Ordeal of a Russian Jew

THE COLLECTED STORIES (381 pp.]--Isaac Babel--Criterion Books ($5).

When Isaac Emanuelovich Babel was ten years old, he saw his father kneel in the mud before a mounted Cossack captain and beg for help while an Odessa mob looted and wrecked the family store. "At your service," the officer said, touched his lemon-yellow chamois glove to his cap, and rode off passionlessly, "not looking right or left . . . as though through a mountain pass, where one can only look ahead." Torn with pity and terror for his father, the boy was also stirred by a sneaking admiration for the Cossack, with his instinctive animal grace and his life of action and violence. This paradox shaped Babel's life and writing. Before he was mysteriously imprisoned in the late 1930s, some say for making indiscreet remarks about the Stalinist regime. Babel had worked as a Bolshevik propagandist, been a member of the Cheka. and ridden with Budenny's Red Cossack cavalry as a supply officer in the Polish campaign of 1920. The meek intellectual with "spectacles on [his] nose and autumn in [his] heart" as Babel described himself, spent the young manhood of his life honing his squeamish conscience on "the simplest of proficiencies --the ability to kill my fellow-men."

"My World Was Tiny." In The Collected Stories, the bulk of his too little-known work is fully translated for the first time and prefaced with a perceptive introduction by Critic Lionel Trilling. Like another Eastern Jewish writer, Sholom Aleichem, Babel was a folk artist of the ghetto. To Aleichem (TIME, April 25), the ghetto was as comforting as a mother's lap, and he could always smile through the tears; to Babel it was just a prison cell which he tramped with despairing irony. Laconic and deadpan in style, his autobiographical stories are nonetheless as anguished and personal as a scream.

Born in 1894, in an era of sanctioned pogroms, Babel did not need to see his father in the mud to have a firsthand knowledge of the ordeal of a Russian Jew. In The Story of My Dovecot, Babel tells how his dearest childhood dream was to own some pigeons. One day the excited ten-year-old is racing home with his first set of birds, when a pogrom erupts. A crippled dealer in stolen Jewish goods grabs the boy's sack, and, opening it in disgust, smashes one of the pigeons against the boy's face: "The guts of the crushed bird trickled down from my temple . . . A piece of string lay not far away, and a bunch of feathers that still breathed. My world was tiny, and it was awful."

Sounds Like Iron Filings. The world at home was not much bigger or better. In Awakening, Babel describes the chief human export of Odessa's Moldavanka ghetto: "Infant prodigies . . . freckled children with necks as thin as flower stalks and an epileptic flush on their cheeks." Papa Babel insists on a violin virtuoso in the house, even when "the sounds dripped from my fiddle like iron filings." Little Isaac plays hooky and tries to learn how to swim. But "the hydrophobia of my ancestors--Spanish rabbis and Frankfurt moneychangers--dragged me to the bottom." A local athlete bucks up the boy's spirit: "How d'you mean, the water won't hold you? Why shouldn't it hold you?" "I came to love that man," says Babel, who always complained that his boyhood had been "nailed to the Talmud" and adds bitterly: "In my childhood . . . I had led the life of a sage. When I grew up I started climbing trees."

The biggest tree on Babel's grown-up horizon was the Bolshevik Revolution. In the 35 stories grouped under the heading "Red Cavalry," he climbs it with a sense of lyric release and manly endurance. For Babel, it was the Stephen Crane-Hemingway test of courage in reverse: not "Can I take it?" but "Can I dish it out?" In fact, cruelty itself became for Babel a form of self-knowledge. Says a fellow officer who has just stomped his former master to death: "With shooting--I'll put it this way--with shooting you only get rid of a chap . . . With shooting you'll never get at the soul, to where it is in a fellow and how it shows itself. But I don't spare myself, and I've more than once trampled an enemy for over an hour. You see, I want to get to know what life really is, what life's like down our way." "

You Guys in Specs." As the nameless narrator of the tales, Babel shows a candid self-hatred for sparing himself even a mercy killing. In The Death of Dolgushov, a dying soldier pleads for a bullet before the Poles "turn up and play their dirty tricks." Babel cannot do it, and the man who does jeers at him: "You guys in specs have about as much pity for chaps like us as a cat has for a mouse." When it came to the revolutionary scene, the guy in specs could make a single image do the work of a page: "Streetcars lay like dead horses in the streets." And as early as the mid '20s, he glimpsed the heart of the matter: "Woe unto us, where is the joy-giving Revolution?"

Babel had ironically escaped the Odessa ghetto only to find himself in Big Brother-land. Hailed in the '30s as a great Soviet writer, he no longer found it possible to write. "I am the master of the genre of silence," he ruefully told the Soviet Writers' Congress of 1934. He was arrested in 1937, and in the silence of a Russian concentration camp, some time in 1939 or 1940, the ordeal of Isaac Babel ended in death from causes unknown.

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