KING OF ODESSA

A richly atmospheric first novel by film historian and biographer Rosenstone (Visions of the Past, 1995), who here concocts an apocryphal “last work” of the famous, doomed Russian author Isaac Babel.

A Jew from Odessa who fought with the Red Army in the Civil War that followed the 1917 revolution, Babel became celebrated in the 1920s for his short stories depicting life in the Soviet army and the Odessa underworld. Unwilling to crank out propaganda for the Writer’s Union in the 1930s, his reputation dropped quite precipitously, and in 1939 he was arrested and shot. Rosenstone picks up the story in 1936, when Babel is approached by a shadowy government functionary who asks him to arrange the escape of Lev Kamenev, a high Party official who’s about to be found guilty of treason and conspiracy. If Babel—who, on the basis of his writings, is widely believed to have underworld contacts in Odessa—can get Kamenev out of the country on the sly, he’ll be given a passport and allowed to rejoin his exiled wife and daughter in Paris. Babel can read the writing on the wall, so he agrees to help and heads off to his hometown on the Black Sea to set up the operation. Problem is, he doesn’t really have any “underworld contacts” in Odessa—that was all fiction. So he sets off on his own to cut a deal with the various sharpers and layabouts of the waterfront—who may or may not in reality be police spies. He also starts a love affair with the beautiful Mosfilm actress Nadja Kamenskaya—who may or may not be a police spy, too. In Stalin’s Russia, Kafka would seem like a realist, but Babel manages to keep a (black) sense of humor as he rushes in where angels (not to mention NKVD agents) might fear to tread.

A fresh and fascinating debut that manages both to evoke the topsy-turvy atmosphere of Stalinist Russia and to put together a pretty fair replica of Babel’s prose.