The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine

by Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Isaac Babel

  On July 13,1926, their son Mikhail was born in Leningrad. Babel, who was then in Moscow, expressed his enthusiasm from a distance. “The long-awaited telegram arrived last night. Well done,Tamara! Its great that it s a boy. Girls are common enough, but a boy can turn out to be a real provider. . . . Im dying to know how it all went, how you are feeling, where you had the baby. Please tell me everything quickly. Its such a bitter feeling not to know, but Im tied down here completely and just cant break away for the time being. . . . God bless you, dear Tamara, and get well soon—and when I come, I shall be so happy for you. Letters, letters, letters! I kiss you warmly, my dear soul.”*

  By the time their son was born, Tamara thought that he had finished all the necessary arrangements for his family s departure. She believed, not unreasonably, that the moment had arrived when Babel could start a real family life with her and Mikhail. But this was never to happen.

  Later in 1926 and 1927, Babel wrote to Tamara mostly from Kiev, where he had temporarily settled. They celebrated together Mikhails first birthday on July 13, 1927, and again Tamara made plans for their future together. But it was the last time that Babel was ever to see his son. Two weeks later, he was already in Paris with his wife.

  * Memoirs of Tamara Ivanova, published in the literary journal Oktyabr (October), May, June, July 1992, Moscow.

  The Soviet Way

  Four years after my mothers death, in 1961,1 traveled to the USSR for the first time. There, I found out that in Moscow my mothers deepest secret was common knowledge. Everybody in the literary and cultural milieu knew that Mikhail V. Ivanov was Babels natural son. He was still a small child when his mother, Tamara Vladimirovna Kashirina, married the Soviet writer Vsevolod Ivanov, who adopted, raised, and loved Mikhail as his own. For this reason, Tamara Ivanova never permitted Babel to see his son again. When Mikhail was about eighteen, some well-intended soul told him the truth about his origins. Such a revelation must have caused him much pain and confusion. He later became a painter, and was known for his cityscapes of Moscow. We never met and never will, although I always felt a lot of fraternal sympathy with him. I learned recently of his death in Moscow in the spring of 2000.

  That first trip to the Soviet Union in 1961 was a sort of pilgrimage for me. My primary motivations were to learn something more about the fate of my father, and I still wanted to find out what really lay behind that last meeting between my mother and Ehrenburg. I went in an official capacity, a modest one, but one which provided the protection of the French government. I was a guide-interpreter for the first postwar national exhibition organized by the French Chamber of Commerce. The exhibition was intended to show off all the advances of French industry, from fountain pens to radios to tractors to cars. It was a momentous occasion. Two hundred guide-interpreters were eventually chosen by the Soviet embassy, out of four hundred candidates, all of whom had been preselected and trained by the French. The selection, as we learned later, had been carried out according to very specific criteria: a certain percentage of actual Russian emigres (by 1961, these persons had already reached middle age); a certain percentage of their children, born in France, who were bearing Russian surnames; a certain number of women of Russian origin, who had married Frenchmen, thereby acquiring French surnames; and Frenchwomen who had acquired Russian surnames through marriage! How I stayed on that list, I do not know and I never asked.

  Before our departure, a large group of French laborers were sent to Moscow to work on the construction site for the exhibition, which was to be located in the huge Sokolniki Park. The French authorities gave preference to members of the French Communist Party, who were so very eager to visit the USSR. Soon after their arrival, they became appalled by the work habits of the Soviets, whom they considered slow, lazy, unskilled, incompetent, etc. It took three or four Soviets to produce the output of a single French worker. I served as an interpreter for a number of French workers, when they answered questions about their way of life in France. Their fellow Communists could not believe what they said. One lodging for one family, their own kitchen, perhaps a qua-tre-chevaux car to drive to the farm on weekends to visit their parents. . . . All lies, of course. And the French were foaming at the mouth.

  A big celebration was held in Sokolniki Park when the construction site was finally completed. Everyone was invited, including the Soviet workers. The French government had flown in wonderful food and wine for this festive occasion. All of us went, of course. There was a beautiful bonfire and the party ended when our French workers ceremoniously threw their Communist Party membership cards into the flames. The experiment in political enlightenment had been a huge success.

  As guide-interpreters, we had to work very hard, since there were over eighty thousand visitors a day. All plans for organized shifts had to be forgotten, and sometimes we worked twelve hours a day, instead of the expected six. During the exhibition, I was assigned to the very large book section. We had a huge quantity of paperbacks and many beautiful hardbound art books. There were three copies of each. After the first display had disappeared, we installed the second. For the third display, we had enough paperbacks, but we decided to nail down the art books by their covers, so visitors should still enjoy them. In the end, we were left with the nailed bookcovers. Needless to say, the book section did not have much to pack for the return to Paris. Nevertheless, it was an unforgettable experience. None of my later visits to Moscow as an individual scholar, with a grant to work in the Lenin Library, at least ostensibly, can match the encounters, and surprises, of those few summer months of 1961—the time of my first meetings with my half-sister Lydia and her mother.

  In the late 1950s, my aunt, Meri Chapochnikoff, nee Babel, my father s only sister, began a correspondence with her niece Lydia, and her mother Antonina Nikolayevna Pirozhkova. She too had somehow learned about their existence. Not wanting to hurt or offend my mother, she did not write to them until after her death. In 1961, knowing that I was going to Moscow, she tried to tell me about them, but I would not hear of it. Yet despite my deep resentment, Aunt Meri told me just before my departure that she had informed them that I was coming. She gave me their telephone number and tried her best to convince me to meet them. I was furious at her for what I considered her betrayal of my mothers life and memory. I felt full of conflicts, and expressed my confusion to Boris Souvarine,* an old friend of my fathers and a wise man. He said to me, “Trust your fathers judgment and trust your heart.”

  There is one particularly striking difference between Babels family in Paris and his family in Moscow, specifically, our ignorance of their existence. Antonina Nikolayevna learned of Babels wife and daughter on the first day she met him at a luncheon at a friends house in 1932. As she recalled their first meeting in her memoirs, “Over lunch, Babel told us how difficult it had been for him to get permission to go abroad, and how long the process had dragged on. Going was an absolute necessity for him, since his family lived abroad with no means of support, and it was very difficult to help them from Moscow.”^

  As it turned out, she learned about my existence right from the beginning. “ Tm going there to meet a little three-year-old miss/ he said. Td like to bring her back to Russia, as I fear they might turn her into a monkey there/ He was speaking of his daughter Natasha, whom he had not seen.”**

  In her memoirs, Antonina notes that Babel never spoke to her about his son Misha, about whose existence she learned from friends. On the other hand, she learned a great deal more about us over the years. “By contrast, I knew everything about Natasha. Babel would always show me her photographs and repeat everything that Evgenia Borisovna wrote in her letters about her, and would ask me to buy toys and little books for her.”^ Her daughter Lydia naturally knew of us all her life.

  * See the second footnote of my preface to this volume.

  ^ At His Side, The Last Years of Isaac Babel, p. 2, by A. N. Pirozhkova, Steerforth Press, South Royalton, Vermont, 1996, paperback edition

  ** Op. cit., p. 2.

&
nbsp; ^ Op. cit., p. 92.

  Their awareness of us contrasted with our lack of it. In his personal correspondence, Babel wrote practically every day to relatives and friends. I figure that he must have written at least twelve personal letters a day—often using postcards. But there was never a word about his other life in Moscow, not even when his second daughter was born in January 1937—an event which must have made him very happy.

  On my first day in Moscow, I realized that if I did not call this family immediately, I would never do it. So I called. Lydia and I agreed to meet in front of the Bolshoi Theater the next day. She would wear red and I would wear blue—and thus we would know each other. She arrived with a friend—and so did I. My friend was Tanya Parrain,2 who was also an exhibition guide, and was also in the Soviet Union for the first time. It seemed that each of us needed reinforcement. We were both young, pretty, I think, and nicely dressed. We resembled each other in some unexpected way. Once during that summer, when we were trying to squeeze together into a crowded phone booth, an irate citizen called us “useless doubles.”

  On the day of our first encounter, we walked around the city, making conversation, testing the ground for emotional land mines. She was a young architect. I was teaching French language and literature. Then Lydia said, “My mother is expecting us for tea.” It was one of those moments of decision that one remembers forever—an existential moment that can change your whole life. I accepted.

  So we went to what had been my fathers last home, a large two-story stone house in the heart of Moscow. At the time I met them, they each had a room on the second floor with access to a communal bath and kitchen. I remember their rooms as being quite cozy, in a cluttered, friendly Russian manner. Their eating and sleeping in the same room did not surprise me, as I had done the same with my mother for many years, as had many other Russian emigres. This old part of the city has since been torn down to make way for modern apartment buildings.

  As we walked into a dark entry and climbed a flight of stairs, I saw a woman standing at the top of the landing and crying. I looked at her, and what suddenly came out of my mouth has never failed to astound

  me. “You look so much like my mother!” I blurted out. I have compared photos of both of them in their youth, and indeed there was a physical resemblance. We both started to cry. I was amazed and felt deeply touched to meet another woman who, like my own mother, had never stopped loving my father—who appeared never to have wavered in her devotion to him. For many years and across the Iron Curtain, we remained a part of each others lives as best we could, despite the obstacles. Lydia and her mother eventually emigrated to the United States in 1996.

  Returning to the subject of Ehrenburg and his encounters with my mother, I quote from a recent biography of this enigmatic figure by Joshua Rubenstein:

  Ehrenburg saw Babels first wife Yevgeniya Borisovna in France on two occasions after the Second World War. When he visited Paris in 1946, according to Nathalie Babel, he conveyed the message that he [Babel] was alive and had spent the War in exile, under house arrest, not far from Moscow.*

  There is no doubt in my mind that on this occasion, Ehrenburg knew he was lying to my mother. He of all people had sufficiently high stature and connections to know the truth about Babels fate. In 1944, he had just won the Lenin Prize for his work as a war correspondent, and had won the Stalin Prize for Literature a few years earlier. He was at the height of his fame and power. Rubenstein himself noted in his book that by the end of the war, “No other private citizen [in the USSR] reached such unique stature.”^ He considered Babel to be among his closest friends. Surely he would have been able to find out if Babel was really alive and living so close by

  Why did he mislead my mother? Certainly not to spare her feelings, as he knew she absolutely despised him. I believe strongly that he was following orders to pass on false information. After all, he had done just that during his whole professional life. Babel was well known in the literary community in France, the USSRs wartime ally, and was admired by many eminent men of letters, such as Andre Gide, Romain Rolland, and Andre Malraux. These same writers had been very forceful in insisting that Babel be sent to Paris as a delegate in 1935 to the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture and Peace. They surely would have asked Ehrenburg about Babels fate. De Gaulle had made Ehrenburg a member of the French Legion of Honor after the liberation of Paris. The Soviet government could hardly have found a more credible messenger of the news that the Soviet Union had spared Babels life. And what better way to publicize this message than to inform his wife?

  * Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg, p. 288, by Joshua Rubenstein, Basic Books, a Division of HarperCollins, New York, 1996. t Op. cit., p. 218.

  Ehrenburg met with my mother in 1956, ten years after their first encounter. He was working hard on the rehabilitation of Babels works and was the de facto chairman of a Commission of the Writers’ Union to look after Babels legacy. He was indeed instrumental in getting Babel republished at last in the USSR. Antonina Nikolayevna was also a member of this commission. I believe that in 1956, Ehrenburg, a survivor, decorated with every possible honor the Soviet system could bestow, miraculously still alive at the age of sixty-five, felt that he had nothing to fear anymore, and that he was trying to ease his conscience. He did act on behalf of many people who were victimized by the Soviet regime, and he did help in the rehabilitation of some of the maligned dead. Babel was his great friend and a great writer, whom he professed to love. He did everything he could to break the silence surrounding Babels name, his memory, and his work and to introduce Babel to new generations of readers who had never heard of him. He wrote the introduction to the 1957 edition, the first edition in the USSR after the war. His introduction was bold for the time, and he knew that it would not be met favorably by everyone. His introduction and Babels stories were in fact very much criticized by the Communist literary establishment. It took ten years for another volume of Babels work to be published again in 1966.

  In 1956, Ehrenburg informed my mother of Babels date of death and his rehabilitation. But why did he want to tell her about a second family and to ask her to sign a falsified admission of divorce? It was a cruel act on his part. There was certainly no love lost between them. Ehrenburg undoubtedly considered Antonina a more suitable widow than my mother, who by then had lived in Paris for more than thirty years as an emigre artist. After all, Antonina was the epitome of the new Soviet woman, having been the first woman construction engineer employed to work on the Moscow subway system. Now that Babel was rehabilitated, perhaps he thought she could receive a pension as his legitimate wife. Perhaps Ehrenburg had other reasons for trying to establish her social position and status, all honorable from his point of view.

  Over the years following our first meeting in 1961,1 developed a great admiration for Antonina Nikolayevna and respect for her efforts and perseverance. She was one of the main editors of the publication of two volumes of Babels collected works in 1990-1991, when she was eighty years old. These two volumes are still the most complete compilation of Babels work in Russian. Unfortunately, certain omissions, which were made understandably in the 1957 publication, are found again in the later edition.

  I am thankful to her that she shared with me a few of my fathers unpublished stories. These stories had resurfaced little by little and had been given to her. Babel had left these stories with friends (perhaps as gifts). They had kept them, and after the rehabilitation of Babel, they entrusted the stories to her. Indeed, over the years she became the repository of Babels work in the Soviet Union. As a result, and with Ehrenburgs help, she established her social position as an important personage.

  America

  Being Russian, French, American, and Jewish has meant that wherever I am, part of me could be somewhere else. Living in so many worlds can lead to varied confusions, mistakes, emotional misperceptions, and in my case it has also led to impulsiveness and a tendency toward pessimism. However, when th
e United States offered the opportunity, I decided to try to benefit from my “multicultural identity.” I soon learned that New York City was an ideal place to put my confusions to good use, particularly on upper Broadway.

  After mother died, I was poor and restless, and decided to leave the past behind. My decision was crystallized by an invitation to teach in the Department of French at Barnard College. I flew to New York in early September 1961, arriving with a suitcase in hand, my winter coat on my arm, and twenty dollars in my purse. I had just returned from that first momentous visit to Moscow, which had made me miss the first week of the fall semester.

  I had written to the chairman, the late and admired Leroy Breunig, about a one-week delay in my arrival, explaining that I was coming to the States via the USSR. This led him to remark at the first departmental meeting, “This woman has a very original sense of geography.”

  As a faculty member, I was able and encouraged to take classes at Columbia University. I had access to so many fascinating topics and professors, and loved the idea of being an auditeur libre, an intellectual flaneur in the manner of the French. I registered for six courses, without knowing what this entailed.

  I remember in particular a seminar on English romantic poetry, about which I knew almost nothing, which was taught with a heavy dose of Freudian theory. I understood very little, but enjoyed it very much. I found the discussions in class on hidden images, double entendres, and erotic metaphors immensely challenging. My bliss began to evaporate when my professors started to ask about my midterm essays. “Midterm” was a new concept for me, yet I learned its meaning quickly after I discovered the nonexistence of the status of auditeur libre at Columbia. My transcript still bears witness to my prompt retreat from most of these courses. I appeared, as I was later told, “to be very nice and very lost.”