Status
Available
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Collection
Publication
Torino, Einaudi
Description
'Everyone makes mistakes, even God.' In the original Odessa Stories collection published in 1931, Babel describes the life of the fictional Jewish mob boss Benya Krik - one of the great anti-heroes of Russian literature - and his gang in the ghetto of Moldavanka, around the time of the October Revolution. Praised by Maxim Gorky and considered one of the great masterpieces of twentieth-century Russian literature, this is the first ever stand-alone collection of all Babel's narratives set in the city, and includes the original stories as well as later tales.
User reviews
LibraryThing member gbill
I have great respect for Pushkin Press, who publish interesting authors in such a beautiful format. The short stories in the beginning of this collection which focus on gangsters and various other characters in Odessa were hit and miss with me, but it got more interesting and more poignant towards
As I read, I thought I was getting a glimpse into the reasons Babel was dangerous to the Soviet Union, but it was interesting to find he was targeted instead because of his affair with the wife of NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov. My favorite story was ‘Karl-Yankel’, in which a communist party member takes his mother-in-law to court for having his newborn son circumcised, and for having calling his son Yankel instead of the name he’s chosen, which is Karl, after Karl Marx. It’s presented as a farce, but quite clearly shows the conflict between the Soviet state and Judaism, and in the trial rabbis show up because the “Jewish faith itself would be on trial.” Other nice stories are ‘The Story of My Dovecote’, ‘First Love’, ‘In the Basement’, and ‘The Awakening’, which were written between 1925 and 1931, a golden period for him, before he was disillusioned while travelling to Ukraine and before Stalin began cracking down on artistic expression. Babel’s short stories didn’t blow me away, but were certainly worth reading.
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the middle, with more direct references to the atrocities of the Red Army, pogroms against the Jews, and Babel’s own semi-autobiographical accounts of life growing up. Babel is sometimes salty and is highly idiomatic throughout, some examples of which are these lines: “I don’t want you, Rook, like no one wants to die; I don’t want you like a bride doesn’t want pimples on her head”, and “Beyond the window, stars scattered like soldiers relieving themselves – green stars across a dark blue field.”As I read, I thought I was getting a glimpse into the reasons Babel was dangerous to the Soviet Union, but it was interesting to find he was targeted instead because of his affair with the wife of NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov. My favorite story was ‘Karl-Yankel’, in which a communist party member takes his mother-in-law to court for having his newborn son circumcised, and for having calling his son Yankel instead of the name he’s chosen, which is Karl, after Karl Marx. It’s presented as a farce, but quite clearly shows the conflict between the Soviet state and Judaism, and in the trial rabbis show up because the “Jewish faith itself would be on trial.” Other nice stories are ‘The Story of My Dovecote’, ‘First Love’, ‘In the Basement’, and ‘The Awakening’, which were written between 1925 and 1931, a golden period for him, before he was disillusioned while travelling to Ukraine and before Stalin began cracking down on artistic expression. Babel’s short stories didn’t blow me away, but were certainly worth reading.
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LibraryThing member steller0707
The Odessa Stories are a set of tales of life in Old Odessa, giving a glimpse of life in the early 1900s in Russia. The characters are Jews - old men and women, gangsters, and priests - and their neighborhood, Moldavanka. The same characters reappear across several stories. There are parties and
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jokes, along with trickery and malice, showing the strains changeover from a czarist state to a workers' government. Show Less
LibraryThing member JosephCamilleri
This Pushkin Press edition brings together all of Isaac Babel’s stories with an Odessa setting, in a new translation by Boris Dralyuk. Dralyuk also provides a helpful introduction which explains the context of the stories and gives insights into his approach to the translation. We learn, for
The first part of this volume of stories is entitled “Gangsters and other Old Odessans” and includes tales inspired by this “urban folklore”. They feature recurring characters – such as Benya “the King” Krik, Froim “the Rook” and Lyubka “the Cossack”. I must confess that I did not find these criminals particularly likeable, nor did I warm to their dubious exploits. Whatever my feelings about his protagonists, however, there’s no denying Isaac Babel’s brilliance as a writer. His style is very particular, alternating dark humour with lyrical passages inspired, according to Dralyuk, by the argot of Odessa. It must have been a particular challenge to capture the flow of the originals in this English translation, but Dralyuk manages to do so effectively by drawing, believe it or not, on the style of American pulp fiction contemporary with Babel's stories.
The gangster tales are complemented by a number of autobiographical works, grouped under the title “Childhood and Youth”. These vignettes reflect Babel’s Odessan upbringing, but they are an imaginative interpretation of his childhood impressions, rather than a memoir. You could call it autobiographical fiction, or fictional autobiography - or, to use a current term, auto-fiction. Three pieces which could not be comfortably placed under either of these two sections are placed in a final part - "Loose Leaves and Apocrypha."
This is a collection to read, both for the quality of its stories and for the snapshot it gives of the Jewish community of Odessa at a particular point in time. Here was a world which would soon change forever.
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instance, that at the start of the 20th century Odessa had the largest Jewish settlement after New York and Warsaw, counting around 140,000 Jews. The community had also its seamier underworld, largely based in the area of Moldavanka. This part of the city, which Dralyuk compares to London’s Whitechapel or New York’s Lower East Side, led to the development of what one might call Odessa’s “urban folklore”, peopled by gangsters at once reviled for their violence and revered for their roguish charm and peculiar code of honour.The first part of this volume of stories is entitled “Gangsters and other Old Odessans” and includes tales inspired by this “urban folklore”. They feature recurring characters – such as Benya “the King” Krik, Froim “the Rook” and Lyubka “the Cossack”. I must confess that I did not find these criminals particularly likeable, nor did I warm to their dubious exploits. Whatever my feelings about his protagonists, however, there’s no denying Isaac Babel’s brilliance as a writer. His style is very particular, alternating dark humour with lyrical passages inspired, according to Dralyuk, by the argot of Odessa. It must have been a particular challenge to capture the flow of the originals in this English translation, but Dralyuk manages to do so effectively by drawing, believe it or not, on the style of American pulp fiction contemporary with Babel's stories.
The gangster tales are complemented by a number of autobiographical works, grouped under the title “Childhood and Youth”. These vignettes reflect Babel’s Odessan upbringing, but they are an imaginative interpretation of his childhood impressions, rather than a memoir. You could call it autobiographical fiction, or fictional autobiography - or, to use a current term, auto-fiction. Three pieces which could not be comfortably placed under either of these two sections are placed in a final part - "Loose Leaves and Apocrypha."
This is a collection to read, both for the quality of its stories and for the snapshot it gives of the Jewish community of Odessa at a particular point in time. Here was a world which would soon change forever.
Show Less
LibraryThing member BooksForDinner
My great grandfather and my aunts and uncles all came from Odessa at this time. So great reading these stories that I somehow had never read before.
Language
Original language
Russian
Original publication date
1931
ISBN
8806599747 / 9788806599744