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.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.