Babel' in Context

“Isaac Babelʹ is the first name on everyone’s list of Russian Jewish authors. Efraim Sicher’s book not only makes a highly significant contribution to Babelʹ scholarship, but also provides a point of departure for those working in Russian Jewish studies generally. Sicher is one of the very few scholars who discuss Hebrew literature in the Russian setting of the 1920s. Hebrew was one of the components of the multilingual culture of Odessa, which also included Russian and Yiddish, and in which Babelʹ and other, similar authors, lived and worked, as Sicher shows. Thanks to Sicher’s work, we now have access to Babelʹ’s dialogue with Yiddish writers and with the Hebrew authors Bialik and Hazaz, and the Hebrew journal Breshit. This is a fascinating and important study." -- Harriet Murav, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“In this profoundly original book, the distinguished Babelʹ scholar Efraim Sicher examines this elusive writer through a defining set of linguistic, cultural, and historical contexts. Everything is here: the Babelʹ who was infatuated with Maupassant, the Babelʹ who tried writing in the framework of collectivization, the untangled biography, and, best of all, the Babelʹ who, as a native speaker of Yiddish, drew from the rich traditions of Yiddish and Hebrew literature centered in Odessa." -- Alice Nakhimovsky, Colgate University
“The essays in this volume offer a comprehensive view of Isaac Babelʹ’s literary legacy, shaped by Russia, but deeply rooted in Jewish culture, Jewish history, and Jewish identity. Sicher reads Babelʹ like a palimpsest, revealing layer after layer of cultural and literary allusion. Babelʹ in Context: A Study in Cultural Identity is an indispensable contribution to Babelʹ scholarship by one of its most distinguished pioneers.” -- Grisha Freidin, Stanford University
“Sicher’s scholarly excavation of Babel´’s Jewish themes, grounded in his knowledge of both Jewish and Russian languages and reference points, helps us to identify the multiple cultural layers in Babel´’s fiction. Ultimately this leads us toward a more sophisticated understanding of Babel´’s messages.” -- Amelia Glaser * Slavic Review, Spring 2014 *
"Since much of Babel’’s work was censored or lost, he has become an iconic figure for who and what he might have been as well as who and what he was. The clearly written study will be suitable for specialist scholars of Babel’, Eastern European-Jewish Studies, and early post-Revolutionary Russian literature." -- Book News, Inc.
“Many critics and scholars have noted and explored the Jewish element in the work of Isaak Babel’, but none has given it the sustained and penetrating analysis that Efraim Sicher has undertaken over his long and distinguished career. Sicher has demonstrated persuasively and, I think, definitively the extent to which specifically Jewish paradigms penetrate, shape, and give meaning to Babel’’s texts, whether they derive from Sholem Aleichem, Mendel Mokher-Sforim, Khaim Bialik, the kheder, the Midrash, or Torah.” -- Jonathan Brent (The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Bard College), Canadian Slavonic Papers (Vol. LV, Nos. 3-4, September-December 2013)