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The New America

By G. Pascal Zachary, David Rieff, Chiori Santiago, Hwee Hwee Tan, Rubén Rumbaut and Salim Muwakkil

How immigration is transforming our society.

Liberty on the Defensive

By Doug Ireland

The definition of “terrorist” has drifted far from ground zero.

Operation Infinite Jest

By Chris Lehmann

The return of the culture wars.

The Arms Dealer Next Door

By Ken Silverstein

The Angolan war’s connection to suburban Arizona.

Editorial

By David Moberg

Market Magic's Empty Shell

Viewpoint

By Matthew Jardine

Days of infamy and memory.

The Great Game

By Naomi Klein

Let's review the tape.

Back Talk

By Susan J. Douglas

The liberal media strike again.

Appall-o-Meter

By Dave Mulcahey

The Enemy Within

By Neve Gordon

Israel’s gravest danger is not the Palestinians.

Treaty’s End

By Jeffrey St. Clair

Bush unilaterally junks the ABM accord.

Broken Trust

By Jeff Shaw

Washington gives Indians the runaround—again.

Reversal of Fortune?

By Dave Lindorff

Mumia's death sentence is overturned, for now.

Coal Dust-up

By Ken Ward Jr.

Massey Energy, Inc. targeted by labor and greens.

In Person

By Ben Winters

Phil Radford: Last Call, Save the Ales.

Where The Sun Never Sets

By J.W. Mason

BOOKS: Empire’s new clothes.

The Empty Theater

By Heather McCabe

BOOKS: Joan Didion vs. the political class.

Terrible Beauty

By Ben Ehrenreich

BOOKS: The Complete Works of Isaac Babel.

Ghost World

By Julien Lapointe

FILM: The Devil’s Backbone of the Spanish Civil War.

December 22, 2001

Terrible Beauty

by Ben Ehrenreich

Isaac Babel�s mugshot from Stalin�s dreaded Lubyanka prison, where he was executed in 1940.

e have needed Isaac Babel sorely these past few years, during which we’ve had to depend on the treacly fantasies of Spielberg and Hanks for too much of our understanding of war. We’ve needed him even more these past few months, as carnage has yet again been dressed up as moral crusade. It is hard to think of anyone who has written about war with as much subtlety, honesty and devastating beauty as Babel, whose Red Cavalry stories fictionally recount the months that he, a bespectacled Ukrainian Jew, spent riding with a brutal and anti-Semitic Cossack cavalry unit on the Polish front in the Russian Civil War.

Take the first of those stories, “Crossing the River Zbrucz,” which begins with the image of the sun “rolling across the sky like a severed head,” in which the exhausted narrator finds lodging in a Jewish home, ransacked by the retreating Poles, and lies down next to a sleeping old man. He is awoken by the man’s daughter—he has been yelling in his sleep, thrashing about. She pulls back the blanket covering the old man beside him, revealing that “his gullet has been ripped out, his face hacked in two.”

“I want you to tell me,” she demands, “I want you to tell me where one could find another father like my father in all the world!” There is no comfort here in the glories of brotherhood, sacrifice and duty, only, as Babel put it in his diaries, “unbearable baseness and crime,” and the discomforting pleasures of Babel’s flawless prose.

Babel has been lost to the world since 1939, when, just 44, he was arrested in Moscow and charged, absurdly, with espionage. His real crime was the honesty of his writing and his refusal to spout the Stalinist line. It wasn’t until 1954 that it was revealed he was dead, shot by a firing squad eight months after his arrest and buried in a mass grave. And it wasn’t until 1990 that the details of Babel’s secret trial were released. His last recorded words: “I am asking for only one thing—let me finish my work.”

Perhaps in part because his life and work were cut so tragically short, and because his name lingered for so many years in oblivion, Babel is not better known in the West. Adored by a relatively tiny cult of serious readers and scholars, in the common imagination Babel has not been elevated into the pantheon of Russian literary greats, however much he may deserve to join them.

During his lifetime Babel enjoyed an international reputation unmatched by any living Russian writer save his longtime mentor Maxim Gorky, who christened him “the great hope of Russian literature.” Red Cavalry was first published in English as early as 1929; other collections of his work have been translated here over the years. Until now, though, his oeuvre has been scattered among different collections, some of them out of print.

he publication of The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, edited by Babel’s daughter Nathalie, is thus a fairly monumental occasion. Its nearly 1,100 pages include all of his stories, some previously unpublished, his journalism, two chapters of an unfinished novel, his diary, plays and screenplays. The project began in 1998, Nathalie Babel reveals in her foreword, when translator Peter Constantine approached her about publishing the screenplays. Instead they printed all there was to print. Three years is not much time to translate a work of this size and depth, and the haste shows.

Particularly in Red Cavalry, the rhythm of Constantine’s translation tends to be clunky, his word choices ill-considered. In the story “Salt,” for instance, Constantine comes up with this nearly unreadable sentence: “The initiative showed by the fighters who jumped out of the train made it possible for the struggling railroad authorities to emit sighs from their breasts.” (Compare Walter Morison’s tidier version from 1955: “The initiative of the men that had scrambled out of the coaches gave the insulted railway authorities their breath back.”) Such blunders too often deprive Babel’s stories of their lyrical punch, sharpening his prose where it should be soft, muddying his metaphors, and failing to live up to his dictum that “no iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.”

Some of the translations, though, are excellent, especially the later stories. Many of them are complex coming-of-age tales that combine in a few deft moves a simultaneous awakening to sex, cruelty and artistic beauty, as in the tender “In the Basement,” which ends with the young narrator weeping and suddenly seeing that “the world of tears was so immense and beautiful that everything except my tears disappeared from before my eyes.”

This ability to find beauty amidst squalor is one of the hallmarks of Babel’s work. It is, for him, a solemn task to preserve ambiguity and avoid judgement, not to squeeze the world for morals, to save every ounce of splendor the world offers, no matter its origins. In “Pan Apolek,” he writes of a drunken old painter who travels the countryside and wins the ire of the Catholic Church for painting religious scenes for pious peasants, with the saints’ faces modeled on the peasant’s own. “In the most impoverished and foul-smelling hovels,” Apolek leaves images of “Josephs with gray hair neatly parted in the middle, pomaded Jesuses, many-childed village Marys with parted knees.” Babel writes: “I took a solemn oath to follow the example of Pan Apolek. The sweetness of dreamy malice, the bitter contempt for the swine and dogs among men, the flame of silent and intoxicating revenge—I sacrificed them all to this oath.”

He follows through on his vow, portraying the sensual joys of living without papering over the miseries that shadow them. One of the most salient images in the collection comes at the end of “The Father,” one of Babel’s wild tales of dashing Jewish gangsters (who reappear in Babel’s plays and screenplays) in pre-revolutionary Odessa. Two gangsters walk past a cemetery, plotting extortion and revenge. The story ends with the sentence, “Young men were pulling girls behind the fences, and kisses echoed on the gravestones.”

Constantine generally does a better job translating the Odessa stories, and all the stories that rely on a more vernacular style. Babel’s 1920 Diary, which became the basis for the Red Cavalry stories, is very forceful here, recording his steady loss of faith in his Bolshevik ideals. “Why am I gripped by a longing that will not pass?” he asks. “Because I am far from home, because we are destroying, moving forward like a whirlwind, like lava, hated by all, life is being shattered to pieces, I am at a huge, never-ending service for the dead.” And later, “This is not a Marxist Revolution, it is a Cossack uprising that wants to win all and lose nothing.”

he exhaustion and revulsion expressed in the diary contrast with the propaganda he simultaneously penned. If in his diaries he admitted that the Red Army’s treatment of the Jews was no better than that of the counter-revolutionary Whites, in an article recounting a pogrom conducted by the latter he was nonetheless able to froth: “Slaughter them, Red Army fighters! Stamp harder on the rising lids of their rancid coffins!”

These contradictions survive in the Red Cavalry stories, which gain their force from the tension between Babel’s alienation from the Cossack soldiers around him, his disgust with their brutality, and his longing to be as strong and cruel as they. In “After the Battle,” the narrator (named Lyutov, the alias adopted by Babel to hide his Jewishness from the Cossacks) is cursed for his cowardice by the one Cossack he has managed to befriend. “The village floated and bulged, crimson clay oozing from its gloomy wounds,” he writes. “I was exhausted, and, crouching beneath the crown of death, walked on, begging fate for the simplest ability—the ability to kill a man.”

Babel never shies away from war’s real horrors, never sweetens them with false sentiment, but neither does he cover over war’s pernicious but equally real attractions. Again and again, violence and eros stand disturbingly side by side. In “My First Goose,” he admires the brutal figure of his division commander: “I was taken aback by the beauty of his gigantic body. … His long legs looked like two girls wedged to their shoulders in riding boots.”

Elsewhere this awful sensuality resides in the landscape, “A naked corpse lay on the embankment. And the rays of the moon streamed through the dead legs”; and in the universe itself, “The sky changes color—tender blood pouring from an overturned bottle—and a gentle aroma of decay envelops me.”

It’s not surprising that there is nothing as dangerous as eros, or as subtle as truth, in the discourse surrounding our latest war. Sixty years later, it’s hard not to mourn Babel’s death, to regret that there’s no one around to tear aside the pious lies, to wrench some fragile beauty from this “world of tears.”

Ben Ehrenreich is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.

Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University in Israel and can be reached at ngordon@bgumail.bgu.ac.il.

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