Too Silent for Stalin

ISAAC BABEL: YOU MUST KNOW EVERYTHING. Edited by Nathalie Babel. Translated by Max Hayward. 283 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $5.95.

More words have been published about Isaac Babel than by him. It is a situation that would have greatly amused the Russian-Jewish short-short-story writer whose work exemplifies Pushkin's golden rule that "precision and brevity are the prime qualities of prose." As a writer who could be economical without sacrificing impact, Babel compares favorably with Chekhov. Even Hemingway, one of the most ruthless wringers of prose, conceded that Babel could "clot the curds" better than he could.

Though plentiful, facts about Babel are less precise than his fiction. An obsessive craftsman, intensely jealous of his working and thinking time, he was often evasive and devious with friends and editors. There is no doubt, however, that Babel's life was brief. In 1939, after nearly a decade of playing the quiet and lucky mouse to Stalin's cat, the 44-year-old writer was snatched off to Moscow's Lubyanka prison and never heard from again. As the prison gates closed behind him, he was heard to utter, with a sly smile, "I was not given time to finish."

Babel's unpublished manuscripts were seized, and are presumed to have been destroyed during World War II. His books disappeared from the shops, and his name was stricken from The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia. He became an Orwellian unperson. Whether Babel was shot immediately after a sham trial or died in a forced-labor camp has never been known with any certainty. After Khrushchev "rehabilitated" Babel's name in 1954, the family received only a certificate giving an official death date of March 17, 1941.

Conflicting Character. Like many other artists whose lives and works were obliterated during Stalin's purges, Babel was guilty not of disloyalty to the Revolution but of not being demonstrably loyal enough. Apparently, Stalin expected much of this stocky, near sighted Jew, who in the 1920s had become an overnight literary hero with Red Cavalry, a collection of vignettes in which Babel fictionalized his experiences as a correspondent riding with the Red Cossacks against the Poles who repulsed the Bolshevik attempt to Communize their homeland. But instead of falling into the assembly line of Social Realism, Babel fell into one of the noisiest silences in the history of modern Russian literature. Some of the reasons for Babel's failure to fulfill his production quotas are touched on by Ilya Ehrenburg, Lev Nikulin, Georgy Mun-blit and Konstantin Paustovsky, writers and former friends of the author. Their reminiscences compose most of the generous appendix to You Must Know Everything, a collection of newly translated short stories, abrupt prose exercises and journalistic sketches gathered and annotated by Nathalie Babel, the author's daughter and dedicated literary guardian, who now lives in the U.S.

Babel was not merely compelled to rewrite a story dozens of times, as the Russian authors suggest. He seems to have been incapable of writing anything that did not follow the unique lines of his own ironical and conflicting character. For all their straightforward drama and excitement, the Red Cavalry stories rest on the contradiction between professional bloodletting and revolutionary ideals.

Earliest Voice. Babel himself put the matter of his individuality best. In a 1937 interview, the text of which Miss Babel has included in her book, he told the hounding members of the Union of Soviet Writers: "You talk about my silence. Let me tell you a secret. I have wasted several years trying, with due regard to my own tastes, to write lengthily, with a lot of detail and philosophy --striving for the sort of truth I have been talking about. It didn't work out with me. And so, although I'm a devotee of Tolstoy, in order to achieve something I have to work in a way opposite to his."

This individuality, which was both Babel's genius and his death warrant, comes through best in his tales of old Odessa. In them, Chekhov's melancholy, Maupassant's detachment and Gogol's grotesque wit seem to fuse into the unmistakable Babel voice. It is a voice that can be heard most simply and clearly in You Must Know Everything, the title story of the collection. Considered to be his earliest known fiction, the story was discovered in manuscript and published in the Soviet Union in 1965.

As in the typical autobiographical Babel childhood story, the reader slips into the author's atmosphere of old Odessa as if it were a familiar coat. Within a framework of shop-lined streets, savory meals and sturdy furnishings, the young narrator casually spins the tale of his grandmother, an embittered illiterate who urges her grandson to study hard and learn everything. To her, knowledge is not an instrument of discovery but a weapon of revenge that will bring the world to its knees.

Many of the 25 stories translated by Max Hayward for this edition were published in Russia during Babel's lifetime, but only a few even begin to approach the lyrical force of such concentrated conceptions as the widely known The Story of My Dovecot, Lyubka the Cossack and Salt. The Jewess, longest story in the book and presumed to be a fragment of a proposed novel, touches on one of Babel's most forceful and most personal themes--the conflicting needs of a Soviet Jew to retain his traditions and be a correct citizen. The Jewess of the title is a country widow whose son Boris, a Bolshevik official, resettles her in a Moscow apartment. He turns the apartment into a club for his comrades, and soon Moscow Cooperative Society sausage is replaced by the old lady's gefilte fish. The story ends abruptly with a neighbor's complaint about the smell of boiled fish throughout the building. The last lines hint at ethnic and possibly political troubles in the making.

"Why," asks Daughter Nathalie, "did Babel leave The Jewess unfinished?" Was it because, as she suggests, he could not resolve in himself the conflict he hoped to portray in Boris? The slim hope remains that a completed variation of the manuscript may yet be found. The Jewess has never been published in Russia, and it is not difficult to see why. In a nation where anti-Semitism and the assimilation of minorities are sensitive issues, this tale is bound to cause embarrassment. Babel's name may have been rehabilitated, but some of his work remains incorrigible.

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