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Article: Plucking the heart out of Isaac Babel's mystery.(Review Essay)(Savage Shorthand: The Life and Death of Isaac Babel)(Book review)
- Article from:
- Midstream
- Article date:
- January 1, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Theodor Herzl Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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At one point in her masterful introduction to an edition of Isaac Babel's Complete Works, Cynthia Ozick expresses her regret that a "formal" Babel biography does not, alas, exist. After all, Babel was as enigmatic in his life as he was slippery on the page. A scholarly biography would go a long way in terms of separating myths about Babel from the facts, and establishing, once and for all, which actual events went into the making of his fiction and which were invented from the whole cloth.
My hunch is that the biography Ozick hankers for is not in the cards, partly because so many of Babel's papers were (presumably) burned and partly because Babel took ...