100 years ago today the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd

Ill and now missing from the scene, Alexandr Angert leaves a volatile power void in the Russo-Ukrainian underworld

Lionel Trilling saw Isaac Babel as he imagined or wanted Eastern European Jews to be, not as he really was

Visiting Odessa, the city where I grew up, I learned how Isaac Babel turned my great-great-grandmother into an iconic character

The Ukrainian Black Sea port has lost most of its Jews, but not the vestiges of the muddled, criminal city Isaac Babel imagined

Cosmopolitan yet barbarous, Jew-filled and Jew-free, remote but central—a new history explores the Black Sea port city’s many contradictions

Immigrants and émigrés

What we’re reading—and rereading—this season

Lionel Trilling was a classicist who did not believe in creativity’s lower depths. So what did he see in Isaac Babel?