I couldn’t write. I wanted to, so badly, but the words wouldn’t come. I struggled to put pen to paper for three years. One night, my mother read a few lines from Isaac Babel’s Odessa Tales to me over the phone. The passage was as follows: “Well then, forget for a while that you have spectacles on your nose and autumn in your heart. Forget that you pick fights from behind your desk and stutter when you are out in the world! Imagine for a moment that you pick fights in town squares and stutter only among papers...” I was shocked. Babel understood exactly how I had been feeling. He had taken what felt like a myriad of inexplicable anger and frustration and confusion, and he had expressed it all in two sentences. Two sentences! Later that year, I jumped at the opportunity to learn more about this mysterious man who seemed to know me so well.

Who was Isaac Babel? This was, of course, the first question I asked. I felt I understood much of who he was by reading his stories, so immaculately and (seemingly) simply crafted. Babel was a man who had the ability to beautifully and faithfully capture the human condition using the least amount of words imaginable. He painted the world around him in a million different hues, depending on who was narrating his stories.

When he wrote from the point of view of a child, the reader remembered their own childhood. As I read In The Basement, I recalled how fun it once was to imagine. As children, we make up stories, we contemplate, and we dream without any particular goal in mind. For some reason, as we grow older, that capacity to play diminishes. In The Basement allowed me to remember what it is to play. In this way, Babel’s works bring the reader to a closer understanding of life. His stories do not try to mirror literary cliches – gloomy sadness or pure happiness. They do not force you to approve or disapprove of their content. They merely ask that you step into the world of fiction without presumptions or judgments. Perhaps the story will end and you will have more questions than when you started, or perhaps you will come up with some answers; but what you most definitely will have after reading Babel’s stories is countless human emotions stirring in your heart, even those subconscious feelings that had been lying undisturbed for so many weeks or months or years.

Perhaps Babel is able to compel his readers to achieve this emotional state because his life was difficult and these hardships are reflected in his works. He was born in 1894, a Jew in Ukraine, during a time of severe anti-Semitism. He carried the burden of Judaism with him for his entire life. Yet Babel used this burden to enrich his art. His works reflected the synthesis of Jewish and Russian culture, with the cruelty, beauty, hardships, and rewards endured in both. For this reason it is often said that upon reading Babel’s stories, the reader experiences “laughter through tears.”

I began this project by researching Babel. During the process, I decided to take a break and watch a film. I chose Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors. It wasn’t what I saw that surprised me – it was what I hadn’t seen before. I watched the film with Babel’s stories running through my head. Allen and Babel were so much alike. I saw that same laughter through tears, that same burden – Judaism – lying at the core of the identities of both. I saw how the works of both have a heavy autobiographical influence. They both laid their lives into their work; they lived to create, and created to live. They asked life’s fundamental questions without fear or shame, questions such as, What is good and what is evil, and why? How does one determine a system of morality? Babel and Allen did not answer these questions, nor were they expecting to; this was always the work of the reader or the viewer.

These connections led me to realize that my project could become even more interesting if I incorporated Allen. Even though Allen and Babel are separated by generations, they have so much in common. I wanted to simultaneously show the art of both, as well as to describe the ways in which their lives were similar. To read if only a few excerpts of Babel’s stories and to watch a few clips from Allen’s films – these are preconditions for understanding them both. With this in mind, I decided that a blog would be the ideal medium to present my work.

I wasn’t tied to any formal structure while researching and writing for this project. If something attracted my attention or piqued my interest, I followed that lead. In this way, I saw that the blog could become a vortex. If I did not maintain focus in my research, I was quickly pulled down a dozen different rabbit holes, therein losing my footing (and track of time) altogether. Still, I found that not only are there a multitude of interesting topics and sub-topics to explore that pertain to Babel, Allen, and Judaism, but there are hundreds of clips, articles, and photos that fed my curiosity and supported my research. Multimedia allowed me to understand and see Babel and Allen on a level that would’ve been impossible in Babel’s time. I could look at photos of him, watch clips from his silent film, or read expert articles written about him, all in the span of a few hours.

I learned a great deal about Babel, Allen, and the connection between the two. Yet the greatest resource for understanding Babel remained his stories. I read his stories and conversed with him. Researching his life filled in the gaps in this conversation – it either confirmed or answered questions I had. Similarly, for Allen, watching his movies and reading about his life in combination with one another allowed me a clearer vision of him and his art.

Both of these artists also granted me a deeper knowledge of Jewish identity and the ways in which it had transformed over the generations. From Babel to Allen, much had happened to the Jewish people. Through Babel’s self-understanding of and identification with the Jewish tradition and Allen’s attempt to grasp his Judaism as well as what he conceived to be the Jewish tradition, I understood the magnitude of the impact of the 20th century on the Jewish faith. Various extremely different schools of thought had formed during this century, all of which had their own understanding of what it means to be Jewish. And yet, the tradition of the ‘big questions’ persisted all through the 20th century; people continued to ask these questions, even if their answers varied over time.