![]() ![]() ![]() Lipsyte’s reference to Vassily, I assumed, was buried in the Red Cavalry Stories, themselves filled with pitiless carnage paired with jokes: “So there we were making mincemeat of the Poles at Belaya Tserkov…we got cut off from the brigade commander…no less than a hundred and fifty paces away, we see a dust cloud which is either the staff or the cavalry transport…off we rode. This new translation dated 2002 has such a sense of the absurd and contemporaneity it doesn’t seem possible it is 100 years old. I came here looking for a reference dropped by Sam Lipsyte in The Ask in which a legless soldier of the Iraq war calls his prosthetics “my girls.” Lipsyte tells us his character copies a soldier, Vassily, in a Babel story. Those stories and other writings are collected here, in this volume edited by Nathalie Babel with an Introduction by Cynthia Ozick. ![]() Isaac Babel was Russian, killed in 1940 by firing squad at 45-years old for “being a member of a terrorist conspiracy.” Let us make no mistake: he was killed for his stories. ![]()
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