Isaac Babel
A World Without EnemiesMonday, December 3, 2012 by Aryeh Tepper | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
In Isaac Babel’s 1931 short story "Argamak," a Jewish intellectual "thirsting for peace and happiness" joins a Red cavalry division made up of Jew-hating Cossacks. The division commander understands the Jew’s strange choice—and has contempt for it.
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Magnitizdat Sophie Pinkham, Paris Review. The samizdat literature that helped undermine the Soviet Union had a musical counterpart: bootlegged prison songs from the gulag, some mythologizing the Jewish gangsters of Odessa.