beginning and end of a particular pogrom. Babel witnessed the pogrom of 1905 in Nikolaev, during three days and nights near the end of October. Neither he nor his family was harmed. But the pogrom would become a powerful motif in his fiction, and he would insinuate himself into the action as both a sufferer and celebrant: the pogrom excited Babel, aroused him, flooded him with language.
1906 Unable to get into a traditional gymnasium because of the government’s restrictions against Jews, even in “Jewish” Odessa, Babel is sent to a commercial school, Nicholas I, in 1906, and the Babels move back to Odessa, settling in a posh part of town. It was while at Nicholas I that he fell in love with the work of Guy de Maupassant.
1911 Sent by his father to Kiev, where he enrolls at the Institute of Finance and Business Studies, Babel meets his closest “collaborator,” Evgenia Gronfein, or Zhenya, a free-spirited fifteen-year-old girl who believed in the sanctity of art. She was the daughter of Boris Gronfein, a rich manufacturer of agricultural machinery. Young Isaac was welcomed into the household. Gronfein and his wife practically adopted him, but they didn’t expect their own little princess to fall in love with a bumpkin from Odessa.
1916 Babel arrives in Petersburg, living from hand to mouth, he claims, hoping to become the Russian Maupassant. He had little luck with his stories until he met Maxim Gorky. (There was no one quite like Gorky in Russian or any other literature. He would shepherd into being— protect, nourish, provoke—an entire generation of young writers, including Babel and Yuri Olesha, author of Envy. He read their work, edited it before and after publication, marking up manuscripts and books with a big fat crayon.)
Gorky will “command” Babel to go out into the world—a dangerous proposition. Gorky hadn’t been a wanderer by theory or decree. He was a hobo who sucked in his surroundings, who educated himself on the road; his tutors were fellow tramps and Volga boatmen. He was rawboned and muscular, a tall proletarian prince. And Babel was a bookworm from Odessa with weak eyes and “autumn in his heart,” but his imagination was like a house on fire: his entire life seemed to be an internal dialogue with Gorky, the need to see himself as a picaro—a cavalier on his own precipitous battlefront.
1917– 1918 These two years are a kind of shadowland for Babel and many other Russians. He may have served in the Cheka (as a translator), may have been “a soldier on the Rumanian front,” but there are few real records of Babel’s activities: it’s a time of upheaval—revolution and civil war—and Babel may have fallen into some historical crack where biography blends with myth.
1919 Babel marries his sweetheart from Kiev, Evgenia Gronfein (Zhenya), and lives with her in Odessa, surrounded by his sister, mother, father, uncles, nieces, aunts—a whole tribe of Babels.
1920 While in Odessa with his bride, he conspires with the local Communist Party to finagle him into General Budenny’s Red Cavalry as a war correspondent under a Russian pseudonym—Kiril Lyutov. He will spend only four or five months with the Cossacks (from June to September or October 1920), but the diary he kept during his “service” with Budenny would shape him as a write
r. For once, Gorky’s commandment was correct: Babel had gone into the world and discovered a whirlwind in Poland, in the war between Cossacks and Polish cavalrymen.
1921 Babel publishes “The King,” his first celebrated story.
———While Russia is ravaged by civil war, Lenin introduces NEP (New Economic Policy), or “the breather,” a return to capitalism on a small scale. He will allow peasant farmers to grow rich, will bring back nightclubs and casinos, hotels and restaurants for foreigners, even a cadre of prostitutes. Moscow has its own Jazz Age. Experimentation flourishes in all the arts. It is during NEP that Babel matures as a writer, finds his own complex “music.” But Lenin still means to pounce. “It’s a very great mistake to think that NEP means the end of terror,” he tells one of his commissars, himself a terrorist. “We shall resort to terror again.”
1922 Lenin creates a new post, General Secretary of the Party, and anoints Stalin as the first “Gensek.” All of Stalin’s power will come from this post.
1922– 1923 The most fecund period in Babel’s life. Part of the time he lives with Zhenya on a mountain near Batum. Working in isolation, with Zhenya beside him, he completes his Odessa tales and begins the stories that will become Red Cavalry.
1923 Babel’s father dies in Odessa. He will miss Manus more than he ever might have imagined. Manus had been imposing, handsome, unpredictable, given to sudden rages—a father who might have been invented by Franz Kafka. But Manus had also believed in Isaac’s uniqueness, wanted him to be a prodigy on the violin, while Fanya preferred that he not be noticeable in a world that didn’t look favorably upon Jews. “When I go through moments of despair, I think of Papa,” Babel wrote to Fanya in 1927. “What he expected and wanted of us was success not moaning. Remembering him, I feel a surge of strength.”
———Stories from Red Cavalry begin to appear in print.
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