Nathalie Babel

Nathalie Babel was the daughter and literary heiress of the Jewish Soviet writer Isaac Babel, who was executed by the Stalinist regime in 1940. She taught Slavic languages at various American universities and began collecting, editing and publishing her father’s works. In 1964, she collected his letters in The Lonely Years, 1925-1939: Unpublished Stories and Private Correspondence, which was followed in 1969 by the appearance of You Must Know Everything: Stories 1915-1937. Her life work was the edition of her father’s collected journalistic, literary and essayistic works in The Complete Works of Isaac Babel (2002).