Isaac Babel
Isaac Babel
Born to a Jewish family in Odessa, Ukraine, during a mass exodus of Jews from the Russian empire, Isaac Babel experienced a relatively peaceful youth. At school, he studied Talmud, music, and the German and French languages. In 1915, Babel completed his formal education when he graduated from Kiev University and moved to Petrograd (now St. Petersburg). There he met famous Russian writer Maxim Gorky.
During the Russian Civil War, Babel was assigned as a journalist to Field Marshall Semyon Budyonny's First Cavalry army, witnessing its unsuccessful Polish campaign to carry Communist revolution outside Russia. The Red Army penetrated almost to Warsaw but was driven back.
Back in Odessa Babel started to write a series of short stories set in the Odessan ghetto of Moldavanka, where he was born, describing the life of the Jewish underworld before and after the October Revolution. During this same period, Babel met and maintained an early friendship with Ilya Ehrenburg, while continuing to publish stories, to wide acclaim, throughout the 1920s.
However, as Stalin tightened his grip on Russian culture in the 1930s, and especially with the rise of socialist realism, Babel increasingly withdrew from public life. Unlike other Russian authors, Isaac Babel was allowed to travel during this time (as his family was living in France), and in 1935 delivered a speech to the International Congress of Writers in Paris but soon he returned to the Soviet Union. Isaac Babel collaborated with Sergei Eisenstein on the film Bezhin Meadow.
After suspicious death of Gorky in 1936, Babel noted: "Now they will come for for me." (See Great Purge). In May 1939 he was arrested at his cottage in Peredelkino, and eventually interrogated, at Lubyanka, on charges of espionage. After a forced confession, Babel was tried, found guilty, and, on January 27, 1940, shot in Butyrka prison.
On December 23, 1954, a year after Stalin's death, Isaac Babel was publicly exonerated of the charges against him.
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