Product Description
"A celebration of literary genius framed by 20th-century tragedy."--Richard Bernstein, New York TimesFinally in paperback, this "monumental collection; gathers all of Babel's deft and brutal writing, including a wide array of previously unavailable material, from never-before-translated stories to plays and film scripts" (David Ulin, Los Angeles Times). Reviewing the work in The New Republic, James Woods wrote that this groundbreaking volume "represents a triumph of translating, editing, and publishing. Beautiful to hold, scholarly and also popularly accessible, it is an enactment of love." Considered one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, Isaac Babel has left his mark on a generation of readers and writers. This book will stand as Babel's final, most enduring legacy. Winner of the Koret Jewish Book Award; A New York Times Notable Book, a and Library Journal Best Book, a Washington Post Book World Rave, a Village Voice Favorite Book of the Year.Amazon.com Review
Arguably the best book of short stories published in 2001, The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, expertly translated by Peter Constantine, should affirm Babel's place among the top Russian short story writers. Like Chekhov, Isaac Babel primarily wrote odd, tightly wrung little stories in which he displays a variety of convincing styles and tones, with each piece having an immediacy and weight that exceeds its brevity.

Babel's writing life lasted approximately 20 years. (He was executed by Stalin after a few military subjects unflatteringly portrayed in his "Red Cavalry" stories gained positions of influence.) His most notable stories depict the Russian civil war and Jewish soldiers, his childhood, and Jewish thugs in his native Odessa. Often journalistic in style, his stories provided gripping war accounts to Russians eager for news from the front, as in this passage from "The Church in Novograd":

We drank rum, waiting for the military commissar, but he still hadn't come back from the headquarters. Romuald had collapsed in a corner and fallen asleep. He slept and quivered, while beyond the window an alley seeped into the garden beneath the black passion of the sky. Thirsting roses swayed in the darkness. Green lightning bolts blazed over the cupolas. A naked corpse lay on the embankment. And the rays of the moon streamed through the dead legs that are pointing upward. So this is Poland...

Customer Reviews (14)

new discovery
I was delighted to discover this book.Although I was a literature major (and teacher) and have read lots of Russion lit, I had never heard of Isaac Babel.His story is amazing.I have just begun reading his short stories, but I think I will enjoy them.

Revolution
Vignettes on life in the Red Calvalry during the days when the Russian Revolution was still 'The Russian Experiment' rather than the disaster it became, and of life in Odessa where a culture is being swept aside for the new.
These stories are often humourous and frequently brutal;a flavour of life in Eastern Europe and all the clues of what lay in store for Soviet Russia are (unwittingly perhaps) contained in all these stories. 'Oil' sees Babel critical of the hopelessly unrealistic 5 year plans and 'End of the Old Folks Home hints at the growing tyranny of bureaucratic officialdom.
This is classical Russian literature, below the level of Tolstoy but sitting comfortably close.

The Greatest Jewish Writer
For my money, Babel is the greatest Jewish writer. Kafka comes close, but he's going in a completely different direction. While Kafka couches the nightmare and loneliness of modern life in fable and fantasy, in dream and allegory, Babel serves it to us straight, covered in blood and shredded paper and feathers.

eh
I just don't know, man . . . a solid writer (mostly), an enthusiastic writer (always), somewhat ahead of his time (in places), but I would stop WAY short of the commentators' seeming consensus that Babel stands alongside the matchless Franz Kafka. Notably, when reading many of Babel's "Benya Krik" anecdotes--which I deign not so grandiosely to classify as "stories"--I often found myself asking, "Huh? Where did that come from?" or, "But wasn't he just talking about Joe a minute ago?" or, "Who spoke that last sentence?" And a fellow who scored 12H+ on the standardized N.Y. state reading test at age seven has difficulty placing the blame in his own lectorial debilities: I also note that I can blaze through Kafka like it's a "Peanuts" cartoon.

Essential
Babel's output was relatively small.His reputation rests on his short stories, particularly the stories about his hometown of Odessa and the remarkable Red Cavalry sequence describing the Soviet invasion of Poland.This work is, nonetheless, a high point of 20th century literature.Babel was a great writer, putting more into short stories than many talented writers can put into whole novels.His descriptions of life under the Czar, seen particularly through the prism of Jewish gangsters in Odessa, are remarkably gripping accounts of a repressive society.The Red Cavalry sequence, a tour de force of vivid narration and psychological insight gets right to the heart of the brutality that characterized much of the 20th century. ... Read more

Product Description
From the early Soviet period, the impassioned short fiction of the great Russian-Jewish writer

One of the most powerful short-story writers of the twentieth century, Isaac Babel expressed his sense of inner conflict through disturbing tales that explored the contradictions of Russian society. Whether reflecting on anti-Semitism in stories such as "Story of My Dovecote" and "First Love," or depicting Jewish gangsters in his native Odessa, Babel’s eye for the comical laid bare the ironies of history. His masterpiece, "Red Cavalry," set in the Soviet-Polish war, is one of the classics of modern fiction. By turns flamboyant and restrained, this collection of Babel’s best-known stories vividly expresses the horrors of his age. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

great
this is just what i was looking for. babel is an unbelievable Russian Jewish writer. I learned a lot from him.

Excellent book
This book is not to be read at one sitting, but many of these stories are powerful, well written and cause you to think. In today's world of politically correct stories with boring characters, this is a welcome change.

Amazing Russian Modernist Writer
This is a wonderful collection of Isaac Babel's stories. His writing is terse, image laden and thoroughly engaging. Recounting his experiences with Cossack cavalry in Poland, Babel's tales offer a unique and firsthand perspective into these Russian campaigns.
Babel's style and his short stories (many times as short as half a page) ask to be read with a level of engagement that many are incapable of. Luckily the stories are both easy and enjoyable to re-read and offer much to be considered and mulled over - though his stories are in prose they demand the attention and interaction of poetry.
Babel is a unique and interesting writer, and his stories are by no means light reading. Presenting moral questions of persecution, violence and conflicting identities (ethnic, religious, political - to name a few) Babel is a Russian writer to be savored.
One note on this Penguin edition: the notes are lacking compared to most Penguin Classics publications and the translation begs for these notes to have been better compiled and expanded. Many words are left untranslated and many times translations are made in an attempt to maintain a Polish or Russian sound - which though wonderful for those that have the knowledge or time to appreciate it is for anyone else an unnecessary distraction from Babel's writing. ... Read more

Product Description
Following the historic publication of Norton's The Complete Works of Isaac Babel in the fall of 2001, The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel appears as the most authoritative and complete edition of his fiction ever published in paperback. Babel was best known for his mastery of the short story form—in which he ranks alongside Kafka and Hemingway—but his career was tragically cut short when he was murdered by Stalin's secret police. Edited by his daughter Nathalie Babel and translated by award-winner Peter Constantine, this paperback edition includes the stunning Red Cavalry Stories; The Odessa Tales, featuring the legendary gangster Benya Krik; and the tragic later stories, including "Guy de Maupassant." This will be the standard edition of Babel's stories for years to come. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (16)

Courageous fiction
Isaac Babel (1894-1940) was one of the foremost Russian writers of the twentieth century.And since he wrote in the realistic style of so many of the best Russian writers, it's not surprising that he met an early death at the hands of a Soviet government intolerant of art that reflected its brutality in such stark terms.Babel wrote of his life, and a large part of his life was lived during a historic time, a time of wars and revolutions that, like most revolutions do, ate their own children.This is lucky for us because we have an important historical document in the form of his fiction.

Babel's most famous stories are the Odessa Stories, which describe the lives of Jewish gangsters in Babel's childhood home, and the Red Calvary Stories, in which he recounts the atrocities he saw while assigned to the Red Calvary in the Poland-Soviet War of 1920.Perhaps because Babel's stories tend to relate fictionalized accounts of what he actually saw, they are written in description-rich prose.In fact, Babel's writing is a veritable writer's workshop of description.It is filled with colorful visions and sounds and smells that leap from the page.To give just a taste: "Fields flowered around us, crimson with poppies; a noon-tide breeze played in the yellowy rye; on the horizon virginal buckwheat rose like the wall of a distant monastery...The orange sun rolled down the sky like a lopped-off head, and mild light glowed from the cloud gorges.The standards of the sunset flew above our heads.Into the cool of evening dripped the smell of yesterday's blood, of slaughtered horses."

This last sentence hints at another characteristic of Babel's writing.Like the times he was writing in, it can be brutal.And thus, for us here in the twenty-first century, not for everyone.These stories are for those of us interested in luxuriating over beautiful descriptions and rich, though stark at the same time, prose.And it's also for those of us interested in Russia's history, and more specifically the after-effects of the Revolution.I couldn't recommend it to anyone else.It's not enjoyable reading.Its subject matter is tough.There aren't standard plots.A lot of characters are unsympathetic bad-guys.Unfortunately, this probably explains Babel's relative obscurity in America.

But this is a courageous book.He wrote a lot of these stories, especially the Red Calvary Cycle, knowing he would anger important people in the government.In fact, a few tried to stop its publication.It was through the help of Maxim Gorky that these stories were published at all.But it was only a matter of time before Babel's luck would run out.As the pressure built over the years, Babel could have fled Russia; he was in Western Europe in the mid-30's and chose to go back to his home.He was a complex man.He knew he was in danger, but he went home anyway.And finally, in 1939, he was arrested.

If you can stomach it, if you are a tough reader who will wade through great writing no matter how difficult, please pick up this important book.

Powerful document of folklore and vicious warfare
Isaac Babel does not fit neatly into any box.Some may say his writing reminds them of this or that author, but without reading him in his native Russian, I don't know.What I can say is that his stories do not conform to any assumptions I have about pre- and post-revolutionary Russia, or the experience of its Jewish population at the same time.

There are four sections here: Early Stories, The Odessa Stories, The Red Calvary Cycle, and Later Stories.Of these, the Early Stories are the weakest- but maybe only in comparison.Once Babel gets started on Odessa, the tempo quickens and the section hangs together like a novella written out of short stories.The challenging part is that his characters might as well have been from the moon for all the sense of kinship I had with them.At times these stories - filled with gangsters and charlatans and schemers and fighters - read almost like folklore.Earthy, passionate and brutal legends of a mixed community, which, perhaps due to its location and population, operated differently from my conception of mainstream Russian life of the time.When Babel hints at the destruction of this way of life in the wake of the revolution, I felt a genuine sense of something unique passing away.

But it is in the Red Calvary Cycle where Babel shines.Here his plain style fits the subject matter to a T - both unapologetic and un-glorified, he presents warfare in all its barbaric possibilities.Embedded within the (mostly) Cossack cavalry, Babel and his companions are pitted against Polish troops as the Soviets seek to spread the revolution.Despite their fierce anti-Semitism, the Cossack troops eventually accept Babel, though it was never clear to me (but I assumed it) that they knew of his heritage.Many of the stories took place in and around Jewish villages, and Babel doesn't claim any relationship with the peasantry as the Cavalry boards in their homes.Perhaps he felt that the revolution had stripped away all of the old labels and conventions, and that he was a cavalryman first and Jewish second.I don't know - he certainly doesn't reserve any pity for the peasants, but then again, he doesn't reserve pity for anyone in this cycle of stories.No one comes out unblemished.This is warfare much like the world would see 20 years later during World War II.Those who wonder why our own country attempts to abide by the Geneva Convention and by Rules of Engagement might do well to read Babel's dispatches from the front.It may not change anyone's mind, but at least they might understand the full implications of the alternative they are advocating.

Even though the Polish campaign ended in failure, this cycle of stories cemented Babel's fame, and when I compare the popularity of his gritty realism with the patriotic, almost naive "Sergeant York" style of war stories in America at the time, I am bewildered by the difference in attitude between cultures.The last section of stories turn autobiographical, and when describing the pogrom he experienced as a child and events soon after the revolution, Babel catalogs all of the inhuman cruelty he witnessed.Taken with the Red Cavalry Cycle, Babel can be at times plainly vicious - readers who prefer their stories sanitized would do well to look elsewhere.

Nathalie Babel, his daughter, provides footnotes, and Cynthia Ozick writes a glowing introduction, but there are many references in Babel's stories that undoubtedly went over my head.Those unfamiliar with Russian history and customs may have difficulty understanding Babel's finer points, but that in no way dulls the effectiveness of his stories.What's clear to me is that no matter what label someone places on him - whether folklorist, or partisan, or Jewish writer - and whether his deceptive simple style is comparable to Kafka or not - as Ms. Ozick maintains in her introduction - as a chronicler of a time and place that is gone forever, he is certainly of the first rank.

Babel is not for everyone
Reviewers on Amazon tend to self-select; I've noticed that people (including myself) seem more willing to write reviews of books they loved than of books they disliked. This makes sense; I usually don't even finish reading a book I strongly dislike.

But I had to read this book for a class. It was possibly my least favorite work of literature that I have ever read. Babel's writing is sparse, dry, and frequently cryptic; often I struggled to figure out what was actually going on in the stories. I also found his characters opaque and mysterious, and not in a good way. And all his stories are gloomy, and apt to induce misery in an unsuspecting reader. Babel's writing is rich with layers of meaning, but its about as enjoyable to crack as a caluculus textbook. The difficulty I encountered in reading this book just made Russia seem insurmountably foreign to me. Instead of serving as a bridge to another culture, this book aroused a feeling of alienation in me.

I will not be so presumptuous as to say that Babel is a bad writer. But I must attest that Babel is not for everyone. On my scale--1 star.

Russia's great twentieth- century storywriter
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 in a soul- wrenching way scenes of great violence and human deprivation. His stories like those of Chekhov perhaps like those of Russian writers especially often involve incidents of great cruelty.
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.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.

After Chekhov comes Babel
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, deprivationwith 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 divisionin Babel between the world of power and physical force, and a kindsensitive inner life.Then there are the Odessa stories ofBenya 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 dohave are the axe which breaksthrough the icy soul within.

... Read more

Product Description
One of the great masterpieces of Russian literature, the Red Cavalry cycle retains today the shocking freshness that made Babel's reputation when the stories were first published in the 1920s. Using his own experiences as a journalist and propagandist with the Red Army during the war against Poland, Babel brings to life an astonishing cast of characters from the exuberant, violent era of early Soviet history: commissars and colonels, Cossacks and peasants, and among them the bespectacled, Jewish writer/intellectual, observing it all and trying to establish his role in the new Russia.

Drawn from the acclaimed, award-winning Complete Works of Isaac Babel, this volume includes all of the Red Cavalry cycle; Babel's 1920 diary, from which the material for the fiction was drawn; and his preliminary sketches for the stories—the whole constituting a fascinating picture of a great writer turning life into art. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Mind blowing (but grim)
Babel's writing is like no others. His stories are like viewing war through a flipbook.

An excellent read.
Babel's Red Cavalry is a remarkably candid look at a little known subject of the Bolshevik's effort to export their revolution to Europe via Poland.His writing is very much in the style of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in that he cuts through to the heart of the matter in a very subtle manner, and vividly describes the drive, actions, and sufferings of those involved in this conflict. ... Read more

Product Description
This diary by the famed twentieth-century Russian writer recounts Babel's experiences with the Cossack cavalry during the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1920.The basis for Red Cavalry, Babel's best-known work, it records the devastation of the war, the extreme cruelty of the Polish and Red armies alike toward the Jewish population in the Ukraine and eastern Poland, and Babel's own conflicted role as both Soviet revolutionary and Jew. Selected as a Notable Book of the Year (1995) by the New York Times Book Review. Winner of the 1997 American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) award for the best translation of a work from a Slavic or East European language ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A must read for Russian and Jewish History Enthusiasts
For those readers with even a remote interest in Russian or Jewish history, Isaac Babel's 1920 Diary is definitely worth adding to your library.

Some are destined to experience frustration as they initially delve into the reading.The style of Babel's diary resembles something more akin to shorthand notes - a few words separated by endless commas - as opposed to the free-flowing prose one might expect to find in a personal journal.As Babel's story progresses, however, his descriptions inspire the reader's imagination to fill in the gaps and produce a favorable, even enjoyable rhythm.

His descriptions of his travels during the Soviet-Polish war with the Red Army offer a remarkable insight into the Communists' earliest attempts to propagate and establish their new doctrine in the territories immediately surrounding Russia.For instance, he writes, "An order comes from the Southwest Army Group:when we enter Galcia - the first time Soviet troops cross the frontier - we are to treat the population well.We are not entering a conquered country, the country belongs to the workers and peasants of Galicia, and to them alone, we are going there to help them establish Soviet rule."While, some of Babel's entries seem to espouse his belief in new Communist ideologies, most ridicule the terrifying, violent means used by the Cossacks to attain this supposedly utopian end.

However, the diary serves a much greater purpose than simply offering up some interesting history on Russia.Babel, although traveling under a Russian pseudonym to mask his Jewish heritage, sees many of his experiences through the enhanced prism of his own strong Jewish self-consciousness.From his pleasant descriptions of majestic Jewish synagogues to his harrowing accounts of merciless, war-time pogroms against entire Jewish communities, Babel masterfully transports his readers into the paradoxical realities of peace, intermixed with the atrocities of war.

Finally, the editor of this edition has effectively supplemented the diary with an authoritative introduction as well as an informative appendix, both of which add needed context to Babel's diary so that, even if you have no former knowledge of this period of Russian history, you'll be able to enjoy the book nonetheless.

JOTTINGS OF GENIUS
The journal Isaac Babel kept when he rode with the Cossacks in the 1919-20 war the Soviet Union waged against Poland served as source material for the stories in his brilliant collection, RED CALVARY.The diaries are a gem in themselves, displaying Babel's immediate response to the situation at hand, later to be transmuted by the writer's alchemy into the gold of the stories.It is a little slice of history in the raw, viewed through the eyes of a great writer, a writer who refused to conform to "socialist realism," a writer who 20 years later would be executed by the State Security Apparatus of the USSR. ... Read more

Product Description
A compelling memoir of life with a man who has been the called the Soviet Union's greatest writer describes the author's discovery of the true circumstances of his death after the collapse of the Soviet Union. IP. Amazon.com Review
Antonina Pirozhkova, Isaac Babel'swidow, recounts the last seven years of the man many consider thefinest short-story writer of the 20th century. Although no completebiography has ever been written of Babel, Pirozhkova's book goes along way toward bringing out Babel's complex and at timescontradictory nature, as well as the exhilarating and terrifyingperiod of Stalin's Russia. Through it all we are given a clear view ofBabel, the man: a man of burning curiosity and intellect, as well as aman of great humor and aplomb. When he was arrested by the secretpolice, Babel remarked to one of the arresting officers, "So, Iguess you don't get much sleep, do you?" ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

How Stalin murdered the Soviet intelligentsia.
This is a sad story of Isaac Babel, a Soviet writer of short stories.Isaac was a good writer but fell on the foul side of Stalin's policies.This is the story of the last seven years of his life as told by his common law wife.As the terror grows, artists on all sides of Isaac start to disappear.Isaac even befriends the former leader of the Soviet NKVD who gives him some sage advice---If they arrest you, deny everything.Babel was arrested and disappeared.The NKVD tells his wife he is at a labor camp when in actuallity he was executed by a firing squad approximately six months after his arrest.
Two things stand out about this book.One was Babel never getting to spend time with his three children before he died.The second is his common law wife spending significant time trying to recover him and documenting his life's work.Their married life was one of true love.A nice story about the destruction of the Soviet intelligentsia. ... Read more

Product Description
This Norton Critical Edition is based on Peter Constantine’s incomparable translations, which are introduced and annotated by the renowned Babel scholar Gregory Freidin.Isaac Babel’s work has left an indelible mark on modern literature. The scope of this Norton Critical Edition surpasses that of any other Babel paperback edition and includes his fiction, nonfiction, autobiography, plays, and political writings together with the contextual and critical materials necessary for in-depth study.

Background materials include “Selected Letters of Isaac Babel to His Sister and Mother, 1926-1939,” a rich collection of letters–sixty-eight in all, as well as “Isaac Babel Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries,” reminiscences by the contemporaries who knew Babel best, including Maxim Gorky, Tamara Ivanova (Kashirina), M. N. Berkov, and Dmitry Furmanov, among others.

“Criticism” reprints four major assessments of Babel’s legacy by Viktor Shklovsky, Lionel Trilling, Efraim Sicher, and Gregory Freidin.

A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are also included. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Best Place to Start Babel, and a Good Bit More
This Norton will appeal to readers new to Babel but also to those who have read his creative fiction and want to know more.

Freidin offers in the volume a wonderfully lively introduction describing Babel's place in Russian literature--not really the most un-intense of traditions. The intro likewise shows how the intensity of Babel's stories, and the personal myth they projected, intertwined with the author's life. From war reporter to loverboy to buffoon to gulag prisoner, Babel lived stories as mind-blowing as his writings.

The bold and original organization of the volume reflects this intertwining of life and art. Freidin moves from fictional stories to actual war reportage to diary and back to fiction again. The order works smoothly as it is arranged both by chronology and theme. He ends the volume with a few letters and foundational critical pieces.

Intros to entries and sections are brief but give just enough context and background to whet the appetite even further. Notes are minimal but useful. The more you read, the more you get caught up in the drama and fate of Babel's life and works. ... Read more

Product Description
The Lonely Years, a collection of private correspondence, is essential to an understanding of Isaac Babel's life and works. Babel rose to fame in 1920s Russia for such books as Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories. But as Stalin's regime grew repressive, he found it increasingly difficult to write or publish. He was finally arrested in 1939, never to be heard from again. Alternately tender and biting, and accompanied by nine stories from the "lonely years," these letters show an individual laboring against all odds to remain true to his craft and ideals. This edition contains a new introduction, based on previously unreleased information from the KGB files. ... Read more

Product Description
Hailed as the first great Soviet writer, Isaac Babel was at once a product and a victim of violent revolution. In tales of Cossack marauders and flashy Odessa gangsters, he perfectly captured the raw, edgy mood of the first years of the Russian Revolution. Masked, reckless, impassioned, charismatic, Babel himself was as fascinating as the characters he created. At last, in renowned author Jerome Charyn, Babel has a portraitist worthy of his quicksilver genius.

Though it traces the arc of Babel’s charmed life and mysterious death, Savage Shorthand bursts the confines of straight biography to become a meditation on the pleasures, torments, and meanings of Babel’s art. Even in childhood, Babel seemed destined to leave a mark. But it was only when his mentor, Maxim Gorky, ordered him to go out into the world of revolutionary Russia that Babel found his true voice and subject. His tales of the bandit king Benya Krik and the brutal raids of the Red Cavalry electrified Moscow. Overnight, Babel was a celebrity, with throngs of admirers and a train of lovers.

But with the rise of Stalin, Babel became a living ghost. Charyn brilliantly evokes the paranoid shadowland of the first wave of Stalin’s terror, when agents of the Cheka snuffed out artists like candle flames. Charyn’s chilling account of the circumstances of Babel’s death–hidden and lied about for decades by Stalin’s agents–finally sets the record straight.

For Jerome Charyn, Babel is the writer who epitomizes the vibrancy, violence, and tragedy of literature in the twentieth century. In Savage Shorthand, Charyn has turned his own lifelong obsession with Babel into a dazzling and original literary work. ... Read more

Product Description
The world of Babel- full of brutal clashes, morbid sexuality and oppositions of moods - is that of a romantic, but its tension and poetic melancholy are perfectly controlled -381 pages ... Read more

Product Description
An offbeat and brilliant imagining of a "lost novel" by Isaac Babel

A celebrated writer returns to his hometown of Odessa, pondering a deal with the secret police, pining for a daughter living abroad, and hoping to pen one last homage to his own past. Isaac Babel, the world famous spinner of tales about Cossacks and gangsters, arrives in Odessa to be treated for asthma-and perhaps help a condemned prisoner to escape.Or is it Babel who intends to escape?

For six decades our only record of Babel's visit has been the contents of letters and postcards sent abroad to his mother and sister.In King of Odessa, Robert A. Rosenstone imagines a version of this visit and the novel Babel wrote during those weeks.Babel himself is concerned with more than literary plots as he considers an escape just as he starts an affair with an actress who may be a police spy.He also ruminates on his past-his childhood as a sickly Jewish boy, the horrifying 1905 pogrom, the famous rides with the Cossacks that inspired Red Calvary, and above all his complicated relationships with women.Throughout the novel Rosenstone captures Babel's lively wit, his exhaustion with fame and the Soviet system, and his infectious charm.

This would prove to be Babel's last visit to Odessa.Three years later, he was arrested as a spy and executed.Rosenstone, the acclaimed biographer of writer and activist John Reed, mixes historical facts and fiction with the talent of a gifted storyteller.The result is a captivating exploration of a great writer surrounded by history and on the brink of falling out of it forever.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Romping and imaginative
The conceit of this new novel is that it is a recently discovered and long-alluded-to lost work of Isaac Babel, written in the summer of 1936, during his last visit to his hometown of Odessa. It is a daring undertaking, and Rosenstone largely pulls it off (only at times giving his narrator a bit much knowledge of contemporary events), delivering a romping and imaginative firsthand (and, yes, Babel-esque) view of life in the brutal chaos that was Russia of the 1930s. (Reviewed in Russian Life)

terrific debut novel
Rosenstone takes on the daunting task of imagining the life of Soviet writer Isaac Babel, whose literary reputation was lost/destroyed during the Soviet regime's darkest and most repressive days. In this fictitious re-creation of Babel's return to his hometown before being arrested and executed as a spy, Rosenstone creates the possibility that Babel was actually involved in a plot to help political dissidents flee. This is a tragic cautionary tale, a must-read for those interested in the genre.

A cleaver and imaginative novel
Rosenstone examines a well known literary character, Isaac Babel, and creates a novel that is quite magical. Babel, who is already a famous writter, goes back to his hometown of Odessa, leaving behind a wife and child in France. While there, he encounters much excitement and intrigue with the many people and places he encounters.Using the letters, postcards and knowledge of the life of Isaac Babel, Rosenstone weaves together fact, fiction and farce, andcreates a book which is as ejoyable to read as it is beautifully written. Up until the last pages, the reader is unaware if what he/she is seeing is fact, fiction or both, or if it really does not make any difference in the end. A must for anyone interested in intelligent literally fiction with a unique twist. ... Read more

Product Description
Critical essays on the work of Isaak Babel, one of a group of poets and novelists whose works were part of a rebirth in Russian literature in the 1920s following the Communist Revolution. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Excellent Bloom
Lovers of Bloom and Babel should feel right a home. Compare this to the orginal short stories in The Complete Works Of Isaac Babel and enjoy. ... Read more