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3.73 AVERAGE
3.73 AVERAGE
Thus, began my life, full of thought and merriment.
With 'Odessa Stories', Isaac Babel took me to the legendary city of Odessa, the mythical [b:city of Rogues and Schnorrers|13243823|City of Rogues and Schnorrers Russia's Jews and the Myth of Old Odessa|Jarrod Tanny|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1383166658i/13243823._SX50_.jpg|18444111] on the coast of the Black Sea – Fascinated, I listened to the beguiling, mirthful and ironic voice of the narrator ‘with glasses on his nose and autumn in his heart’, depicting the feisty local life in the rambunctious Moldavanka, the tough and sinful district where Babel used to live, a Jewish gangsters’ paradise. As Comrade Babel had access to secret files of the police, he was well informed about Jewish banditism in Odessa.
(Illustrations to Babel’s Odessa Stories by G.G. Filippovsky, 1931)
The title of this collection, Odessa Stories might be somewhat confusing, as it includes more stories than the ones originally known as the Tales of Odessa. The 17 stories included in Odessa Stories are arranged in three parts. 9 picaresque stories revolve around the adventures of mobster ‘King’ Benya Krik and other ‘Old Odessans’; 5 stories draw on Babel’s childhood and youth and are assumed semi-autobiographical; 3 are found under the title ‘Loose leaves and Apocrypha’.
As an Odessan Judeo-Russian author, Isaac Babel was acutely aware of his Jewishness and the preponderance of Jewish culture in his beloved hometown. Cosmopolitan Odessa was the most Jewish of Russian cities in the 1920 - in 1900, about 35 percent of the population was Jewish. Inspired by Odessa’s variegated population, Babel passes in review a rich mix of characters in his stories: thieves, swindlers, smugglers, draymen, shopkeepers, prostitutes, musicians, bourgeois, bankers, craftsmen, beggars, old pious Jews like the storyteller Aryeh Leib, luftmenschen – jacks-of-all-trades living on air, going from town to town buying and selling.
Marc Chagall, Over Vitebsk
Pursuing ‘precision and brevity’ like Pushkin in his literary style, Babel’s utterly perceptive eye only needs a few pages and terse phrases to paint his flamboyant scenes: ’No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place’. According to another Soviet author associated with Odessa, his friend Konstantin Paustovsky, Babel once told him that he had to keep his phrases and stories that short because he suffered from asthma.
Babel needed to submerge in real life to inspire him. Infatuated with the prose of Gustave Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant, Babel’s living literary hero and mentor, Maxim Gorky – who protected him politically for 20 years - taught Babel ‘extremely important things and sent me into the world’, resulting in his most famous story cycle, Red Cavalry, on the 1919-21 Polish-Soviet war.
While reading Red Cavalry years ago, Babel’s unsettling juxtaposition of the most violent and blood-soaked savagery and splendid surreal imagery of nature revolted and delighted me so intensely I couldn’t stomach more than one story in one sitting. However stunning Red Cavalry, in some sense I felt relieved most tales in Odessa Stories are less disconcerting and shocking than the ones from Red Cavalry.
Besides the intriguing themes or engaging plots of the stories from the Odessa collection, it was mostly Babel’s unique expressionistic style and visual prose which overwhelmed and charmed me – again. Reading Babel is like stepping into a painting of Chagall, brushing his tableaus inspired by Jewish tradition and Russian folklore in a pictorial language brimming with vivid, brilliant colours. Searingly exuberant, at times affectionate, Babel wins the reader’s heart with his juicy metaphors and gaudy imagery. The sun is almost a character in itself: the sun rises over a head like a sentry with a rifle, sprinkles people with creeping freckles, freckles the colour of lizards, hangs from the sky like a thirsty dog’s rosy tongue or pours down into the clouds like the blood of a stuck hog, or soars up and spins like a red bowl on a spearhead. A sunset viscous as jam boils in the sky.
Babel seems on a personal cosmic mission to revitalize the sun in Russian literature, and in his eyes, it would take Odessa and an Odessite son to bring the sun to Russian literature and to free it from the clutches of cold and misty St Petersburg:
There is the blowup and distorting of reality, and the schmaltzy Jewish pun. After having shot a man in How it Was Done in Odessa, mob leader Benya Krik tells the man’s mother: ‘Aunt Pesya, if you want my life, you can have it, but everyone makes mistakes, even God. That’s what it was, aunt Pesya – a huge mistake. But wasn’t it a mistake on God’s part to put the Jews in Russia, where they suffer as if they’re in hell? I ask you, why not have the Jews live in Switzerland, with nothing but top-quality lakes, mountain air and Frenchmen as far as the eye can see? Everyone makes mistakes, even God.’.
Yet not all is laughing matter. The brutal realism of the times, of the Revolution and the new regime trickle down in stories describing how is done away with old Odessa figures who are useless in the bright Soviet future, like in The End of the Almshouse and Froim the Rook. There is the haunting anti-semitism and horrible pre-revolutionary violence on Jews. One of the most harrowing stories of this collection, The Story of My Dovecote parallels the outrageous brutality of the Red Calvary story cycle , recounting a pogrom from the perspective of a ten year old Jewish boy:
With 'Odessa Stories', Isaac Babel took me to the legendary city of Odessa, the mythical [b:city of Rogues and Schnorrers|13243823|City of Rogues and Schnorrers Russia's Jews and the Myth of Old Odessa|Jarrod Tanny|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1383166658i/13243823._SX50_.jpg|18444111] on the coast of the Black Sea – Fascinated, I listened to the beguiling, mirthful and ironic voice of the narrator ‘with glasses on his nose and autumn in his heart’, depicting the feisty local life in the rambunctious Moldavanka, the tough and sinful district where Babel used to live, a Jewish gangsters’ paradise. As Comrade Babel had access to secret files of the police, he was well informed about Jewish banditism in Odessa.
(Illustrations to Babel’s Odessa Stories by G.G. Filippovsky, 1931)
The title of this collection, Odessa Stories might be somewhat confusing, as it includes more stories than the ones originally known as the Tales of Odessa. The 17 stories included in Odessa Stories are arranged in three parts. 9 picaresque stories revolve around the adventures of mobster ‘King’ Benya Krik and other ‘Old Odessans’; 5 stories draw on Babel’s childhood and youth and are assumed semi-autobiographical; 3 are found under the title ‘Loose leaves and Apocrypha’.
As an Odessan Judeo-Russian author, Isaac Babel was acutely aware of his Jewishness and the preponderance of Jewish culture in his beloved hometown. Cosmopolitan Odessa was the most Jewish of Russian cities in the 1920 - in 1900, about 35 percent of the population was Jewish. Inspired by Odessa’s variegated population, Babel passes in review a rich mix of characters in his stories: thieves, swindlers, smugglers, draymen, shopkeepers, prostitutes, musicians, bourgeois, bankers, craftsmen, beggars, old pious Jews like the storyteller Aryeh Leib, luftmenschen – jacks-of-all-trades living on air, going from town to town buying and selling.
In Odessa, luftmenschen skulk around coffee shops, looking to earn a rouble and feed their families, but there’s no work to be had – and what kind of work could there be for a useless luftmensch? (From Odessa, 1916)
Marc Chagall, Over Vitebsk
Pursuing ‘precision and brevity’ like Pushkin in his literary style, Babel’s utterly perceptive eye only needs a few pages and terse phrases to paint his flamboyant scenes: ’No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place’. According to another Soviet author associated with Odessa, his friend Konstantin Paustovsky, Babel once told him that he had to keep his phrases and stories that short because he suffered from asthma.
Babel needed to submerge in real life to inspire him. Infatuated with the prose of Gustave Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant, Babel’s living literary hero and mentor, Maxim Gorky – who protected him politically for 20 years - taught Babel ‘extremely important things and sent me into the world’, resulting in his most famous story cycle, Red Cavalry, on the 1919-21 Polish-Soviet war.
While reading Red Cavalry years ago, Babel’s unsettling juxtaposition of the most violent and blood-soaked savagery and splendid surreal imagery of nature revolted and delighted me so intensely I couldn’t stomach more than one story in one sitting. However stunning Red Cavalry, in some sense I felt relieved most tales in Odessa Stories are less disconcerting and shocking than the ones from Red Cavalry.
Besides the intriguing themes or engaging plots of the stories from the Odessa collection, it was mostly Babel’s unique expressionistic style and visual prose which overwhelmed and charmed me – again. Reading Babel is like stepping into a painting of Chagall, brushing his tableaus inspired by Jewish tradition and Russian folklore in a pictorial language brimming with vivid, brilliant colours. Searingly exuberant, at times affectionate, Babel wins the reader’s heart with his juicy metaphors and gaudy imagery. The sun is almost a character in itself: the sun rises over a head like a sentry with a rifle, sprinkles people with creeping freckles, freckles the colour of lizards, hangs from the sky like a thirsty dog’s rosy tongue or pours down into the clouds like the blood of a stuck hog, or soars up and spins like a red bowl on a spearhead. A sunset viscous as jam boils in the sky.
Babel seems on a personal cosmic mission to revitalize the sun in Russian literature, and in his eyes, it would take Odessa and an Odessite son to bring the sun to Russian literature and to free it from the clutches of cold and misty St Petersburg:
Consider this: Could it be true that, in all Russian literature, there isn’t a single clear and joyous depiction of the sun? (…) And have you ever run across a bright and enlivening sun in Gogol – a man from Ukraine?(..) The first person to talk about the sun in a Russian book – to talk about it with enthusiasm and passion – was Gorky. but precisely because he talks of it with such enthusiasm and passion, we’re still not quite dealing with the real thing. Gorky is a forerunner – the most powerful in our time. But he is not a singer of the sun – he is the herald of truth. And know this: If there is anything worth singing about, it’s the sun (…). I believe the Russian people will soon be drawn to the south, the sea and the sun. Everyone feels the need for new blood. It’s getting hard to breathe. The literary messiah, for whom we’ve awaited so long and so fruitlessly, will come from there – from the sunny steppes washed by the sea. (From Odessa, 1916)
There is the blowup and distorting of reality, and the schmaltzy Jewish pun. After having shot a man in How it Was Done in Odessa, mob leader Benya Krik tells the man’s mother: ‘Aunt Pesya, if you want my life, you can have it, but everyone makes mistakes, even God. That’s what it was, aunt Pesya – a huge mistake. But wasn’t it a mistake on God’s part to put the Jews in Russia, where they suffer as if they’re in hell? I ask you, why not have the Jews live in Switzerland, with nothing but top-quality lakes, mountain air and Frenchmen as far as the eye can see? Everyone makes mistakes, even God.’.
Yet not all is laughing matter. The brutal realism of the times, of the Revolution and the new regime trickle down in stories describing how is done away with old Odessa figures who are useless in the bright Soviet future, like in The End of the Almshouse and Froim the Rook. There is the haunting anti-semitism and horrible pre-revolutionary violence on Jews. One of the most harrowing stories of this collection, The Story of My Dovecote parallels the outrageous brutality of the Red Calvary story cycle , recounting a pogrom from the perspective of a ten year old Jewish boy:
My world was small and terrible. I shut my eyes, so that I wouldn’t have to see it, and pressed myself into the earth, which lay beneath me in soothing silence. This trodden earth had nothing in common with our lives – nothing in common with the anticipation of exams in our lives. Somewhere far away disaster galloped along this very earth on a big horse, but the sound of its hooves was growing weaker, vanishing, and calmness, that bitter calmness that sometimes comes over children during calamities, suddenly obliterated the boundary between my body and the unmoving earth. The earth smelt of damp inner depths, of the grave, of flowers.Isaac Babel was a great storyteller and a brilliant stylist. In 1940, at the age of 45, he was shot by a firing squad for treason, for belonging to a Trotskyist group and spying. His body was thrown into a communal grave.
I stood there all alone, clutching my watch, and suddenly, with a clarity I had never experienced until that point, I saw the towering columns of the City Council, the well-lit foliage along the boulevard, and Pushkin’s bronze head, faintly reflecting the glow of the moon. For the first time I saw my surroundings as they actually were – hushed and unspeakably beautiful. (from Di Grasso)Odessa Stories offers a great sampling of utterly fine Babel stories. The stories were translated by Boris Dralyuk, who also wrote an excellent preface and recently edited an anthology of literary responses to the Russian Revolution , [b:1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution|29737292|1917 Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution|Boris Dralyuk|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1459726367i/29737292._SY75_.jpg|50079757].
emotional
funny
sad
medium-paced
A fine collection: while it may not be the equal of Red Cavalry, on average these are more entertaining. Dralyuk continues to be one of the best in the business, preserving so much of the original color of these stories of the gangsters and hustlers of his and Babel's shared hometown. I'll admit that I still haven't had my come-to-god moment with Babel: I find myself appreciating his work more as documentary evidence of a time and place rather than for its artistry (which is present, to be clear.) Ultimately I find myself more drawn to the weirdos and the clowns among his contemporaries, the sorts of writers who embraced their outsider status. As in Red Cavalry, Babel here is painfully aware he's an outsider, and is drawn to the confidence and machismo of the powerful, the sorts of people who could and eventually would swiftly discard him. And, frankly, as with Red Cavalry, it's already starting to run together in my mind: the stories are consistently good, but without the sort of standouts that would end up in my personal canon.
Vissa städer är så drömlikt kosmopolitiska att man hellre reser dit i fiktionen än i verkligheten. Tänker på Tanger, Kairo, Dakar och Odessa.
Ett par av berättelserna i den här fanns på svenska som ebok på Storytel. En passage som verkligen inte gått förlorad i de olika översättningarna är den om farbror Sjojl, som jobbar på fiskmarknaden och hans händer doftar alltid av "kalla, underbara världar".
Ett par av berättelserna i den här fanns på svenska som ebok på Storytel. En passage som verkligen inte gått förlorad i de olika översättningarna är den om farbror Sjojl, som jobbar på fiskmarknaden och hans händer doftar alltid av "kalla, underbara världar".
I’ve been trying to figure out why Babel hasn’t stolen my heart. On paper this collection has everything I love. I love all things Russian and all things Jewish and all things modernist. The comedy in those stories of Moldavanka thugs should be totally up my street. And yet, there was something too grotesque, too putrid for me to be able to laugh at it. There was nothing cheerful about this comedy and no depth to those characters – it felt like watching them through a thick semi-opaque glass. Or maybe I like my gangsters more glamourous. This was just violent and chaotic (did Benya Krik got married twice in two completely different stories? Did I miss something? Was it two alternative histories? Did something happen between? Did I get the wrong end of the stick here? Am I overthinking this?). A few times while reading this I wondered why any of those people bothered with living. They didn’t really seem sold on the idea.
The semi-autobiographical stories in the collection spoke to me more and eventually saved this reading experience.
The semi-autobiographical stories in the collection spoke to me more and eventually saved this reading experience.
emotional
funny
informative
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Fantastic short story collection, written in an intricate dialect, now lost; with intense episodes, impressions and characters, juxtaposed on real historical events of Civil war, living experiences inside a Jewish ghetto within a pale of settlement in early-20th-century Russian Empire. As it often happens, audio version is subpar, normal book would be much better medium for it.
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 jokes, along with trickery and malice, showing the strains changeover from a czarist state to a workers' government.
adventurous
lighthearted
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
dark
emotional
funny
informative
lighthearted
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
More of a 4.5 but so, so great at evoking a lost time and place. The Story of My Dovecote has to be one of the greatest short stories I've ever read.