The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Read Online Free PDF Page B

The Imperial government was losing control, and calls for change; which were to lead to the Revolution and Civil War, were in the air. Perhaps most important for a young writer was that the Czarist censorship was crumbling, which meant that daring new subjects could be treated in new ways, a characteristic that was to stay with Babel throughout his writing career. His first published story, “Old Shloyme” (1913), dealt with the subversive subject of Jews forced by officially sanctioned anti-Semitism to renounce their religion. In the story, a young Jew gives in to the pressure to Russianize himself, “to leave his people for a new God,” while the old Jew, though never interested in religion or tradition, cannot bring himself to give them up. In the subsequent stories, Babel touches on other taboo subjects: Jewish men mixing with Christian women, prostitution, teenage pregnancy, and abortion.
    These early stories also reveal Babel’s growing interest in using language in new and unusual ways. He has a young woman offer herself to her lover; “and the lanky fellow wallowed in businesslike bliss.” Odessa matrons, “plump with idleness and naively corseted are passionately squeezed behind bushes by fervent students of medicine or law” Babel describes the Czarina as cc a small woman with a tightly powdered face; a consummate schemer with an indefatigable passion for power” In a forest scene, “green leaves bent toward one another, caressed each other with their flat hands” We also see the recurring motifs of sun and sunset, which are to play an important role in Babel’s later writing.
    Babel’s piquant brand of realism soon caught the eye of Maxim Gorky, who was to be the single most influential literary figure in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s, and who was particularly instrumental in helping young Soviet writers. Gorky published BabeVs stories “Elya Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofievna”and “Mama, Rimma, and Alla”in 1916 in his literary magazine Letopis, which marked the beginning of Gorky’s mentoring of Babel’s career This mentoring was to last until Gorky’s death exactly twenty years later.

OLD SHLOYME

    Although our town is small, its inhabitants few in number, and y [ although Shloyme had not left this town once in sixty years, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single person who was able to tell you exactly who Shloyme was or what he was all about. The reason for this, plain and simple, is that he was forgotten, the way you forget an unnecessary thing that doesn’t jump out and grab you. Old Shloyme was precisely that kind of thing. He was eighty-six years old. His eyes were watery. His face—his small, dirty, wrinkled face—was overgrown with a yellowish beard that had never been combed, and his head was covered with a thick, tangled mane. Shloyme almost never washed, seldom changed his clothes, and gave off a foul stench. His son and daughter-in-law, with whom he lived, had stopped bothering about him—they kept him in a warm corner and forgot about him. His warm corner and his food were all that Shloyme had left, and it seemed that this was all he needed. For him, warming his old broken bones and eating a nice, fat, juicy piece of meat were the purest bliss. He was the first to come to the table, and greedily watched every bite with unflinching eyes, convulsively cramming food into his mouth with his long bony fingers, and he ate, ate, ate till they refused to give him any more, even a tiny little piece. Watching Shloyme eat was disgusting: his whole puny body quivered, his fingers covered with grease, his face so pitiful, filled with the dread that someone might harm him, that he might be forgotten. Sometimes his daughter-in-law would play a little trick on Shloyme. She would serve the food, and then act as if she had overlooked him.
    The old man would begin to get agitated, look around helplessly, and try to smile with his twisted, toothless mouth. He wanted to show