Fame and Folly by Cynthia Ozick

Author:Cynthia Ozick [Ozick, Cynthia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Cultural; Ethnic & Regional, General, Literary Collections, essays, Letters, Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781786491114
Google: zfAlDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2017-10-05T23:28:44.720450+00:00

It goes without saying that the flatness of this essentially evasive summary does almost no justice to an astonishing historical record set down with godlike prowess in a prose of frightening clarity. In Russia the complete text of the journal finally appeared in 1990. Yale University Press brings it to us now under the title Isaac Babel: 1920 Diary, in an electrifying translation, accompanied by a first-rate (and indispensable) introduction. (It ought to be added that an informative introduction can be found also in the Penguin Collected Stories; but the reader’s dependence on such piecemeal discussions only underscores the irritating absence of a formal biography.) In 1975 Ardis Publishers, specialists in Russian studies, made available the first English translation of excerpts from the journal (Isaac Babel: Forgotten Prose). That such a manuscript existed had long been known in the Soviet Union, but there was plainly no chance of publication; Ehrenburg, in referring to it, was discreet about its contents.

The Diary may count, then, as a kind of secret document; certainly as a suppressed one. But it is “secret” in another sense as well. Though it served as raw material for the Red Cavalry stories, Babel himself, in transforming private notes into daring fiction, was less daring than he might have been. He was, in fact, circumspect and selective. One can move from the notes to the stories without surprise—or put it that the surprise is in the masterliness and shock of a ripe and radical style. Still, as Ehrenburg reported, “the events are all practically the same,” and what is in the Diary is in the stories.

But one cannot begin with the stories and then move to the journal without the most acute recognition of what has been, substantively and for the most part, shut out of the fiction. And what has been shut out is the calamity (to say it in the most general way) of jewish fate in Eastern Europe. The Diary records how the First Cavalry Army, and Babel with it, went storming through the little Jewish towns of Galicia, in Poland—towns that had endured the Great War, with many of their young men serving in the Polish army, only to be decimated by pogroms immediately afterward, at the hands of the Poles themselves. And immediately after that, the invasion of the Red Cossacks. The Yale edition of the Diary supplies maps showing the route of Budyonny’s troops; the resonant names of these places, rendered half-romantic through the mystical tales of their legendary hasidic saints, rise up with the nauseous familiarity of their deaths: Brody, Dubno, Zhitomir, Belz, Chelm, Zamosc, etc. Only two decades after the Red Cossacks stampeded through them, their Jewish populations fell prey to the Germans and were destroyed. Riding and writing, writing and riding, Babel saw it all: saw it like a seer. “Ill-fated Galicia, ill-fated Jews,” he wrote. “Can it be,” he wrote, “that ours is the century in which they perish?”

True: everything that is in the stories is in the Diary—priest,

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