JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

abel, isaac emmanuilovich
feasts and magnificent funeral processions are reminiscent of
the lush canvases of a Breughel.
The picturesque world of Polish Ḥasidim and Odessa cart
drivers, of waterfront philosophers and ritual slaughterers was
disappearing before Babel’s eyes, a victim of secularism, pogroms,
and the Revolution. Its death was recorded in some
of Babel’s best tales. A few of these relate only an amusing or
a paradoxical incident – e.g., an old-age home receives a new
lease on life as a funeral cooperative, but only for as long as
it continues the swindle of not burying the corpse together
with the only coffin it owns; the first honest funeral arranged
by it will also spell its doom. Other stories have moral overtones
of varying degrees of significance. An infant is named
Karl by its Communist atheist parents in honor of Marx; but
the grandparents conspire to have it secretly circumcised and
the infant emerges with the hybrid name Karl-Yankel (i.e.,
Jacob). A rabbi’s son joins the Communist Party but, for the
time being, continues to live with his parents because he does
not want to leave his mother. Just as Babel, long after ceasing
to believe in God, could not shed the commandment “thou
shalt not kill,” so the rabbi’s son remains faithful to another
commandment which makes it incumbent upon us to honor
our parents. In another story, the rabbi’s son ultimately leaves
his parental home to fight and then to die for the Revolution,
but the break with his past is tortured and incomplete: among
the killed soldier’s belongings his comrades find a portrait of
Lenin and another of Maimonides, Communist Party resolutions
with Hebrew verse written in their margins, the text of
the Song of Songs, and some empty cartridges.
The inability to shift one’s allegiances completely was
most poignantly illustrated in the short story “Gedali.” The
protagonist, an old Jew, the owner of a Dickensian curiosity
shop, is puzzled because murder and looting are his town’s
lot no matter whether its current masters are Communist or
anti-Communist: how then, he asks, can one tell which is the
Revolution and which the counter-revolution? Old Gedali
cannot agree to the proposition that ends justify means. He
is troubled because the Revolution demands that all of the
old values, the good as well as the bad, be discarded: “To the
Revolution we say ‘yes,’ but can we say ‘no’ to the Sabbath?”
And he tells his Communist visitor that what the world really
needs is not more politics, but an International of Good
Men, in which all men could live in peace and harmony, and
in which “every soul would get first category rations.”
After some twenty years of disgrace, Babel – or, more precisely,
his memory – was cleared by the Soviet authorities of
the false charges which caused his arrest and death. His best
known works were reprinted in the 1950s and in 1966 but subsequently
he was again ignored in the Soviet Union.
[Maurice Friedberg]
His Life
Until the age of 16, Babel was provided, by private tutors, with
a thorough Jewish education, including Hebrew, Bible, and
Talmud. At the same time he attended a Russian commercial
school in Odessa. During his student years he seems to have
been active in Zionist youth circles. In 1915, after graduating
from the Kiev Institute of Financial and Business Studies, he
went to Petrograd, where he had to avoid the police because as
a Jew he had no residence permit. It was in prerevolutionary
Petrograd that his first two stories were published in Maxim
Gorki’s Letopris (November 1916; in English in The Lonely
Years, 1964). After the revolution, he served on the Romanian
front in 1918 and contracted malaria. According to his autobiographical
note, the details of which are sometimes contested,
he subsequently served the new regime in various functions,
e.g., in the Cheka (security police), the Commissariat of Education,
in “expeditions for provisions” (i.e., confiscating agricultural
products in the villages), in the northern army against
the White counterrevolutionaries, etc. During his service on
the Polish front in Budyonny’s 1st Cavalry Army, he developed
asthma, and while convalescing in Odessa and the Caucasus,
between 1921 and 1924, he wrote and published most of his
Jewish Odessa Tales.
In 1931, while reporting on the collectivization in the
Ukraine, Babel conceived a full novel or a cycle of stories on
the collectivization. One chapter appeared in Novy Mir (October
1931), but it did not meet ideological requirements and the
publication was stopped. Only one other chapter was found
and published posthumously (both are in The Lonely Years).
A fragmentary story called “The Jewess” (published for the
first time in the New York Russian magazine Novy Zhurnal,
June 1968, and in English in You Must Know Everything) also
seems to have originated in the same period as the beginning
of a full-fledged novel. In 1928 and 1932 he was allowed to visit
his wife and daughter, who had emigrated to Paris. Babel was
sent abroad for the last time as a member of the Soviet writers’
delegation to a left-wing congress in Paris in 1935, but in
the meantime he had virtually stopped publishing. The literary
authoritarianism inaugurated in 1934 with the establishment
of the Soviet Writers Union induced him to become “a master
of silence.” He continued writing incessantly but evaded
publishing by finding various excuses. “With the death of
Gorki” (1936), says his daughter, Natalie, “Babel lost not only
a friend but a powerful protector. The ground crumbled under
him.” Babel was arrested and disappeared in 1939, and all
his manuscripts, except those which were deposited with personal
friends, were probably destroyed by the secret police.
The reason for his arrest is unknown, though Ilya *Ehrenburg
indicated in a speech in 1964 that it was somehow connected
with his frequent visits to the house of the head of the secret
police (NKVD), Nikolai Yezhov, whose wife Babel had known
for a long time. Since Yezhov was deposed and executed in
1938, there might be something to this theory. Officially the
date of his death was subsequently given as 1941, but after his
arrest he was never seen in a camp or in exile, and apparently
he was executed in January 1940.
Babel’s ties with Judaism never ceased. Six of his stories
appeared in 1926 in Hebrew translation, “edited by the author,”
in the only issue of Bereshit, a Hebrew literary almanac
18 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3