Finding Babel

David Novack's documentary sketches the life and work of Isaac Babel, the Russian-Ukrainian short story writer who, despite service in the Soviet army in the 1920s and considerable literary renown, was arrested in 1939 and executed after a forced confession. Finding Babel follows the writer's grandson, Andrei Malaev-Babel, as he travels to the important places in his grandfather's life—his home city of Odessa, Paris (where Babel visited his first wife in the mid-1930s), and Moscow—to research his ancestor's past and explore Babel's posthumous legacy, interviewing acquaintances, peers, and experts who comment knowledgeably on his writing, including aged poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Novack also intersperses filmed reflections by Babel's second wife Antonina, an engineer forced to witness her husband's arrest, who emigrated to the U.S. following the collapse of the U.S.S.R., and he incorporates excerpts from Babel's major works—The Odessa Tales (1931) and Red Cavalry (1926)—read by Liev Schreiber. Finding Babel proceeds to a sequence in which Malaev-Babel is accosted by security guards as he approaches the site where his grandfather was arrested, after which he speaks with a researcher who notes the incompleteness of Babel's prison file and discusses the probable fate of the author's lost writings, which were seized along with the writer. Babel was finally exonerated in 1954 and a statue of him was erected in Odessa in 2011, but Novack's impassioned film clearly suggests the inadequacy of such tributes to an artist who was crushed by Stalin's totalitarian regime. Extras include a featurette on Babel's semi-autobiographical account of the 1905 Odessa pogrom, and deleted scenes. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)