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Red Cavalry
(Babel, Isaak)

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Isaak Babel speaks directly to us in the early twenty first century. A journalist and Jewish intellectual, he rode on horseback with the Red Army during Russia's war with Poland soon after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1920. Red Cavalry is a journalistic account of Babel's travels during these border wars. The horrifying atrocities and sheer stupidities he witnessed are described with muscular, pointed detail. Babel was caught up in his passionate belief that the Revolution was the answer to the evils of the old tsarist regime; but his instinct for the truth and feeling for the price of all the violence makes him a poignant observer.

An example: Babel and the Red Cavalry ride to a village in the old Pale of Settlement, Volhynia, where the Polish cavalry have not just tortured and murdered an old Jewish pharmacist, who had no use for any faction in this dirty war. No, they have wantonly destroyed his entire store of medicines, leaving their own community, themselves, without defense against disease and infection. Babel conveys the vicious irony of the situation with feeling, but no sentiment. He goes on to urge the Red Cavalry to bring these Polish Knights to justice, but the exhortation is hollow in comparison to the description of the horror he has witnessed. This where we are now in 2006: what comes first, humanity or ideology? There is no place for the maudlin or one-dimensional point of view infused with loyalty if we want the truth, then or now. This is what Babel still has to teach us.

Babel was a Jew who was Russian, and he wanted to serve the Soviet state with honor; we have a tendency to forget the incredible atrocities of the tsarist regime, especially those against Jews, after all the years of Soviet insanity and state sponsored murder. Babel's desire to tell the truth in such a way that the reader would viscerally feel, not just see, in the fewest words possible, is what makes him the moral and stylistic ancestor of such Jewish American writers as Grace Paley and Philip Roth; and this is what led to his execution by the Soviet state in 1940. At the age of 45 all Babel wanted to do was finish his work, tell the truth, to live his art. He was executed anyway.

Red Cavalry is Babel's best known work, and it should be read for the speed and brilliance of its pace, as well as its spare, vivid, tough and direct prose. Babel also conveys myriads of complexity in terms of point of view as well as the historical situation. Isaak Babel gets to the point, impartially, yet also from the heart. Very few writers, dead or living, are so capable.



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