Babel's Tower

Mike Walker's play imagines the Jewish-Russian writer Isaac Babel being interrogated after his arrest by the Soviet secret police in 1939. As Stalin's henchmen beat and bully Babel, scenes from his two great collections of stories come to him: the Jewish gangsters fighting over Odessa, Babel's hometown, and the Red Cavalry, with which he had ridden as a war correspondent, slaughtering Poles at the edge of the new Soviet Union.