Educational Media Reviews Online

Isaac Babel, famed Russian author (1894-1940), had an incredible, although tragically abrupt life, during times of dramatic social ruptures and transformations like the turmoil that followed the 1917 revolution in the former Russian Empire. As a Jew born on the periphery of the late tsarist imperial realm (in the cosmopolitan port-city of Odessa), he attempted to seek opportunities (already since 1915) in the more rewarding capital cities such as Petrograd (St. Petersburg). Although his very first stories were written in French, it was writing in the Russian language, excelling in Russian capital circles, and the life-long protection of Maxim Gorky, the most influential writer in Russia/USSR, that greatly advanced the marketing of Babel’s creative output and made him a globally known Russian author. In this sense, his career could be summarized as transformation from Bobel (his original Jewish surname) to Babel (with all its connotations of universality/Babylon).

An opposite trajectory would be from Babel to Brighton Beach, Little Odessa, the Soviet Jewish émigré area of New York and one of the opening scenes of the recent (2016) documentary film by David Novack Finding Babel. With a major support provided by The Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, the film could be seen as essentially an attempt to reintroduce Babel as a Jewish writer from Ukraine whose engagement with Russia resulted in tragedy.

In the film, its host and co-author Andrei Malaev-Babel, American-born grandson of Babel and an Associate Professor of Theater, visits several locations related to Babel: “Paris, L’viv, Red Cavalry places, Odessa, Moscow – to try to understand what remains.” “What remains” most often in the first half of the film is lost/ruined Jewish heritage in Ukraine, a topic relevant yet not identical or central to Babel’s creative project.

For instance, Red Cavalry stories took place during the 1920 Polish-Soviet war that Babel attended formally as a war correspondent and propagandist. It is certainly challenging to find locations in the waste borderland region that are representative of the highly mobile nomadic cavalry and relevant to all sides of the (multifaceted) civil war a century ago. Instead, the film highlights anti-Semitism in the civil war and depicts several lost Jewish heritage places in the area of L’viv such as ruins of a synagogue in Brody, and a cemetery. Coupled with visitation of a site of 1942 Jewish massacre that could not be related to the events of the 1920s civil war and to Babel who died in 1940, this section of the film could easily result in misrepresentation of both Babel’s complex masterpiece and of the history of Jews in Ukraine.

The city of Babel’s second most famous work (Tales of Odessa) is presented from a similar angle. The film provides several insightful encounters such as those related to construction of a monument to Babel as well as the landscape view from his apartment in Odessa. An opportunity of finding “what remains” of Moldovanka, the ghetto of Odessan criminal Jewish underworld immortalized by Babel, for some reason is substituted by excerpts from a Soviet film that popularized Babel’s tales.

Babel’s connection to Ukraine is not limited to his most known early short stories (Red Cavalry and Tales of Odessa). Even after moving to Moscow in 1924 he kept returning to Ukraine to collect material for his novel about forced collectivization. Even only partially published, his eye-witness reports from there (as well as other publications of the 1930s) deserves discussion (not provided).

The film’s third main location after Odessa is surprisingly not Moscow but Paris giving an impression of irrelevance of the Russian period and of Babel’s exile abroad. A hotel on Rue Danton in the French capital is specifically highlighted, and Gregory ‘Grisha’ Freiden, a Stanford professor and scholar of Babel, points out that Danton wanted to end the French Revolution’s terror and the revolution ate him “echoing what was happening in the Soviet Union”. For Freiden, once the USSR and Nazi Germany got closer together, Babel seized to be useful for Stalin, his immunity was lifted and he had to return to the Soviet Union/Russia. Then we see Andrei Malaev-Babel rehearsing Babel’s play (Maria, set in revolutionary St. Petersburg) as an opportunity to explain in Paris “what it is to be in a world where you cannot stay in your country anymore”. With an idyllic Eastern European landscape in the background, famous actress Marina Vlady reads an excerpt from Maria’s letter: “Our reinforcements are all Ukrainians. In their language and expressiveness, they remind me of Italians. Russia has been destroying and denigrating their culture for centuries.” This Russophobic selection, provided without any context, is not supported by Vlady’s own conclusion that Babel (as well as Vlady’s famous husband Vladimir Vysotsky) could not live without Russian culture and language. In general, the Paris part of the film misrepresents Babel’s life after 1924: he spent more time in Moscow than in Europe where he visited several times, in part, because of his original plan to move his Paris family to Moscow.

The film’s fourth and last visitation is to Moscow presented as a locale of Babel’s two fateful encounters, with his wife, beautiful Russian girl Antonina Pirozhkova, and with the Stalin’s repressive system, both intersecting in the end at Babel’s last accommodation, his summer cottage in the Moscow vicinity. Malaev-Babel’s failed attempt to visit it (now someone’s private property) is presented in an ominous way and coupled with his (unproductive) visit to the Russian Security Services archives where Babel’s unpublished writings are still not located and their fate remains a mystery. We hear a message that modern Russia has not fully recovered from Stalinism, that there are little Stalins around. The film only briefly discusses Moscow as a locale of Pirozhkova’s romance with Babel, and instead focuses on her recollection of details of Babel’s arrest: the film visits locations related to his detention, interrogation, and death, and this is in the end how the film overall relates Moscow (and Russia in general) to Babel. Such a nexus arguably misrepresents Babel’s life-long engagement with Russia.

Moscow is the place of not only Babel’s tragic death but also of his success: there he has become a well-established figure of the new Soviet system, living in a shared two-story apartment (not discussed in the film even if for a moment - there is an image of the Taganka neighborhood, perhaps a sign that this topic was planned yet then eliminated from the film) within walking distance from the Kremlin as well as in the summer cottage in the elite writers settlement of Peredelkino, enjoying frequent and prolonged stays in Europe, and friendship with the family of Nikolai Yezhov, the notorious head of Soviet terror conveyer responsible for the great purges that eventually killed them both. Starting with Red Cavalry, Babel had a complicated life-long fascination (and alleged collaboration) with the new Soviet machinery of violence and humiliation; his travels to Europe were allowed, as the film partially acknowledges, to advance some of Stalin’s clandestine foreign policy goals and schemes. Reportedly, Babel had access to the secret services headquarters on Lubyanka and liked to watch there (sometimes with his mistresses) torture and execution of victims of the totalitarian state -- to collect first-hand observations needed for a big novel about Soviet secret services he was writing. If surfaced, who knows what would be its effect on Babel’s reputation. Yet Babel’s unpublished works have never been recovered from the security services, continuing to fuel speculation about the degree of his engagement/fascination with the totalitarian machinery of violence, and casting a shadow over his classical texts loaded with powerful poetic metaphors of a sadistic and violent kind. All these complicated intimate relations with the machinery of terror culminated in his own arrest. The timing and locations of his interrogation and death ironically almost entirely correspond with that of Yezhov himself, even their ashes are reportedly in the same mass grave that in the end the film visits (yet it does not acknowledge any of these telling coincidences). In a 2011 interview, Malaev-Babel assured that the sensational version of Babel’s arrest due to his alleged love triangle with Yezhov’s family will be in the film, yet the released version of the film does not discuss that.

The late wife of Babel (and Malaev-Babel’s grandmother) Pirozhkova lived until 2010 and died at age 101. Interviewed in the film, she was in a unique position to dispel many of these rumors (as she did in her published memoirs where she refers to them as mystifications and legends Babel himself spread) and to answer difficult questions about his biography in the period she is familiar with (1932-1939). Just think about the situation that is only briefly mentioned in her film interview and could be easily overlooked: as an insider of the system’s elite circle, Babel was able to privately discuss with Yagoda, another head (!!) of Stalin’s terror machinery, what to do “if I’m caught in your clutches.” Pirozhkova’s unique insights into Babel’s complexity deserve prioritization over many basic conventions about Stalin’s Russia the film seems to privilege. The film highlights only one, arrest-related, location in Moscow (the summer cottage) and ignores the rest—the lively details of their life in downtown apartment and travels across the Soviet Union. Places do matter. Babel’s room in his Moscow apartment was eventually occupied by an agent of NKVD and in this regard Pirozhkova in her memoirs dropped an intriguing tidbit that often arrests were motivated by Security Services agents’ aspirations to move in into vacated apartments.

Hopefully Finding Babel (and its experiments with animating excerpts from Babel’s works read by Liev Schreiber) will extend popularity of the great Russian writer beyond its usual Russian-speaking domain and provoke further discussions.