On the Secrets of Isaac Babel; THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ISAAC BABEL by Isaac Babel

In: Dissent: a journal devoted to radical ideas and the values of socialism and democracy, Band 50, Heft 3, S. 102

Abstract

HE WAS A squat man. He wore thick glasses. Photographs captured him badly--none make it clear why he was so popular with women. Memoirists insist that his seemingly benign, even flabby looks could inspire intense fear. Some fifty years ago Lionel Trilling judged Isaac Babel as looking rather like either a 'Chinese merchant,' or a 'successful Hollywood writer,' or a 'typical' Jewish intellectual. 'It is,' wrote Trilling of Babel's face, the kind 'which many Jews used to aspire to have, or hoped their sons would have.' Babel's close friend Konstantin Paustovsky is still more vivid and more than mildly deprecating: 'Stooping, almost neckless ... with a duck's bill of a nose, a creased forehead and an oily glint in his little eyes, he was anything but fascinating.' Why so many who write about him write so much about his appearance is by no means the greatest mystery surrounding Babel and his brilliant but still much debated literary legacy. The secrets Trilling had in mind, in particular, were the uncertainties left in the wake of Babel's stunning, mosaic-like portrait in Red Cavalry of the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1920. How he felt here about the Russian Revolution, the goodness of man, Jews, violence, bourgeois values, or values at all he leaves unclear. The book was built around its contradictory, confounding stances toward these and other critical and (in Soviet Russia already at the time it appeared in the mid-twenties) rather dangerous topics. Babel leaves the reader often stunned by his intermittent inhumanity, his incorrigible sentimentality, his deep attachment to Jews, his breezy indifference to Jews, and his love and horror in the face of revolutionary upheaval. In Red Cavalry, he has his protagonist--who seems, at least at times, very much an autobiographical stand-in--muse about how keenly he wishes for the ability to kill his fellow man. The sentence pierces the heart like the power Babel attributes elsewhere, in his story 'Guy de Maupassant,' to the uncanny, stunning resonance of skillful punctuation: 'No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.' Picking out stray lines from Babel stories in an effort to encapsulate his essential message is, if you will, as useless as choosing stray passages from the Talmud to illuminate the fundamental teachings of the rabbis. The story is addressed to Vasily; he is mentioned four times in as many pages ('Do you remember Zhitomir, Vasily?' is how it begins). He is, it would seem, an unidentified Russian It is not far-fetched to see him also as the very same Russian whom Babel knew read, sometimes with bemusement or hostility or shock, the not infrequently bitter, always frank, sometimes transparently loving portraits of things Jewish in his fiction. Russian Jewish fiction had, since its first appearance in the mid-nineteenth century, been acutely aware, often overwhelmed by this gaze, and, as a result, so much of it was self-conscious and cramped in ways that, not infrequently, diminished it, in contrast to Yiddish or Hebrew literature. Babel refused to edit out of his fiction those intimate, uneasy things acknowledged by Jews to one another behind closed doors, in the clammy privacy of third-class railways cars, or on the pages of Yiddish prose. And he resisted the temptation, on the whole, to hide his ferocious love for his own people. Moreover, Ilya, he insisted, was no less Russian than a character of Chekhov's or Gogol's while he was, at the same time, emphatically Jewish. The future of Russian literature, he predicted in 1916, belonged to Odessa, not foggy, gray St. Petersburg, where 'the spicy aroma of acacias and a moon filled with an unwavering, irresistible light' shine; Russian literature's 'Messiah, so long awaited, will issue ... from the sun-drenched steppes washed by the sea.' Here was as bald, as transparent a claim for ascendancy as produced by any writer and, in the wake of the last, mostly truly terrible century that savaged his beloved Russia, Babel's voice remains more fresh, arguably more relevant than any other. One now reads Babel's youthful, brash declamation as far from frivolous, one reads it as almost chilling in its pertinence.