"I have a Passover guest for you... a 'silken Jew' a person of distinction - he doesn't speak our language." "What does he speak then?" "Hebrew"..."once the land is reached one beholds a terrestrial Eden...and brilliants, pearls and diamonds bestrew the roads, and noone cares to pick them up, they are of no value there." My father translated...

"I hear," she answered, and added: "Why don't they bring some over here? They could make money by it. Ask him that, Yoneh!"..."You see when you arrive there, you may take what you like, but when you leave the country, you must leave everything in it behind, too, and if they shake out of you no matter what, you are done for."...he means, they either hang you on a tree, or they stone you with stones" The more tales our guest told us the more thrilling they became..."
..I dreamt all night long. I dreamt of a desert, a temple, a high priest, and a tall mountain.I climb the mountain. Diamonds and pearls grow on the trees, and my comrades sit on the high boughs, and shake the jewels down onto the ground, whole showers of them, and I stand and gather them, and stuff them into my pockets, and, strange to say, however many I stuff in there is still room! I put my hand into my pocket and draw out - not pearls and brilliants, but fruits of all kinds - apples, pears, oranges, olives, dates, nuts and figs. This makes me very unhappy and I toss from side to side. Then I dream of the temple, I hear the priest chant and the Levites sing, and the organ play. I want to go inside and I cannot - Rikel the maid has hold of me, and will not let me go. I beg of her and scream and cry, and again I am very unhappy, and toss from side to side, I wake - and see my father and mother standing there, half-dressed, both pale, my father hanging his head and mother wringing her hands, and with her soft eyes full of tears. I feel atonce that something has gone very wrong, very wrong indeed, but my childish head is incapable of imagining the greatness of the disaster.

The fact is this: our guest from beyond the desert and the seven seas has disappeared, and a lot of things have disappeared with him: all the silver wine-cups, all the silver spoons, knives and forks;all my mother's ornaments, all the money that happened to be in the house, and also Rikel the maid!

A pang goes through my heart. Not on account of the silver cups, not on account of mothers ornaments or of the money, still less on account of Rikel the maid, good riddance! But because of the happy, happy land whose roads were strewn with brilliants, pearls and diamonds; because of the temple with the priests, the Levites, and the organ; because of the altar and the sacrifices; because of all the other valuable things that have been taken from me, taken, taken, taken! I turn my face to the wall and cry quietly to myself.

Within Jewish bookweek a discussion is taking place on the 5th March, the 50th Anniversary of Stalin's death.The daughter of Isaac Babel will take part in a meditation on the fate of her father and other authors, victims of Stalin's regime.
An interrogator of Babel was asked in 1956 if he had read any stories by Isaac Babel, His reply was "What for?"
The historian Boris Souvarine recalled talking with Babel: "So you think that there are valuable literary works in your country that cannot be published because of political conditions?""Yes," replied Babel, "They are in the GPU (State Political Administration)Whenever an educated person is arrested and finds himself in a prison cell he is given a pencil and paper -'Write', they tell him."
Details of his interrogation entailed a description of the function of literary skills..."Voronsky's basic idea was that the writer should create freely and intuitively, giving the most vivid reflection in his books of his own unrestrained individuality....."(this fundamental condition for any artistic endeavour was treated as a deadly sin by the interrogators,) "When Voronsky was exiled we became the strongholds of his influence on the younger generation....my reputation for literary independence attracted those who were inclined towards formalism,,I encouraged a disregard for the organizational forms of writer's Associations (union of Soviet Writers etc.)... I asserted that extreme decentralisation was required..I protested against the building of settlements and rest-homes for writers, as the beginnings of an anti-professional trend.. I refused any posts or voluntary work in the Union and made fun of it ..It was, so to speak, a product of its day and a consequence of the contemporary situation..... It was common ground for us to proclaim the genius of the slighted Shostakovitch and to sympathise with Meyerhold.
Elswhere in his interrogation he continues: "When they (writers and film-makers) asked me for advice, I told them about the 'theory of sincerity' and of the necessity of working to deepen their artistic individuality, no matter whether society neededn it or not.:A book is the world seen through an individual and the less restrained and more complete that personal revelation, no matter what the nature of that writer, the greater the artistic merits...Neither moral nor public considerations should stand in the way of this revelation od the individual and his style. If you are fundementally flawed, then perfect this flaw in yourself and raise it to the level of art.....opposition...should push ntoward a still more stubborn defence of your positions, but not toward a change in your basic methods of work."
Isaac Babel was executed on the 27th January 1940 at 1.30am. Seven parcels of his documents were removed from the interrogators file and disappeared. The KGB's Literary Archive,Vitaly Shentalinsky. The Harvill Press, London.

Babel spoke with bitterness of the terrible discipline of his Jewish education. He thought of the Talmud Torah as a prison shutting him off from all desirable life, from reality itself. The ignorance of the natural world was a Jewish handicap to be overcome.... in the Jewish vocabulary (Yiddish) of the Jews of Eastern Europe there are but two flower names, the rose and the violet, and there are no names for wild birds....."Only the moon, clasping in her blue hands her round, bright, carefree face, wandered like a vagrant outside the window."

......"I DIVIDE ALL THE WORKS OF WORLD LITERATURE INTO THOSE THAT ARE PERMITTED AND THOSE THAT ARE WRITTEN WITHOUT PERMISSION. THE FORMER ARE RUBBISH, THE LATTER - STOLEN AIR." OSIP MANDELSHTAM