Nathalie’s own relationship with Antonina (who’s still alive as I write this sentence) is even more complicated than one might think. Nathalie first met her in 1961, four years after her own mother’s death. It was Lydia, her half sister, who brought Nathalie through the dark foyer and up the stairs of Babel’s “last house” in Moscow. “I saw a woman on the landing. I looked at her and what came out of my mouth has never failed to astonish me. ‘How you resemble my mother!’ I blurted out—and then we both cried in each other’s arms. I was amazed. Here was another woman who, like my mother, had never stopped loving my father, who had never wavered in her devotion to him.”
But this, unfortunately, would be the highest point of an ever declining hill. Nathalie and Antonina now live a few subway stops away from each other. They seem locked in some climate of distrust that’s like a Balzacian battle. It was Nathalie who helped bring Antonina, Lydia, and Lydia’s son to the United States. I talk of my own meeting with Antonina and Lydia in Paris. I mention Antonina’s white hair.
“Red,” Nathalie says, ruining my own memories.
“The woman is hard as rock. I was accused of robbing them [Antonina and Lydia]. I was covered with insults. Our relationship ended, but they were watching me like a falcon. They sent me a certificate from the USSR. When I saw the certificate, I understood everything I wanted to know” about Ehrenburg. It claimed that Antonina, as Babel’s wife, “was the only heir to all his possessions and writings in the whole world.” And the date on this document was three weeks after Zhenya met with Ehrenburg in 1956. “You cannot imagine the power wielded by this man. He promised Antonina that he would come back with proof of a divorce.” And I tried to figure out the logic behind Ilya’s legerdemain. Was he representing himself or the Soviet government in his machinations and maneuvers with Zhenya?
“Ehrenburg undoubtedly considered Antonina a more suitable widow than my mother,” an émigré artist and daughter of a Jewish industrialist. Antonina had Soviet credentials that Zhenya neither had nor wanted—she was the first woman construction engineer to work on the Moscow metro; it was easier to rehabilitate Babel with Antonina along on the ride as his “legitimate wife.” But however much he wanted to honor Antonina, Ilya must have known that he was dishonoring the past of a man he claimed to love and admire, turning him into a Soviet saint, with a Soviet wife and Soviet child. “He understood the Revolution and recognized it as a pledge of future happiness,” Ilya wrote about Babel, the wise rabbi, as if Babel himself were just another toy of socialist realism. The wise rabbi had never really been “rehabilitated,” because his writing remains problematical, with its lashing modernism that eats into the idea of any dogma or belief. Babel belongs nowhere, certainly not in the new Russia, which has been just as niggardly as the old about celebrating a zhid from Odessa who wrote about Jewish bandits and Jewish revolutionists like Gedali, “a tiny, lonely visionary in a black top hat,” who dreams of “an International of good people,” while Lyutov talks of blood and dreams of “a Jewish glass of tea” (“Gedali”).
“Creativity does not dwell in palaces,” Babel once wrote, nor does it dwell in allegiance to anyone—it exists outside the realm of reward. Babel went into the darkness and wrote Red Cavalry, and that book belongs to his readers, whoever we are. And in some profound way, it also belongs to Nathalie Babel, not because she’s any more “legitimate” than Antonina or Lydia, but because she’s the one who has continued his story. Antonina’s claims to Babel’s “possessions” might be twice as authentic as Nathalie’s. I couldn’t care less. I’m not in the business of arbitration. But if Babel was shot in the head in one of Stalin’s cellars, with a little dirty towel to catch the blood, then the Boss and his henchmen had a harder time killing him than they could ever have imagined. His toughness, his singularity, is there in Makhno’s face and in those sad “love letters” to all of Babel’s readers that seem to come right out of the empty spaces in Niort. Nathalie is a minimalist in her own fashion, as brave as that little girl who danced in front of the Kommandant and demanded her mother’s release. . . .
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arbus, Diane. Diane Arbus. New York: Aperture, 1972.
Avins, Carol J. Introduction to Isaac Babel, 1920 Diary.
Babel, Isaac. The Collected Stories. Trans. Walter Morison. Reprint. Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1960.
———. The Complete Works of Isaac Babel. Ed. Nathalie Babel. Trans. Peter Constantine. New York: Norton, 2002.
———. The Lonely Years 1925–1939. Ed. Nathalie Babel. Trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew and Max Hayward. Reprint. Boston: David R. Godine, 1995.
———. 1920 Diary. Ed. Carol J. Avins. Trans. H. T. Willets. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
———. You Must Know Everything: Stories 1915–1937. Ed. Nathalie Babel. Trans. Max Hayward. Reprint. New York: Dell Publishing, 1970.
Babel, Nathalie. “Afterword: A Personal Memoir.” In Isaac Babel, The Complete Works of Isaac Babel.
———. Introduction to Isaac Babel, The Lonely Years.
Barna, Yon. Eisenstein. Trans. Lise Hunter. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973.
Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero. Trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill & Wang, 1968.
Bellow, Saul. “Where Do We Go from Here: The Future of Fiction.” In Irving Malin, ed., Saul Bellow and the Critics.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Isaac Babel. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
Brown, Edward J., ed. Major Soviet Writers: Essays in Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
Burgin, Richard. Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges. New York: Holt, 1969.
Carden, Patricia. The Art of Isaac Babel. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972.
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———. Taras Bulba. Trans. Peter Constantine. New York: Modern Library, 2003.
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About the Author
JEROME CHARYN is the author of more than thirty books, including Darlin’ Bill, which received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His latest novel, The Green Lantern, was a finalist for the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award. He is a frequent contributor to Le Monde and the City section of The New York Times. He lives in New York and Paris, where he is Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University.
BOOKS BY JEROME CHARYN
COPYRIGHT © 2005 BY JEROME CHARYN
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Charyn, Jerome.
Savage shorthand: the life and death of Isaac Babel /
Jerome Charyn.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Babel’, I. (Isaak), 1894–1941. 2. Authors, Russian—
20th century—Biography. I. Title.
PG3476.B2Z62 2005
813’.54—dc22 2005042821
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-43179-0
v3.0
Savage Shorthand Page 16
