Isaak Babel

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Isaak Emmanuilovich Babel (13 July [O.S. 1 July] 1894 - January 27, 1940) was a Soviet journalist, playwright, and short story writer acclaimed as "the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry." Despite being an enthusiastic Communist, Isaac Babel was arrested, tortured and executed during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge. Isaak Babel was born into a family of Manus and Feyga Bobel (Babel changed the spelling of his surname in his twenties) in Moldavanka, then an impoverished, largely industrial suburb of Odessa. Babel's family moved to the port city of Nikolayev soon after Babel's birth before returning to live in a more fashionable part of Odessa in 1905, but Babel used Moldavanka as the setting for The Odessa Tales and the play Sunset.