Babel' in Context A Study in Cultural Identity [Hardcover]

Isaak Babel' (1894-1940) is arguably one of the greatest modern short story writers of the early twentieth century. Yet his life and work are shrouded in the mystery of who Babel' wasan Odessa Jew who wrote in Russian, who came from one of the most vibrant centers of east European Jewish culture, and who all his life loved Yiddish and the stories of Sholom Aleichem This is the first book in English to study the intertextuality of Babel's work. It looks at Babel's cultural identity as a case study in the contradictions and tensions of literary influence, personal loyalties, and ideological constraint. The complex and often ambivalent relations between the two cultures inevitably raise controversial issues that touch on the reception of Babel' and other Jewish intellectuals in Russian literature, as well as the Jewishness of their work.Efraim Sicher (PhD Hebrew University) is a full professor at Ben-Gurion University, where he teaches comparative literature. He has published a study of Isaac Babels prose style, Style and Structure in the Prose of Isaak Babel (Slavica, 1986), has edited two volumes of Babels stories in Russian and one in English, and has edited the complete works of Babel in Hebrew. He has also published numerous books and articles in Russian and comparative literature and is well known in the field of modern Jewish culture.In this profoundly original book, the distinguished Babel? scholar Efraim Sicher examines this elusive writer through a defining set of linguistic, cultural, and historical contexts. Everything is here: the Babel? who was infatuated with Maupassant, the Babel? who tried writing in the framework of collectivization, the untangled biography, and, best of all, the Babel? who, as a native speaker of Yiddish, drew from the rich traditions of Yiddish and Hebrew literature centered in Odessa. Many critics and scholars have noted and explored the Jewish element in the work of Isaak Babel, but none has given it the sustained and pel“I