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Isaak (or Isaac) Emmanuilovich Babel was born in the Jewish ghetto of Odessa, Ukraine in 1894. His work is unusual in that it is the fusion of four distinct traditions: Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish and French. Besides the short stories for which he is most famous, he also wrote several plays and screenplays.

Most of his early years were spent in the Black Sea port Nikolaev. The atmosphere of the persecution of Jews is reflected in the pessimism of his stories, although his childhood was relatively confortable. He studied violin, German, French and Talmud at the Nicholas I Commercial Institute (1905-11), then attended the Institute of Business Studies in Kiev and later Saratov (1911-15).

He then moved to St. Petersburg, where he studied literature. His first works were published in 1916 in Letopis, a monthly edited by Maksim Gorky. On Gorky's advice Babel decided to see the world and learn about life. He participated briefly in the war on the Romanian front. Invalided out, he joined the staff of Gorky's newspaper Novaya Zhizn. During the Revolution he worked probably as a clerk for the Commissariat of Education and for the CheKa, the Soviet Secret Police.

In 1919 Babel married Eugenia Gronfein and joined the Ukranian State Publishing House. He was assigned then as a journalist to Field Marshall Budenny's First Cavalry army, witnessing its unsuccessful Polish campaign. Back in Odessa Babel started to write a series of stories set in the Odessan ghetto of Moldavanka, where he was born. Tales of Odessa appeared in book form in 1931, and depicted with broad strokes and humor the Jewish underwold on the eve of Revolition. The colourful caricatures of shopkeepers, brokers, whores, and gangsters are linked together by the protagonist, Benia Krik, the king of gangsters.

In 1923 Babel started to publish a cycle of novels called Red Cavalry. The narrator, Liutov, is a Jewish officer, assigned to a regiment of traditionally anti-Semitic Cossacs. Their victims are mostly Jews, and out of the horror of battles, torture and murder Babel creates a tale of revolutionary change.

The stories appeared in Mayakovsky's LEF and other magazines, gaining Babel national fame, but they were also attacked by Budenny, who claimed they insulted his troops.

From 1923 Babel lived in Moscow. His wife went in 1925 to Paris for a 'temporary' separation. Babel visited his wife in Paris and travelled on journalistic assignments in Ukraine and the Caucasus. He served also as a secretary of a village soviet in Molodenovo.

In the beginning of the 1930s Babel's literary reputation was high in Soviet Union and abroad, but from mid-1930s he lived in silence under increasing Stalinist persecution. He married Antonia Pirizhkova, and they had one daughter. He worked on film scripts, including Eisenstein's banned Bezhin Meadow and on a new book.

In May 1939 Babel was arrested. Under interrogation and probable torture at Lubyanka Babel confessed a long association with Trotskyites and engaging in anti-Soviet activity. The Soviet officials informed Babel's widow that her husband died on March 17, 1941 in a prison camp in Siberia. His charges were posthumously cleared in 1954.

His seized manuscripts have not been recovered, and much of his work remains unpublished, untranslated or lost. Indeed, many of the details of Babel's life are uncertain, and are mostly constructed from unsubstantiated theory and rumour. As his daughter Nathalie explained, "although he appeared to be jovial and talkative, he was, in reality, not very communicative. Moreover, he loved to confuse and mystify people."

"..if I write seldom it is not because my life is hard.... but because it is uncertain, and this uncertainty derives entirely from changes and doubts connected with my work. In a country as united as ours, it is quite inevitable that a certain amount of thinking in clichés should appear, and I want to overcome this standardized way of thinking and introduce into our literature new ideas, new feeling and rhythms. This is what interests me and nothing else."

from Nathalie Babel (ed.), Isaac Babel, The Lonely Years. Unpublished Stories and Private Correspondence [New York: 1964], p. xxii

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