title: sex and the presidential city
text: email 
  it was fiftyfour years or so when a classmate at bard college insisted that i read a short story by isaac babel titled the reserve cavalry commander that he described to me as a cossack soldier miraculously bringing a moribund horse to its feet the red cavalry the title of babels collection of short stories written when the jew and former menshevik was imbedded with prorevolution cossacks had been confiscating peasant horses during the civil war and trading in nags ridden to exhaustion on the battlefield for fresh ones 
  for the backward peasants this was the sort of intrusion that would become the straw that broke the camels back in about a decade being forced into collective farms like recalcitrant horses drove them into open revolt for the time being however they were inclined to tolerate the communists who at least had come to power on the promise of peace bread and land it was the assault on the gentrys land that for the time being assuaged the peasants 
  responding to an aggrieved muzhik peasant dyakov the eponymous reserve cavalry commander who was a former circus rider described by babel as redfaced with a gray mustache a black cape and wide red tatar trousers with silver stripes promised that he could make this lively little mare spring to her feet again the idea that the horse splayed out on the ground could be described as lively was almost an insult the muzhik cried out lord in heaven and mother of god how is this poor thing supposed to get up its on its last legs 
  dyakovs ability to bring the horse back on its feet was like jesus raising lazarus from the dead but all the more miraculous since it likely occurred most of babels short stories were based on his experience as a war correspondent he wrote 
  you are insulting this horse my dear fellow dyakov answered with fierce conviction pure blasphemy my dear fellow and he deftly swung his athletes body out of his saddle splendid and deft as if in the circus ring he stretched his magnificent legs his trousers girded by cords around the knees and walked up to the dying animal she peered at him dolefully with a severe penetrating eye licked some invisible command from his crimson palm and immediately the feeble mare felt bracing power flow from this sprightly gray blossoming romeo her muzzle lolling her legs skidding under her feeling the whip tickling her stomach with imperious impatience the mare slowly and deliberatey rose onto her legs and then we all saw dyakovs slender hand with its fluttering sleeve run through her dirty mane and his whining whip swatting her bleeding ranks her whole body shivering the mare stood on four legs without moving her timid doglike lovestruck eyes from dyakov 
  so you seethis is a horse dyakov said to the muzhik  and added softly and you were complaining my dearest of friends 
  throwing his reins to his orderly the commander of the reserve cavalry jumped the four stairs in a single leap and swirling off his operatic cloak disappeared into the headquarters 
  today reading this story once again for the first time in fiftyfour years i am reminded of how important babel was to me at the time like ezra pound james joyce and thomas mann he was a portal into the world of modernist literature that still had an immense attraction for young bohemians in the early s i never thought once about who babel was or anything about the social reality he was trying to depict all that mattered to me was babels prose that could evoke the mysterious power of a cossack resurrecting a dying horse 
  my early connections to modernism and my later connections to marxism that superseded it and just about all the other intellectual baggage i carried around with me from the early s converged as i watched a press screening of finding babel that opens on october  th at the cinema village in new york directed by david novack who has a background as a sound engineer it is a film that will be of great interest to those whose appreciation of babel is strictly literary as was mine long ago and to those trying to come to terms with the soviet legacy given the prominence of ukraine today as a possible trigger of wwiii according to some babels multiple identity as jew ukrainian communist and critic of soviet deficiencies is worth pondering 
  the film is structured around the odyssey conducted by andrei malaevbabel who is the grandson of isaac babel and an acting professor in the theater department of the new college of florida to see where his grandfather lived and to speak with people who knew him or who have studied or been inspired by his work isaac babel was executed for treason in  having been charged with belonging to a trotskyist group and spying for france and austria babels wife antonina pirozhkova who died at the age of  in  is interviewed in the film and provides much of the information about babels personality and his travails as a dissident after her husbands arrest in  the soviet cops told her to forget about him and to regulate her life according to the new york times obituary she was formidable in her own right with her engineering degree she helped to design the moscow subway system the obit notes 
  ms pirozhkova recalled babels dismay at her haphazard reading habits which he tried to correct by drawing up a list of the hundred books that every educated person needs to read it included a volume titled the instincts and morals of insects she recounted evenings spent with soviet cultural giants like the film director sergei m eisenstein and visits by foreign luminaries like andré gide and andré malraux 
  it was babels mistake apparently to adhere to the values of the original russian revolution rather than to fall in line as a stalin toady 
  as he travels around ukraine malaevbabel encounters intellectuals and ordinary people who revere babel as one of their own especially for odessa tales another collection of short stories that is as highly regarded as red cavalry written in  and  the stories focus on jewish gangsters living in moldavanka an odessa slum hardly the material youd expect to find written by a partisan of the russian revolution but certainly in keeping with the original inspiration of soviet culture that conformed to terences observation  homo sum humani nihil a me alienum puto  or i am human and nothing of that which is human is alien to me 
  although i have never read odessa tales i plan to as soon as i find the time since it is about the same sort of characters my grandfather louis proyect probably knew in byelorussia and who like him escaped pogroms by emigrating to the usa unlike my grandfather who made a life out of building hotels in sullivan county in upstate ny abe kid twist reles and other members of murder incorporated only saw the borscht belt as a place where they could dump their victims in swan lake about fifteen minutes from my home town 
  throughout the film we hear brief excerpts from both collections narrated by liev schreiber that will be a good introduction to babels literary power there are also interviews with some leading babel scholars including stanford professor gregory freidin who spent a day traveling around paris with malaevbabel to see places where babel lived for a few years before returning to russia we learn that although he could have avoided becoming one of stalins countless victims by living in exile he was too attached to russian culture and language to live abroad 
  while in paris babel wrote a play titled maria that likely put him on stalins shitlist although being a freethinking intellectual and artist might have condemned from the start with his theater background malaevbabel is ideally suited to discuss the play with fellow thespians including marina vlady an acclaimed russianfrench actress who reads a letter from the titular character 
  in  gregory freidin mounted a production of maria at stanford university the plays program describes major character isaac dymshit a jewish gangster as a symbol of capitalist rationality while the eponymous maria epitomized the pure romance of the revolution she like the young babel served in the red cavalry 
  never seen on stage we only hear from maria indirectly as her letter is recited by another character in scene five it begins 
  at dawn the bugle from squadron headquarters wakes me by eight i have to be in the political propaganda division im in charge therei edit the articles of the divisional newspaper i run the literacy classes our reinforcements are all ukrainians they remind me of italians the way they talk and act russia has been suppressing and destroying their culture for centuries in our house in petersburg opposite the hermitage and the winter palace we might as well have been living in polynesia for we knew any thing at all about our people 
  it is writing lines like this that got babel killed rather than spying for france or austria 
  babel was a friend and protégé of maxim gorky who remained a diehard stalinist despite sharing babels inclination for writing about the lower depths of russian society he was deeply troubled by how maria depicted political corruption prosecution of the innocent and black marketeering within soviet society gorky accused babel of having a baudelairean predilection for rotting meat apparently gorky had forgotten that baudelaire was marxs favorite novelist 
  david novack the director of finding babel has a connection to odessa but not to its legendary jewish gangsters he has an ancestor named david nowakowsky who wrote liturgical music for a synagogue there 
  in an interview given to the odessa review  novack sums up isaac babels relationship to the soviet experience that resonates with my own on the left as someone with roots in the existential outsider world of the s that saw albert camus as its most eloquent spokesmen i never found myself comfortable with the trotskyist milieu that fostered cultish obedience to the genius leader to this day it has been these youthful affinities with outsider culture that makes it difficult for me to join any amen chorus on the left even though it is the left that remains my homeland i think that novacks description of babels insideroutsider sensibility can help me preserve my sanity in a period of deep contradictions within the left 
  babel represented the insider outsider thats what he was he got himself all the way inside up to the upper levels of the nkvd up to beria who ended up supervising his torture in the end personally i dont know if he was in the room but he had an office in the st catharines monastery where babel was tortured that monastery was being used as a torture prison the sukhanovo prison which we note in the film we visited it he got himself as close to the flame as possible as an insider but yet he was an outsider because he was from odessa he was jewish he should not even have been permitted to study under gorky which is where he really honed his skills the only reason that he was able to study under gorky is that he smuggled himself illegally to st petersburg when he wasnt allowed to be there because it was outside the settlement area for jews so babel was an outsider he then found himself with red calvary with the cossacks in the red army running through western ukraine as he documented brutality against the ukrainians and the jews brutality brought on by both sides it was a civil war essentially between the reds and the poles who suffered the most the jews and the ukrainians the peasantry are the ones who suffered the most in that conflict there he was again the outsider insider its from this very unique perspective where all his writing came from