The Russian writer Isaac Emmanuelovich Babel (1894-1941) was a master of the short story. His compact, vivid stories of Jewish life in the Odessa of his childhood and of the Russian Revolution are written with great subtlety and intense moral passion. Is...

Isaak Babel is widely recognized today as a leading twentieth-century short-story writer and the undisputed master of the genre in the Soviet period. By the mid 1920s he had already achieved considerable literary fame and was a prominent, if not extremel...