On the Secrets of Isaac Babel

On the Secrets of Isaac Babel

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 release of this meticulously edited, well-translated, and apparently definitive volume of Babel’s is, of course, a cause for celebration. Until now, Babel’s fiction had appeared in the English language in mostly thin, tentative volumes, awaiting always the inclusion of his unpublished work, hundreds and hundreds of pages, one hoped, which he had hidden away until the time of his arrest in 1939. It seems that this plump, handsome book contains all his existing writing, including the very few unpublished manuscripts-screenplays, fragments of an unfinished novel-located once the implosion of communism made thorough literary research into his life and work possible. Beautiful to hold, and a meticulous work of scholarship, it is more complete than the two-volume Russian edition of his work that appeared in the early nineties. It includes two valuable essays by his daughter, Nathalie Babel, a very useful chronology of his life by the eminent Slavic scholar Gregory Frieden (there is no full-length biography of him in any language), and a characteristically probing, ferociously intelligent introductory essay by Cynthia Ozick. The translation is a bit stiff at times, but, on the whole, impressive.

Still, the book’s publication is more than a bit dismaying. It means that his remaining unpublished writings (twenty-seven folders of manuscripts that were seized at the time of his arrest) have been deemed unrecoverable, and, consequently, it is unlikely that the many uncertainties that surround him-literary, biographical, even, on some level, moral- will be put to rest. Trilling, in his essay on Babel- an essay packed with errors mostly because of misinformation supplie...