Although the family was secularized and observed only the more superficial aspects of Jewish tradition, Isaak never severed his connections with his Jewish heritage; he attended a religious school in addition to secular school and studied both Hebrew and Yiddish. He considered himself an atheist, but his complex relationship to his Jewishness is everywhere apparent in the themes of his major works.
Until his late adolescent years Babel seemed destined for the same career as his father. In 1906 he enrolled in the Nicholas I Commercial School in Odessa, where he lived with his maternal grandmother and two aunts on Tirapolskaia Street. Upon graduation in 1911 he entered the Kiev Institute of Finance and Business Studies, moving in 1915 to Saratov when the institute relocated there because of wartime evacuation, and received a degree in economics in the spring of 1916. His real interests, however, lay elsewhere. At the commercial school, a teacher, Monsieur Vadon, had introduced him to French literature, and by the age of fifteen Babel was writing his own stories in French. The often-noted influence of French writers on his writing, especially of Guy de Maupassant and Gustave Flaubert, dates from these early experiments.
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