Babel in Yiddish / Yiddish in Babel

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Prof. Efraim Sicher, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

This talk explored how Isaak Babel, the great Soviet Jewish short-story writer, not only knew Yiddish, but was thoroughly immersed in Yiddish language and culture. A close friend of Shlomo Mikhoels, Babel worked in the Yiddish cinema and translated Sholom Aleichem into Russian. His own Russian prose reveals a hidden Yiddish subtext, and his Civil War epic Red Cavalry shares with the Yiddish modernists Dovid Bergelson, Peretz Markish, and Yisroel Rabon a disturbing perspective of pogroms and revolution.