From http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/13/arts/13babel.html
"Nathalie Babel Brown, a daughter of Isaac Babel, the illustrious Russian-Jewish storyteller of the Soviet era, whose literary work she edited, died on Thursday in Washington. She was 76. . .Ms. Babel Brown was the editor of 'The Complete Works of Isaac Babel' (Norton, 2002), which collected his writings - stories and sketches, journalism, Soviet propaganda, diaries and even screenplays, all previously vailable only in partial collections. The first complete English edition, it featured new translations by Peter Constantine.
"Nathalie Babel was born in Paris to Evgenia Gronfein Babel, a painter who had married Babel in 1919. A dedicated revolutionary like him, she had grown disillusioned and stayed in France after going there to study.
"Nathalie's only personal memory of Babel was from when she was 5; Babel, then a privileged Soviet writer, visited an international writers' congress in Paris, along with Boris Pasternak, in 1935.
"'There were great pressures on him to stay in France,' Ms. Babel Brown told The Times in 1990. Instead, Babel returned home to write. He was arrested in 1939 by Stalin's secret police and executed on Jan. 27 the next year. His work was banned until after Stalin's death and then published only in carefully edited versions. It wasn't published as written until the demise of the Soviet Union; his complete works in Russian finally appeared in the 1990's, said Jennifer Lyons, Ms. Babel Brown's literary agent."
OK, let's say that Babel had stayed in France, and had survived the war (presumably by fleeing to the US in time). What are the literary consequences? Was Babel all "written out" (he had famously said in 1934 that he had become "the master of a new literary genre, the genre of silence" but of course that doesn't necessarily mean that he could no longer write, just that it was increasingly difficult for him to write anything that could be published in the era of Stalinist "socialist realism") or could he have found a new literary life in emigration? (Naturally, many of the emigres--even leaving aside the anti-Semitic ones--would have detested him for his past services to the Bolsheviks.) Maybe he becomes a screenwriter in Hollywood:?...(Though of course in the late 1930's and 1940's the very last thing Hollywood would want to make movies about would be the Jewish underworld in Odessa or elsewhere. [1])
Presumably it would have been much longer than in OTL before his works would have been allowed to be published--even in part--in the USSR. Such strongly anti-Soviet emigres as Bunin were eventually published there (selectively of course), but only after their deaths.
[1] This was the era of what Henry Popkin (in "The Vanishing Jew of Our Popular Culture" published in *Commentary* in 1952) called the "de-Semitization" of American popular culture. Ben Hecht in 1944 had noted "the almost complete disappearance of the Jew from American fiction, stage, radio and movies." According to Popkin, "This. . .originates not in hate, but in a misguided benevolence--or fear; its name is *sha-sha*. . . [and its source] is Hitler. When Hitler forced Americans to take anti-Semitism seriously, it was apparently felt that the most eloquent reply that could be made was a dead silence." https://books.google.com/books?id=xGYyDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT528
"Nathalie Babel Brown, a daughter of Isaac Babel, the illustrious Russian-Jewish storyteller of the Soviet era, whose literary work she edited, died on Thursday in Washington. She was 76. . .Ms. Babel Brown was the editor of 'The Complete Works of Isaac Babel' (Norton, 2002), which collected his writings - stories and sketches, journalism, Soviet propaganda, diaries and even screenplays, all previously vailable only in partial collections. The first complete English edition, it featured new translations by Peter Constantine.
"Nathalie Babel was born in Paris to Evgenia Gronfein Babel, a painter who had married Babel in 1919. A dedicated revolutionary like him, she had grown disillusioned and stayed in France after going there to study.
"Nathalie's only personal memory of Babel was from when she was 5; Babel, then a privileged Soviet writer, visited an international writers' congress in Paris, along with Boris Pasternak, in 1935.
"'There were great pressures on him to stay in France,' Ms. Babel Brown told The Times in 1990. Instead, Babel returned home to write. He was arrested in 1939 by Stalin's secret police and executed on Jan. 27 the next year. His work was banned until after Stalin's death and then published only in carefully edited versions. It wasn't published as written until the demise of the Soviet Union; his complete works in Russian finally appeared in the 1990's, said Jennifer Lyons, Ms. Babel Brown's literary agent."
OK, let's say that Babel had stayed in France, and had survived the war (presumably by fleeing to the US in time). What are the literary consequences? Was Babel all "written out" (he had famously said in 1934 that he had become "the master of a new literary genre, the genre of silence" but of course that doesn't necessarily mean that he could no longer write, just that it was increasingly difficult for him to write anything that could be published in the era of Stalinist "socialist realism") or could he have found a new literary life in emigration? (Naturally, many of the emigres--even leaving aside the anti-Semitic ones--would have detested him for his past services to the Bolsheviks.) Maybe he becomes a screenwriter in Hollywood:?...(Though of course in the late 1930's and 1940's the very last thing Hollywood would want to make movies about would be the Jewish underworld in Odessa or elsewhere. [1])
Presumably it would have been much longer than in OTL before his works would have been allowed to be published--even in part--in the USSR. Such strongly anti-Soviet emigres as Bunin were eventually published there (selectively of course), but only after their deaths.
[1] This was the era of what Henry Popkin (in "The Vanishing Jew of Our Popular Culture" published in *Commentary* in 1952) called the "de-Semitization" of American popular culture. Ben Hecht in 1944 had noted "the almost complete disappearance of the Jew from American fiction, stage, radio and movies." According to Popkin, "This. . .originates not in hate, but in a misguided benevolence--or fear; its name is *sha-sha*. . . [and its source] is Hitler. When Hitler forced Americans to take anti-Semitism seriously, it was apparently felt that the most eloquent reply that could be made was a dead silence." https://books.google.com/books?id=xGYyDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT528