After the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Soviet government cultivated artists’ colonies to generate propaganda “literature” promoting manual labor and the working class, and criticizing capitalism and religion. It is not surprising that Babel and his literature fell out of favor with the state. In 1941, he was murdered by Stalin’s secret police under false premises of spying and treason. Like many Russian Jews of his time, Isaac Babel experienced the glimmering hope of emancipation, acceptance, and even popularity in secular Russian society, a hope that was eventually extinguished by Stalin’s politics of terror. After the war, back in Odessa, he wrote Odessa Tales (1931), for which he has been hailed as the greatest Russian Jewish writer that ever lived.

He published two plays and a number of short story collections, most notably Red Cavalry, which he wrote during his journalism career writing about the Bolshevik army during the Russian Civil War of 1917-1923. Petersburg, the cultural and political center of Russia, where he became involved in the national literary scene, and like many young progressive writers of the time, in the anti-Czarist revolutionary movement. His family was relatively well-to-do, and he grew up pampered with private tutors who taught him German, French, Talmud, and music.Īs a young man, he moved to St. My Jewish Learning is a not-for-profit and relies on your help Donateīorn in 1894 in Odessa, Ukraine, Isaac Babel had a rather non-typical childhood for a Russian Jew of his era.

Verhalen uit Odessa by Isaac Babel