This paper explains that Issac Babel's "Collected Stories" include finely chiseled stories about a Jewish intellectual assigned
to a military unit of anti-Semitic Cossacks as in "The Red Cavalry" and stories about encounters with grotesque figures in a Jewish ghetto as in the "Odessa Tales". The author points out that, despite the unending conflict of his personal, religious and political life, Babel appears not to rant against the cruelties of the society, which he exposes in his succinct and sparkling
narratives; instead, he uses dynamic
metaphorical storytelling to demonstrate this conflict. The paper relates that totalitarian states cannot tolerate writers like Babel, who, along with dozens of other Russian writers, was hauled off to the Gulag because they did not satisfying the Bolshevists.