Born in 1894, murdered by the Soviet political police in 1940, Isaac Babel is best known for Red Cavalry, his collection of stories about the Polish-Bolshevik war of 1919-1921. Another cycle, Odessa Stories, has recently appeared in a new English translation by Boris Dralyuk. Praising Dralyuk for the “rhythm and concision” of his “clipped, pacey style,” Robert Minto notes the stories’ political message:

The book is broken into parts which show Odessa in its romantic heyday, run by gangsters, and then in its Soviet decline, as it is ruthlessly standardized, normalized, and drained of color. Babel’s autobiographical notes and essays about Odessa are tacked onto the end, to make the book a complete testament to his vision of the city.

That vision is complex and tragic. Odessa in pre-Soviet days may have been a region of mythic heroes, who share something of the amoral vigor of the bandits and warriors of folklore, but it also hosted a plundered populace. A city run by bandits is a paradise for no one but the strong. Still, compared with the regime that pacified the city, old Odessa may not have been so bad after all. The Soviet government rooted out corruption and crime, but it also cracked down on religion and innocent customs, reorganizing here as everywhere according to the blunt dictates of un-nuanced rationality. . . .

Babel . . . resisted the cultural mandate that writers should conform to a politically useful socialist realism. His stories were resolutely romantic, and rather than revising his oeuvre or adopting a new documentary style, he opted to write less and less. He said that he was becoming the master of a new genre, the genre of silence.

The tragic course of Babel’s career exemplifies the cleavage opened by Soviet history between the deepest feelings and the profoundest convictions of its best and wisest supporters. To dream the dream of red plenty while witnessing its dystopic implementation and watching your own art suppressed must have been soul-destroying. I think the conflicted admiration Babel’s gangsters wring from the heart of a reader is an echo of Babel’s own life-defining conflict.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.