Grace Paley on Isaac Babel

“my favorite writer, the writer that I loved the most for a long time, was Isaak Babel. First of all, I was doing short stories then I began to read him—I hadn’t read him—and I felt, Oh my, it’s just what I want to do. He’s really writing about things he doesn’t exactly know and yet he’s trying to understand, he’s using writing to try to understand the world and that’s what I want to do. And that’s what I do. I write about things I don’t know all that well just to try and understand them. The act of writing is an investigative, learning act.”

“I read somewhere that Isaac Babel said that his main problem was that he had no imagination. And I thought about that a lot, because if you read him, you know that what he's trying to say-except for a few pieces, such as "The Sin of Jesus"-is very close to his life, the terrifying life that he led in the Cossack Red Army during, I guess, 1920, '21, ‘22. And so I tried to figure out exactly what he meant. I guess what he really didn't understand was the amount of imagination it had taken for him to understand what had happened, what was real. There were people in his unit who, if they had tried to tell him what was going on in this particular hut or pogrom-suffering village, couldn't have. Yet he was able to use what he did know about life and poverty and war to stretch toward what he didn't know about the Cossack Red Army. So I think about that as the fact of the imagination.”