I have always had a fascination for historical oddities. For instance, a German, three years after Hitler’s accession to chancellor, won the Nobel Peace Prize, and deserved it. I always loved Ripley’s “Believe it or Not.” Well believe it or not, there was a Jew who rode with Cossacks. What, you may ask, is so odd about a Jew who rode with Cossacks? In the mid seventeenth century, Bogdan Chmielnicki’s Cossacks inflicted horrible massacres on the Jewish people of the Ukraine. Those who were massacred before the Cossacks could torture them were probably the lucky ones. Ever after, when the Czar wished a particularly vicious pogrom on his Jewish subjects, he would call out the Cossacks. History records that Cossacks were only too willing to oblige.
Cossack and Jew – oil and water. The whole Cossack ethos was violence, earthiness, and anti-intellectualism. The Jewish ethos was humanism, the book – Torah, the life of the mind, and pacifism. For a Jew to ride in a Cossack cavalry regiment can only be compared to a black riding with the Ku Klux Klan.
Yet it happened! Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel, an author, was assigned to Budenny’s Cavalry. He wrote about his adventures in a collection of short stories known as “Red Cavalry.” Lionel Trilling, in his introduction to “The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel,” states: ”There was an anomaly at the very heart of the book, for the Red Cavalry of the title were Cossack regiments, and why were Cossacks fighting for the revolution, they who were the instrument and symbol of Czarist repression.” He then goes on to say a Jew in a Cossack regiment was more than an anomaly, it was a joke, for between Cossack and Jew there existed not merely hatred but a polar opposition.
Now, I must hasten to add some qualifiers to our anomaly. Carol Luplow, in her study. “Red Cavalry,” tells us that “Babel” used the pseudonym “Lyutov” when assigned in 1920 to Budenny’s Cavalry. This to hide his Jewish ancestry. Furthermore, he was really assigned as a war correspondent and a writer for the division newspaper The Red Cavalrymen. However, the lines blurred and Babel/Lyutov, whether he liked it or not, became a combatant as well as a correspondent.
Let’s back up and see what we can find out about this Isaac Babel. By the way, the Brooklyn Central Library at Grand Army Plaza has “The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel” with the Trilling introduction. They have Carol Luplow’s “Red Cavalry,” Danuta Mendelson’s “Metaphor in Babel’s Short Stories,” and “Isaac Babel” by Milton Ehre in the Twaynes series. If that weren’t enough, the Encyclopedia Judaica has an excellent article by Maurice Friedberg.
Isaac Babel was born in Odessa. His second famous set of tales is aptly called “Odessa Tales.” He sometimes gave out his biography as a “Shtetl” Jew, but he was not. His father was a sales representative for a manufacturer of agricultural implements. The family tried to move toward assimilation though Yiddish was still the language of the household. Isaac attended commercial school in Odessa, and then the Institute of Finance and Business in Kiev. In 1916 he moved to St. Petersberg. Oddly, his first short stories were in French, and his model was Du Maupassant, not Chekhov. He made the acquaintance of Gorky, who published several of his stories. Gorky told him that he had to see more of life.
The World War and the revolution made this a relatively easy task to accomplish. In 1917 he served in the Russian Army on the Rumanian front. In 1919 he served in the Red Army in the civil war, and, in 1920, he served as correspondent to Budenn’s First (Cossack) Cavalry Army in Poland.
When “Red Cavalry” appeared in 1923, it created a sensation. Babel moved to Moscow in 1924, where he was promptly denounced” by General Budenny himself, who attacked his manliness and accused him of failing to show the Cossacks revolutionary elan. Pravda weighed in by praising Babel’s obvious talent, but warning him against the “dangerous deviations of naturalism and eroticism.” Meetings were held and he was accused of failing to show the Red Army with sufficient heroic glamour. In 1928 Gorky came to Babel’s defense. He got Stalin to step in and stop the attacks. Stalin called “Red Cavalry” a very good book. This makes me wonder if there were two Stalins. One “liberal and understanding”? No way! One just biding his time for his days of absolute power. Surely a writer who has an old Jew expressing puzzlement because murder and looting are his town’s lot and then. wonderment that cne can’t really tell the Communists from the anti-communists because they both murder and loot, can’t last in a society governed by Socialist realism.
There really isn’t much more to Babel than “The Odessa Tales” and “Red Cavalry.” However. in 1934 Stalin clamped down with an iron fist through the “First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers.” They wanted to know where were Babel’s works glorifying the Soviet Union and the revolution. He defended himself. unwisely it would seem, as “a master of the genre of silence.” In 1935 he was allowed to leave the country and travel to Paris to attend an anti-fascist international congress of culture and peace. Unfortunately, he did not defect. He said he could not live without the revolution and the Russian language. This is odd because he’d obviously soured on the revolution and Russian was his third language after Yiddish and French.
In 1938 or 1939 he was arrested. No one knows exactly what happened to him, but he was never reported seen in a concentration camp. It is therefore surmised that he was shot immediately-1y. Other sources put his death in 1941. Why was he arrested? Again the sources differ but for many, even most, in those days there did not have to be a reason. Nameless terror was more effective than reasoned terror. Some say Gorky died, and with him Babel lost a protector. His last words allegedly were “They didn’t let me finish.” In 1954 he was exonerated. Stalin was dead.
I haven’t said much about the tales, though I’ve given you sources that say all you need to know. The tales themselves are often quite short, yet they are not easy reading. The point often just eludes one in the very simplicity. Yet you will understand Russian/Polish Jewish life, and the life of the Cossack. Belter still, what it was like for a Jew to try to be a Cossack. Joyce said of the epiphany that suddenly, miraculously, by phrase or gesture, a life would thrust itself through the veil of things and for an instant show itself, startling by its existence. “Red Cavalry” and “The Odessa Tales” several epiphanies I recommend them to you, from the Jew who rode with Cossacks.