Volume 42, Number 11 · June 22, 1995
A Jew on Horseback
By Alfred Kazin
1920 Diary
by Isaac Babel, edited and with an introduction and notes by Carol J. Avins, translated by H. T. Willetts
Yale University Press, 126 pp., $20.00
Collected Stories
by Isaac Babel, translated by David McDuff
Penguin, 364 pp., $11.95 (paper)
Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel was born in Odessa in 1894. His middle-class family gave him a solid Jewish education (at sixteen he was studying Hebrew and the Talmud so hard at home that he had to 'rest' at high school), and in 1911 he enrolled at the Kiev Institute of Financial and Business Studies, where he remained until 1915. Babel was exempted from military service in the World War, probably because of poor eyesight. By 1916 he was in St. Petersburg, where Maxim Gorky became his patron. Aside from writing for Gorky's social reformist paper Novaia zhizn' (New Life), he spent much of his time dodging the police: as a Jew he did not have residence papers for the capital and thus was living there illegally.
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