SOURCE: Sicher, Efraim. “The Jewishness of Babel.” In Jews in Russian Literature after the October Revolution: Writers and Artists between Hope and Apostasy, pp. 70-111. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

In the following excerpt, Sicher chronicles Babel's time with Russian Cossacks in the First Cavalry in 1920, maintaining that by exploring “the conflict of Russian and Jew in the writer's identity, we … see how Babel came to form his image of the post-Revolutionary Jewish intellectual, torn between Judaism and Communism, alienated from his past and unable to come to terms with the future.”

As a war correspondent attached to Budyonny's First Cavalry (Pervaia konnaia armiia) from May until September 1920, Babel adopted the pseudonym Liutov and passed himself off as a Russian. The name Liutov itself speaks for the ironic contrast between its connotation of fierceness in Russian and Babel's meek appearance. Babel found himself a Jew among Cossacks whose animosity...