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Isaac Babel and Mordche Yaffe.

Article Excerpt
Part One

The question that Sanford Pinsker asked, "What is Isaac Babel, a nice Jewish boy from Odessa, doing riding with the Cossacks? (Midstream, Jan/Feb 2006)--with two changes--could have been asked of my father. Only in the last years of his life did I learn that Mordcha Yaffe, from the Ukraine, was also in General Budyenny's Bolshevik cavalry. Like many war veterans, my father did not talk about his experiences until his later years. Isaac Babel wrote dispatches from the front and later, Red Cavalry, his memorable account of the disastrous venture by the young Bolshevik government to export its Communism to Poland.

There were other differences between Babel and my father. Babel traveled, as a war correspondent while my father was a rank-and-file cavalryman and courier. More noteworthy was my father's being openly Jewish while Babel used the pseudonym of Kiril Lyuto and pretended to be a Christian. My father's youthful candor (he hadn't started shaving and was never taller than five feet four), along with his bravery in battle, resulted in his winning the respect of his fellow peasant soldiers despite their antisemitism. In fact, they were protective of a brave Jewish youth who could have been their son's or grandson's age.

While Babel's father was a businessman and Babel had a comparatively decent education for a Jew in Tsarist Russia; my father came from a working class family and attended cheder and the equivalent of 7th grade in a Russian school. Babel was an aspiring writer during the Russian Revolution, while my father simply tried to survive.

While Babel's embracing of Bolshevism was primarily ideological, my father's was more...

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