Word: babeling
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...Collected Stories, by Isaac Babel. Uncommonly moving tales of war, death, courage and ghetto life by an uncommonly gifted Odessa Jew (TIME, June...
...COLLECTED STORIES (381 pp.]-Isaac Babel-Criterion Books...
When Isaac Emanuelovich Babel was ten years old, he saw his father kneel in the mud before a mounted Cossack captain and beg for help while an Odessa mob looted and wrecked the family store. "At your service," the officer said, touched his lemon-yellow chamois glove to his cap, and rode off passionlessly, "not looking right or left . . . as though through a mountain pass, where one can only look ahead." Torn with pity and terror for his father, the boy was also stirred by a sneaking admiration for the Cossack, with his instinctive animal grace and his life...
...World Was Tiny." In The Collected Stories, the bulk of his too little-known work is fully translated for the first time and prefaced with a perceptive introduction by Critic Lionel Trilling. Like another Eastern Jewish writer, Sholom Aleichem, Babel was a folk artist of the ghetto. To Aleichem (TIME, April 25), the ghetto was as comforting as a mother's lap, and he could always smile through the tears; to Babel it was just a prison cell which he tramped with despairing irony. Laconic and deadpan in style, his autobiographical stories are nonetheless as anguished and personal...
Born in 1894, in an era of sanctioned pogroms, Babel did not need to see his father in the mud to have a firsthand knowledge of the ordeal of a Russian Jew. In The Story of My Dovecot, Babel tells how his dearest childhood dream was to own some pigeons. One day the excited ten-year-old is racing home with his first set of birds, when a pogrom erupts. A crippled dealer in stolen Jewish goods grabs the boy's sack, and, opening it in disgust, smashes one of the pigeons against the boy's face...