Isaak Babel’s “Odessa Tales”

Synonyms

Odessa; Odesa; Odes

Introduction

Isaak Babel (1894–1940), one of the best known Soviet Russian prose writers of the twenties, published a series of short stories about his hometown of Odessa between 1921 and 1937. They are loosely connected by a number of characters but contain inconsistencies and, because of political repression and Babel’s arrest in May 1939, were never completed. Although only four of the stories were collected as “Odesskie rasskazy” [“Odessa Tales”] in Babel’s lifetime, a cycle of nine stories has been recovered (Sicher 2018). The setting of the stories is Odessa’s Moldavanka, a working-class district populated mainly by Jews, and, while the topography is both realistic and accurate, the stories build a mythical world that is intensely, though not exclusively, Jewish and perpetuates Moldavanka’s reputation for criminality (Briker 1994). Written after the Bolshevik takeover, the stories combine nostalgia for a lost world of gangsters and eccentrics with an...