Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel
The protagonist’s struggle to salvage his Jewish identity while serving with a violent and anti-Semitic Cossack regiment attacking Poland in 1920 pervades Isaac Babel’s autobiographical
stories in RED CALVARY. The anomaly established by placing a Jewish intellectual propaganda officer among the notoriously savage Cossack horse soldiers dramatizes both a spiritual and a cultural conflict arising from a coarse, bloody, and ethnic struggle within the context of a raw military campaign.
“My First Goose,” one of Babel’s short-story masterpieces, captures his agonizing ambivalence; his style is bold, concise, and graphic, but his moral subtleties are never overwhelmed. To escape further harassment from the Cossacks, the bespectacled Jewish intellectual behaves uncharacteristically in order to pass a
test of initiation by acting like a Cossack. He curses at an
old woman, shoves her aside, stomps on her goose, lifts it on his sword and commands the old lady to pluck and cook it, much to the delight of his Cossack tormentors. His brutal and bullying action helps him win the confidence of the anti-Semitic troops; he trades part of his
ethos to gain admission to the group, but he cannot reconcile the theories of communism, brute behavior, and the harsh realities of war with his troubled and threatened Jewish identity.
Other stories in RED CALVARY support the central conflict. “Awakening” relates the protagonist’s boyhood ignorance of the names of trees in his ghettoized world. “After the Battle” reminds him, after riding with an unloaded revolver, that the test in war is not merely to accept
death, but to be able and willing to kill another human being. In “The Brigade Commander,” the Cossacks boast of trampling opponents to death rather than shooting them. In “The Death of Dolgushov,” a fatally wounded comrade struggles to hold his intestines intact and begs the narrator to end his suffering with a gunshot rather than leave him to the Poles. The narrator panics and flees, finds a Cossack to administer the coup de grace, and earns the contempt of the soldiers for his weak sensitivity, which he finally acknowledges as an inculcated ethos to avoid making enemies in an era of pogroms.
Babel published two more collections of short stories before he perished in a Stalinist gulag at the hands of men whose ethos resembled the tribal mentality of the Cossacks. He demonstrated, even in the heady days of the Stalinist juggernaut, that the human spirit can fight on amid the crush of enemies, and that literary genius can create its own spiritual heirs.
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