'A Glory Seemingly Reserved For Poems'

“He was born in the jumbled catacombs of the stair-stepped port of Odessa, late in 1894. Irreparably Semitic, Isaac was the son of a rag merchant from Kiev and a Moldavian Jewess. Catastrophe has been the normal climate of his life.” 

Though born within five years of each other, Isaac Babel and Jorge Luis Borges would seem to inhabit dimensions sharing little overlap. Borges wrote a series of “Capsule Biographies” for the magazine El Hogar [Home] between 1936 and 1939. The life of Babel, quoted above, was published February 4, 1938, two years before Babel was executed by order of Beria and Stalin. We shouldn’t be surprised Borges would profile a living Jewish writer. He was consistently an anti-anti-Semite. In 1934, when Argentinian fascists accused him of being a Jew, Borges published an essay, “I, a Jew,” though in fact he wasn’t Jewish.

 

In 1920, Babel had joined a Cossack regiment during the Polish-Soviet War. One of the results was his masterpiece, Red Cavalry (1926). It was his first book to be translated into several languages, including English. Hemingway read and admired it. Borges writes of the Cossacks:

 

“Those blustering and useless warriors were (no one in the history of the universe has been defeated more often than the Cossacks), of course, anti-Semitic. The mere idea of a Jew on horseback struck them as laughable, and the fact that Babel was a good horseman only added to their disdain and spite.”

 

Babel ranks with the masters of the short story – James, Chekhov, Conrad, Borges, Isaac Bashevis Singer. In the last decade, along with Red Cavalry, Boris Dralyuk has translated into English Odessa Stories and Of Sunshine and Bedbugs: Essential Stories, all published by Pushkin Press. Here’s how Borges closes his capsule biography of Babel:

 

“By reputation, though not according to the bibliographies, Isaac Babel is still a homo unius libri [“man of one book”: no longer true].

 

“His unmatched book is titled Red Cavalry.

 

“The music of its style contrasts with the almost ineffable brutality of certain scenes.

 

“One of the stories—‘Salt’—enjoys a glory seemingly reserved for poems and rarely attained by prose: many people know it by heart.”

 

Babel was born on this date, July 13, in 1894, and died on January 27, 1940 at age forty-five.

 

[The brief Babel biography was translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen and included in Selected Non-Fictions (ed. Eliot Weinberger, Viking, 1999).]