page_title: Isaac Babel
section_title: Odessa Tales
hierarchical_section_title: Isaac Babel / His work / Odessa Tales
caption_attribution_description: English: Screen shot from the 1926 silent movie Benya Krik. Director Vladimir Bertoldovitch Vilner (1885-1952). License qualifies as "non-amateur cinema" first shown before 1938
context_page_description: Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel was a Russian writer, journalist, playwright, and literary translator. He is best known as the author of Red Cavalry, Story of My Dovecote and The Odessa Tales—stories from the life of Jewish gangsters from Odessa led by Benya Krik. He has been acclaimed as "the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry". Babel was arrested by the NKVD on 15 May 1939 on fabricated charges of terrorism and espionage, and executed on 27 January 1940.
context_section_description: Back in Odessa, Babel started to write the Odessa Tales, a series of short stories set in the Odessan ghetto of Moldavanka. At their core, the stories describe the life of Jewish gangsters, both before and after the October Revolution. Many of them directly feature the fictional mob boss Benya Krik, who remains one of the great anti-heroes of Russian literature. These stories were later used as the basis for the stage play Sunset, which centers on Benya Krik's self-appointed mission to right 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 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 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 the play, particularly for failing to convey to the audience every single word of its unusually terse text."
caption: Benya Krik as portrayed by Yuri Shumsky in the 1926 movie of the same name.
exif: {}