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73-594: The first written mention of Sokal dates from 1377. In 1424, it received Magdeburg rights from Siemowit IV, Duke of Masovia , and in 1462, the town became part of Bełz Voivodeship , Lesser Poland Province . On August 2, 1519, following the defeat of a Polish-Lithuanian army under Hetman Konstanty Ostrogski by Crimean Tatars , the town was razed by the invaders. Mikolaj Sep-Szarzynski later dedicated one of his poems to this battle. In 1619, Armenians in Sokal were first mentioned. The town remained part of Poland until

146-510: A common law marriage which would ultimately produce a daughter, Lidya Babel. He also collaborated with Sergei Eisenstein on the film Bezhin Meadow , about Pavlik Morozov , a child informant for the Soviet secret police . Babel also worked on the screenplays for several other Stalinist propaganda films. According to Nathalie Babel Brown, "Babel came to Paris in the summer of 1935, as part of

219-428: A daughter, Lydia Babel. According to Pirozhkova, "Before I met Babel, I used to read a great deal, though without any particular direction. I read whatever I could get my hands on. Babel noticed this and told me, 'Reading that way will get you nowhere. You won't have time to read the books that are truly worthwhile. There are about a hundred books that every educated person needs to read. Sometime I'll try to make you

292-500: A high forehead, who probably never once in his life held a pistol in his hands." According to Peter Constantine, from the day of his arrest, Isaac Babel "became a nonperson in the Soviet Union . His name was blotted out, removed from literary dictionaries and encyclopedias, and taken off school and university syllabi. He became unmentionable in any public venue. When the film director Mark Donskoi 's famous Gorky trilogy premiered

365-587: A hundred cities, in Central Europe apart from Germany , including Schleswig , Bohemia , Poland , Pomerania , Prussia , the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (following the Christianization of Lithuania ), including present-day Belarus and Ukraine , and probably Moldavia . In these lands they were mostly known as German or Teutonic law. Since the local tribunal of Magdeburg also became

438-448: A list of 457 'enemies of the party and the soviet regime' who were in custody, with a recommendation that 346, including Isaac Babel, should be shot. According to Babel's daughter, Nathalie Babel Brown, his trial took place on January 26, 1940, in one of Lavrenti Beria 's private chambers. It lasted about twenty minutes. The sentence had been prepared in advance and without ambiguity: death by firing squad , to be carried out immediately. He

511-481: A list of them.' And a few days later he brought me a list. There were ancient writers on it, Greek and Roman— Homer , Herodotus , Lucretius , Suetonius —and also all the classics of later European literature, starting with Erasmus , Rabelais , Cervantes , Swift , and Coster , and going on to 19th century writers such as Stendhal , Mérimée , and Flaubert ." In 1920, Babel was assigned to Komandarm (Army Commander) Semyon Budyonny 's 1st Cavalry Army , witnessing

584-509: A longing of being "a free man," while also expressing fear at no longer being able to make a living solely through writing. On July 27, 1933, Babel wrote a letter to Yuri Annenkov , stating that he had been summoned to Moscow and was leaving immediately. Babel's common-law wife, Antonina Pirozhkova, recalled this era, "Babel remained in France for so long that it was rumored in Moscow that he

657-460: A matter of fact, Babel had many secrets, lived with many ambiguities and contradictions, and left many unanswered questions behind him." In 1932, after numerous requests, he was permitted to visit his estranged wife Yevgenia in Paris . While visiting his wife and their daughter Nathalie, Babel agonized over whether or not to return to Soviet Russia. In conversations and letters to friends, he expressed

730-541: A military campaign of the Polish–Soviet War of 1920. He documented the horrors of the war he witnessed in the 1920 Diary ( Конармейский Дневник 1920 года , Konarmeyskiy Dnevnik 1920 Goda ), which he later used to write Red Cavalry ( Конармия , Konarmiya ), a collection of short stories such as "Crossing the River Zbrucz" and "My First Goose". The horrific violence of Red Cavalry seemed to harshly contrast

803-482: A painting of Our Lady of Sokal, which attracted Catholic pilgrims. Jan Ostroróg, one of the first Polish humanists was buried in the town. After World War II, the painting was moved to a church in Hrubieszów , while the monastery was turned into a prison. On March 27, 2012, the historic complex was almost completely destroyed by fire. Until 18 July 2020, Sokal was the administrative center of Sokal Raion . The raion

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876-509: A permission to sell meat to Christians, or employ Christian servants. By at least some contemporary observers, the parallel infrastructure of Jews and gentiles was considered significant; in medieval Poland's royal city development policy, both German merchants and Jews were invited to settle in Polish cities. Among the most advanced systems of old Germanic law of the time, in the 13th and 14th centuries, Magdeburg rights were granted to more than

949-504: A phenomenon of positive, unproblematic importance and power. ... I should like you to read this remarkable play..." According to Pirozhkova, filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein was also an admirer of Sunset and often compared it to the writings of Émile Zola for, "illuminating capitalist relationships through the experience of a single family." Eisenstein was also quite critical of the Moscow Art Theatre, "for its weak staging of

1022-588: A public statement about this, he privately confided in Antonina, "The bounty of the past is gone—it is due to the famine in Ukraine and the destruction of the village across our land." As Stalin tightened his grip on the Soviet intelligentsia and decreed that all writers and artists must conform to socialist realism , Babel increasingly withdrew from public life. During the campaign against " Formalism ", Babel

1095-612: A reporter for The Dawn of the Orient (Заря Востока) a Russian-language newspaper published in Tbilisi . In one of his articles, he expressed regret that Lenin's controversial New Economic Policy had not been more widely implemented. Babel married Yevgenia Gronfein on August 9, 1919, in Odessa. In 1929, their marriage produced a daughter, Nathalie Babel Brown, who grew up to become a scholar and editor of her father's life and work. By 1925,

1168-606: A result, he was schooled at home by private tutors. In addition to regular school subjects, Babel studied the Talmud and music. According to Cynthia Ozick , "Though he was at home in Yiddish and Hebrew , and was familiar with the traditional texts and their demanding commentaries, he added to these a lifelong fascination with Maupassant and Flaubert . His first stories were composed in fluent literary French . The breadth and scope of his social compass enabled him to see through

1241-548: A set of town privileges first developed by Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor (936–973) and based on the Flemish Law, which regulated the degree of internal autonomy within cities and villages granted by the local ruler. Named after the city of Magdeburg , these town charters were perhaps the most important set of medieval laws in Central Europe . They became the basis for the German town laws developed during many centuries in

1314-420: A single word. Babel asked the secret policeman sitting next to him, 'So I guess you don't get too much sleep, do you?' And he even laughed. As we approached Moscow , I said to Babel, 'I'll be waiting for you, it will be as if you've gone to Odessa ... only there won't be any letters....' He answered, 'I ask you to see that the child not be made miserable.' "But I don't know what my destiny will be." At this point,

1387-627: A wealthy industrialist, whom he eventually married. In 1915, Babel graduated and moved to Petrograd , in defiance of laws restricting Jews from living outside the Pale of Settlement . Babel was fluent in French, besides Russian, Ukrainian and Yiddish, and his earliest works were written in French. However, none of his stories in that language have survived. In St. Petersburg, Babel met Maxim Gorky , who published some of Babel's stories in his literary magazine Letopis ( Летопись , "Chronicle"). Gorky advised

1460-629: A young Soviet writer who was not a member of the Communist Party ." In fact, Babel's father was a dealer in farm implements and owned a large warehouse. In his pre-teens, Babel hoped to get into the preparatory class of the Nicholas I Odessa Commercial School. However, he first had to overcome the Jewish quota . Despite the fact that Babel received passing grades, his place was given to another boy, whose parents had bribed school officials. As

1533-696: Is full of adventure." During the Russian Civil War , which led to the Party's monopoly on the printed word, Babel worked for the publishing house of the Odessa Gubkom (regional CPSU Committee), in the food procurement unit (see his story "Ivan-and-Maria"), in the Narkompros (Commissariat of Education), and in a typographic printing office. After the end of the Civil War, Babel worked as

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1606-531: Is mentioned in The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek as the town passed by Austro-Hungarian soldiers on the way to the battlefields of World War I. The short story Squadron Commander Trunov by Isaac Babel centres around the burial of the title character in the public gardens next to Sokal's cathedral. Sokal was the setting for two documentary films: One was the No.4 Street of Our Lady (2009) about

1679-611: The First Partition of Poland , when it was annexed by the Habsburg Empire , as part of Galicia . It was the capital of the Sokal district, one of the 78 Bezirkshauptmannschaften in the Austrian Galicia province (Crown land) in 1900. After World War I , possession of this province was disputed between Poland and Soviet Russia , until the 1921 Peace of Riga , which attributed Eastern Galicia to Poland. In

1752-539: The Holy Roman Empire . The Magdeburg rights were adopted and adapted by numerous monarchs, including the rulers of Bohemia , Hungary , Poland , and Lithuania , a milestone in the urbanization of the region which prompted the development of thousands of villages and cities. Being a member of the Hanseatic League , Magdeburg was one of the most important trade cities, maintaining commerce with

1825-523: The Imperial Reform of 1495. The first town to be granted Magdeburg rights in Poland was Złotoryja in 1211. Soon many towns were vested with the law including Wrocław , Opole , Inowrocław , Sandomierz , Gniezno , Poznań , Bochnia , Głogów , Bytom , Sieradz , Kraków , Legnica , Opatów , Konin , Piotrków , Racibórz in the 13th century, whereas Szczecin and Stargard were granted

1898-528: The Low Countries , the Baltic states , and the interior (for example Braunschweig ). As with most medieval city laws, the rights were primarily targeted at regulating trade to the benefit of the local merchants and artisans, who formed the most important part of the population of many such cities. External merchants coming into the city were not allowed to trade on their own, but were instead forced to sell

1971-694: The Maria' s performance was cancelled by the NKVD during rehearsals. Despite its popularity in the West, Maria was not performed in Russia until after the dissolution of the Soviet Union . Carl Weber , a former disciple of Bertolt Brecht , directed Maria at Stanford University in 2004. According to Weber, "The play is very controversial. [It] shows the stories of both sides clashing with each other during

2044-546: The Moscow Art Theater when his play Mariya was being given its first reading, and when he returned home he told me that all the actresses had been impatient to find out what the leading female role was like and who would be cast in it. It turned out that there was no leading female character present on the stage in this play. Babel thought that the play had not come off well, but ... he was always critical of his own work." Although intended to be performed in 1935,

2117-692: The October Revolution . According to one of his stories, "The Road" (" Дорога ", " Doroga "), he served on the Romanian front until early December 1917. In his autobiography, Babel says he worked as a translator for the Petrograd Cheka , likely in 1917. In March 1918 he worked in Petrograd as a reporter for Gorky's Menshevik newspaper, Novaya zhizn ( Новая жизнь , " New Life "). Babel continued publishing there until Novaya zhizn

2190-623: The Russian Civil War —the Bolsheviks and the old society members —without making a judgment one way or another. Babel’s opinion on either side is very ambiguous, but he does make the statement that what happened after the Bolshevik Revolution may not have been the best thing for Russia ." In 1930, Babel travelled in Ukraine and witnessed the brutality of forced collectivisation and dekulakisation . Although he never made

2263-827: The Second Polish Republic , Sokal was the seat of a county in Lwów Voivodeship . Sokal was in Polish territory until the German invasion of Poland in September 1939. From September 1939 until June 1941 (see Operation Barbarossa ), it was part of Soviet-occupied territory. Before the Holocaust , Sokal had a Jewish population of 5,200; in addition, thousands of refugees from other parts of Poland arrived in Sokal. On September 17, 1942, 2,000 Jews from Sokal were deported to Bełżec extermination camp . There

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2336-581: The Teutonic Order and Duchy of Masovia , as well as some cities under direct Polish and Lithuanian rule, obtained Chełmno rights , a local variant of Magdeburg rights, which prevailed in the area roughly corresponding to today's northeastern quarter of Poland, including the current Polish capital of Warsaw . In addition to this, many towns in the Duchy of Pomerania in modern north-western Poland and other Baltic port cities were granted Lübeck law , thus

2409-478: The superior court for these towns, Magdeburg, together with Lübeck , practically defined the law of northern Germany, Poland and Lithuania for centuries, being the heart of the most important "family" of city laws. This role remained until the old Germanic laws were successively replaced with Roman law under the influence of the Reichskammergericht , in the centuries after its establishment during

2482-500: The Babels' marriage was souring. Yevgenia Babel, feeling betrayed by her husband's infidelities and motivated by her increasing hatred of communism , emigrated to France . Babel saw her several times during his visits to Paris . During this period, he also entered into a long-term romantic relationship with Tamara Kashirina. Together, they had a son, Emmanuil Babel, who was later adopted by his stepfather Vsevolod Ivanov . Emmanuil's name

2555-535: The Magdeburg rights in Kyiv , Minsk , Tetiiv , Veiviržėnai and Vinnytsia . Isaac Babel Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel (13 July [ O.S. 1 July] 1894 – 27 January 1940) was a Soviet writer, journalist, playwright, and literary translator. He is best known as the author of Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories , and has been acclaimed as "the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry ". Babel

2628-528: The Magdeburg rights. In 1832, the city of Chernivtsi was granted Magdeburg rights by the Austrian authorities. The old towns of Kraków , Lviv , Vilnius and Zamość , considerably developed under the Magdeburg rights, are World Heritage Sites , and Kazimierz Dolny , Lublin , Paczków , Poznań , Przemyśl , Rydzyna , Sandomierz , Stary Sącz , Tykocin and Wrocław are also designated Historic Monuments of Poland . There are memorials to

2701-843: The Pious in 1253. Following the formation of the Polish–Lithuanian union in 1385, Magdeburg rights spread to Lithuania, first granted to the chief cities of Vilnius , Brest and Kaunas , although more slowly than earlier in Poland, especially late in the east and in private towns . In the 15th and 16th centuries, the rights were granted to many other towns, including, chronologically, Trakai , Grodno , Kyiv , Polotsk , Minsk , Novogrudok , Rechytsa , Slonim , Barysaw , Mogilev , Mazyr , Mir , Pińsk , Alytus , Nyasvizh , Šiauliai , Biržai , Lida , Kėdainiai and Vitebsk . Magdeburg rights in Lithuania were initially modeled after

2774-1052: The Polish cities of Kraków and Lublin , and then after Vilnius. Hundreds of towns in Poland and Lithuania, some now located in Belarus, Latvia and Ukraine , were formerly governed on the basis of the location privilege known as the "settlement with German law", excluding local variants of Magdeburg rights, with some of the more notable cities being, chronologically, Lublin , Zielona Góra , Tarnów , Olkusz , Sanok , Bydgoszcz , Rzeszów , Lwów , Będzin , Kielce , Krosno , Wieliczka , Częstochowa , Jarosław , Przemyśl , Chełm , Kazimierz Dolny , Łódź , Kamieniec Podolski , Łuck , Żytomierz , Rivne , Kowel , Siedlce , Leszno , Tarnopol , Rydzyna , Augustów , Płoskirów , Zamość , Daugavpils , Brody , Orsza , Biała Cerkiew , Nowogród Siewierski , Czernihów , Nizhyn , Krzemieńczuk , Vinnytsia , Poltava , Stanisławów , Jēkabpils , Suwałki , Białystok , Uman , Palanga , Telšiai , Cherkasy and Marijampolė . The rights reached

2847-467: The almost ineffable brutality of certain scenes. One of the stories—"Salt"—enjoys a glory seemingly reserved for poems and rarely attained by prose: many people know it by heart. Back in Odessa, Babel started to write Odessa Stories , a series of short stories set in the Odessan ghetto of Moldavanka . Published individually between 1921 and 1924 and collected into a book in 1931, the stories describe

2920-446: The aspiring writer to gain more life experience; Babel wrote in his autobiography, "I owe everything to that meeting and still pronounce the name of Alexey Maksimovich Gorky with love and admiration." One of his most famous semi-autobiographical short stories, "The Story of My Dovecote" ( История моей голубятни , Istoriya moey golubyatni ), was dedicated to Gorky. There is very little information about Babel's whereabouts during and after

2993-584: The delegation of Soviet writers to the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture and Peace. He probably knew this would have been his last chance to remain in Europe . As he had done numerous times during the last ten years, he asked my mother to return with him to Moscow. Although he knew the general situation was bad, he nevertheless described to her the comfortable life that

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3066-475: The door of their Moscow apartment. Although surprised, she agreed to accompany them to Babel's dacha in Peredelkino . Babel was then placed under arrest. According to Pirozhkova: "In the car, one of the men sat in back with Babel and me while the other one sat in front with the driver. 'The worst part of this is that my mother won't be getting my letters', and then he was silent for a long time. I could not say

3139-702: The easternmost cities of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth , including Roslavl , Smolensk and Starodub , now part of Russia . The advantages of the Magdeburg rights were not only economic, but also political. Members of noble families were able to join the city patriciate usually unchallenged. There were cases of changing the type of municipal rights, such as in Błonie from Magdeburg to Chełmno rights , and in Bielsk Podlaski and Tykocin from Chełmno to Magdeburg rights. Most towns ruled by

3212-489: The eyes of peasants, soldiers, priests, rabbis, children, artists, actors, women of all classes. He befriended whores, cabdrivers, jockeys; he knew what it was like to be penniless, to live on the edge and off the beaten track." His attempt to enroll at Odessa University was blocked for ethnic reasons. Babel then entered the Kiev Institute of Finance and Business. There he met Yevgenia Borisovna Gronfein, daughter of

3285-429: The family could have there together. It was the last opportunity my mother had to give a negative answer, and she never forgot it. Perhaps it helped her later on to be proven completely right in her fears and her total lack of confidence in the Soviet Union . My mother described to me these last conversations with my father many times." On May 15, 1939, Antonina Pirozhkova was awakened by four NKVD agents pounding upon

3358-542: The following year, Babel, who had worked on the screenplay , had been removed from the credits." According to his file, "Case #419, Babel, I.E.", the writer was held at the Lubyanka and Butyrka Prisons for a total of eight months as a case was built against him for Trotskyism , terrorism, and spying for Austria and France. At his initial interrogations, "Babel began by adamantly denying any wrongdoing, but then after three days he suddenly 'confessed' to what his interrogator

3431-612: The gentle nature of Babel himself. Babel wrote: "Only by 1923 I have learned how to express my thoughts in a clear and not very lengthy way. Then I returned to writing." Several stories that were later included in Red Cavalry were published in Vladimir Mayakovsky 's LEF ("ЛЕФ") magazine in 1924. Babel's honest description of the brutal realities of war, far from revolutionary propaganda , earned him some powerful enemies. According to recent research, Marshal Budyonny

3504-410: The goods they had brought into the city to local traders, if any wished to buy them. Jews and Germans were sometimes competitors in those cities. Jews lived under privileges that they carefully negotiated with the king or emperor . They were not subject to city jurisdiction. These privileges guaranteed that they could maintain communal autonomy, live according to their laws, and be subjected directly to

3577-412: The happy few, a group that included Soviet writers who enjoyed exceptional status and privileges in an otherwise impoverished and despotic country. In the late 1930s, he was given a villa in the writer's colony of Peredelkino , outside Moscow. No secret was ever made of his having a wife and daughter in Paris . At the same time, hardly anyone outside of Moscow knew of two other children he had fathered. As

3650-441: The life of Jewish gangsters, both before and after the October Revolution . Many of them directly feature the fictional mob boss Benya Krik , loosely based on the historical figure Mishka Yaponchik . Benya Krik is one of the great anti-heroes of Russian literature . These stories were used as the basis for the 1927 film Benya Krik , and the stage play Sunset , which centers on Benya Krik's self-appointed mission to right

3723-488: The man sitting beside Babel said to me, "We have no claims whatsoever against you." We drove to the Lubyanka Prison and through the gates. The car stopped before the massive, closed door where two sentries stood guard. Babel kissed me hard and said, "Someday we'll see each other..." And without looking back, he got out of the car and went through that door." According to Nadezhda Mandelstam , Babel's arrest became

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3796-466: The old common law of Poland in private relations. Local variants of Magdeburg law were created, such as Środa law based on the rights granted to Środa Śląska by Henry the Bearded in 1235, Kalisz law, a variant of the Środa law, based on the rights granted to Kalisz by Bolesław the Pious before 1268, and Poznań law, a variant of Magdeburg rights, based on the rights granted to Poznań by Bolesław

3869-492: The original Magdeburg law was relatively rare in what is now northern Poland. In the medieval Kingdom of Hungary , the first town to receive the Magdeburg rights was Székesfehérvár in 1237, followed by Trnava (1238), Nitra (1248), Levoča (1271) and Žilina (1369). Towns and cities including Bardejov , Buda , Bratislava and Košice adopted the Southern German Nuremberg town rights, rather than

3942-470: The play's attitude toward the bourgeoisie was contradictory and weak. Sunset closed, and was dropped from the repertoire of the Moscow Art Theatre . However, Sunset continued to have admirers. In a 1928 letter to his White emigre father, Boris Pasternak wrote, "Yesterday, I read Sunset , a play by Babel, and almost for the first time in my life I found that Jewry, as an ethnic fact, was

4015-576: The play, particularly for failing to convey to the audience every single word of its unusually terse text." Babel's play Maria candidly depicts both political corruption , prosecution of the innocent, and black marketeering within Soviet society. Noting the play's implicit rejection of socialist realism , Maxim Gorky accused his friend of having a " Baudelairean predilection for rotting meat." Gorky further warned his friend that "political inferences" would be made "that will be personally harmful to you." According to Pirozhkova, "Once Babel went to

4088-417: The rescue of three Jewish families in Sokal by Franciczka Halamajowa family, and the other was The Same Snowy Ground (2020), that featured the ruined synagogue and the new park and told the tale of the town's Jewish community. Magdeburg rights Magdeburg rights ( German : Magdeburger Recht , Polish : Prawo magdeburskie , Lithuanian : Magdeburgo teisė ; also called Magdeburg Law ) were

4161-402: The rights in 1243 by the duke of Pomerania. The Law of Magdeburg implemented in Poland was different from its original German form. It was combined with a set of civil and criminal laws, and adjusted to include the urban planning popular across Western Europe – which was based (more or less) on the ancient Roman model. Meanwhile, country people often ignorant of the actual German text, practiced

4234-448: The royal jurisdiction in matters concerning Jews and Christians. One of the provisions granted to Jews was that a Jew could not be compelled to be a Gewährsmann /informant; that is, he had the right to keep confidential how he had acquired objects in his possession. A Jew with this right could voluntarily divulge who had gifted, sold, or loaned him the object, but it was illegal to coerce him to say. Other provisions frequently mentioned were

4307-433: The setting for Odessa Stories and the play Sunset . Although Babel's short stories present his family as "destitute and muddle-headed", they were relatively well-off. According to his autobiographical statements, Babel's father, Manus, was an impoverished shopkeeper. Babel's daughter, Nathalie Babel Brown, stated that her father fabricated this and other biographical details in order to "present an appropriate past for

4380-421: The subject of an urban legend within the NKVD . NKVD agents, she explains, were fond of "telling stories about the risks they ran" in arresting "enemies of the people". Babel had, according to NKVD lore, "seriously wounded one of our men" while " resisting arrest ". Mrs. Mandelstam contemptuously declared, "Whenever I hear such tales I think of the tiny hole in the skull of Isaac Babel, a cautious, clever man with

4453-668: The town in July 1944, though the western part of the town (the former village of Zhvirka) remained part of Poland between 1944 and 1951 (see 1951 Polish–Soviet territorial exchange ). In the early 17th century, a large Baroque monastery of the Bernardine monks, together with the Roman Catholic church of the Virgin Mary was built in Sokal. The complex is located in the district of Zhvirka, and until World War II , it housed

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4526-642: The wrongs of Moldavanka. First on his list is to rein in his alcoholic, womanizing father, Mendel. According to Nathalie Babel Brown, " Sunset premiered at the Baku Worker's Theatre on October 23, 1927, and played in Odessa , Kiev , and the celebrated Moscow Art Theatre . The reviews, however, were mixed. Some critics praised the play's 'powerful anti- bourgeois stance and its interesting 'fathers and sons' theme. But in Moscow , particularly, critics felt that

4599-652: Was a severe water shortage in the Sokal ghetto. On October 24, 1942, a further 2,500 Jews from the town were deported to the Bełżec gas chambers. On May 27, 1943, the ghetto was liquidated and the town declared ' judenrein '. Only 30 Jews from the town survived the war, including 15 members of 3 families rescued by the Halamajowa family, consisting of the Polish Catholic grandmother Franciszka, her daughter and son (see No.4 Street of Our Lady ). The Soviet army recaptured

4672-434: Was abolished in July 2020 as part of the administrative reform of Ukraine, which reduced the number of raions of Lviv Oblast to seven. The area of Sokal Raion was merged into Chervonohrad Raion (modern Sheptytskyi Raion). Sokal is the location of the opening of the 2009 novel The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell , which takes place immediately following the German invasion of Soviet -occupied Poland in June 1941. Sokal

4745-432: Was arrested by the NKVD on 15 May 1939 on fabricated charges of terrorism and espionage, and executed on 27 January 1940. Isaac Babel was born in the Moldavanka section of Odessa in the Russian Empire , to Jewish parents, Manus and Feyga Babel. Soon after his birth, the Babel family moved to the port city of Nikolaev . They later returned to live in a more fashionable part of Odessa in 1906. Babel used Moldavanka as

4818-484: Was becoming "the master of a new literary genre, the genre of silence." American Max Eastman describes Babel's increasing reticence as an artist in a chapter called "The Silence of Isaac Babyel" in his 1934 book Artists in Uniform . However, according to Nathalie Babel Brown, his life was tolerable: "The young writer burst upon the literary scene and instantly became the rage in Moscow . The tradition in Russia being to worship poets and writers, Babel soon became one of

4891-443: Was changed to Mikhail Ivanov, and he later became a noted artist. After the final break with Tamara, Babel briefly attempted to reconcile with Yevgenia and they had their daughter Natalie in 1929. In 1932, Babel met a Siberian -born Gentile named Antonina Pirozhkova (1909–2010). In 1934, after Babel failed to convince his wife to return to Moscow, he and Antonina began living together. In 1939, their common law marriage produced

4964-480: Was denied access to his unpublished manuscripts. In October 1939, Babel was again summoned for interrogation and denied all his previous testimony. A statement was recorded, "I ask the inquiry to take into account that, though in prison, I committed a crime. I slandered several people." This led to further delays as the NKVD frantically attempted to salvage their cases against Mikhoels, Ehrenburg, and Eisenstein. On 16 January 1940, Lavrentiy Beria presented Stalin with

5037-561: Was forcibly closed on Lenin's orders in July 1918. Babel later recalled, "My journalistic work gave me a lot, especially in the sense of material. I managed to amass an incredible number of facts, which proved to be an invaluable creative tool. I struck up friendships with morgue attendants, criminal investigators, and government clerks. Later, when I began writing fiction, I found myself always returning to these 'subjects', which were so close to me, in order to put character types, situations, and everyday life into perspective. Journalistic work

5110-465: Was infuriated by Babel's unvarnished descriptions of marauding Red Cossacks and demanded Babel's execution without success. However, Gorky's influence not only protected Babel but also helped to guarantee publication. In 1929 Red Cavalry was translated into English by J. Harland and later was translated into a number of other languages. Argentine author and essayist Jorge Luis Borges once wrote of Red Cavalry , The music of its style contrasts with

5183-455: Was never returning. When I wrote to him about this, he wrote back saying, 'What can people, who do not know anything, possibly say to you, who knows everything?' Babel wrote from France almost daily. I accumulated many letters from him during his 11-month absence. When Babel was arrested in 1939, all of these letters were confiscated and never returned to me." After his return to the Soviet Union, Babel decided to move in with Pirozhkova, beginning

5256-499: Was publicly denounced for low productivity. At the time, many other Soviet writers were terrified and frantically rewrote their past work to conform to Stalin's wishes. However, Babel was unimpressed and confided in his protégé, the writer Ilya Ehrenburg , "In six months time, they'll leave the formalists in peace and start some other campaign." At the first congress of the Union of Soviet Writers (1934), Babel noted ironically, that he

5329-546: Was suggesting and named many people as co-conspirators. In all likelihood, he was tortured, almost certainly beaten." His interrogators included Boris Rodos , who had a reputation as a particularly brutal torturer, even by the standards of the time, and Lev Schwartzmann , who tortured the renowned theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold . Among those he accused of conspiring with him were his close friends Sergei Eisenstein , Solomon Mikhoels , and Ilya Ehrenburg . Despite months of pleading and letters sent directly to Beria, Babel

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