How do you reconcile that declaration of innocence with the fact of your arrest?

Jerome Charyn's Savage Shorthand: The Life and Death of Issac Babel has been getting a lot of press lately. James Campbell reviews it in the New York Times Book Review today, with a decidely different take on the introduction to Lionel Trilling's introduction to the 1955 edtion of Babel's "Collected Stories" than Lee Siegel's take on it in the Nation.

Babel's work, published sporadically in English during his lifetime, gained wide attention when "The Collected Stories" appeared in 1955, with a superb introduction by Lionel Trilling. The overall tenor of the stories, the best known of which are included in "Red Cavalry," is predictive of Babel's fate. They treat unutterable cruelty with irony, indifference and humor. A guard checking tickets on a train shoots a newlywed Jewish schoolmaster in the face for no discernible reason, then stuffs the dead man's sexual organs into his bride's mouth, with a wink at a comrade and the words "Try something kosher."

Jerome Charyn is mesmerized by Babel's experience as a soldier, a secret service agent, a Jew in the midst of a pogrom, a man "beyond the Pale" in both the literal and figurative senses. In Babel's character Benya Krik - the gangster known as the King, who lives in the Moldavanka ghetto of Odessa and who can arrange to have the police station set on fire as the authorities are plotting to arrest him - Charyn recognizes figures from "my Moldavanka, the East Bronx." He says he carries Babel's short stories "in my head wherever I go." Babel's "five minutes," as the author referred to the short-story form (in contrast to Tolstoy's 24 hours), are to Charyn "about creating volcanoes with each sentence, about conjunctions on the page that are closer to jazz riffs than to any writer."

Comments

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Just finished Alexander Bakhrakh, Bunin v khalate, where he mentions meeting Babel in Paris, and how IB surprised him. He didn't resemble his Konarmia stories at all: his French was excellent, flowing and grammatically correct; he was on top of all the newest trends in art and literary worlds, he was a charmer, a welcome guest at dinner parties - and a devout family man at that.