The setting is Odessa, a town racked with the pains of a not-yet-successful revolution. Only recently evacuated by the White Army, Odessa was still under blockade and her citizens daily faced heroic struggles to stay alive despite extremely adverse conditions: water was selling for five hundred rubles a bucket, there was no electricity, furniture was being chopped up for fuel, and little food remained other than bread, carrots, and occasional fish. Amid this chaos, Paustovsky not only survived but devoted himself energetically to the publication of a lively newspaper called The Seaman. Working on it together with some of Odessa’s brightest writers, the young journalist became intimately acquainted with the paper’s most gifted contributor of all, the Russian genius Isaac Babel, and in this volume Paustovsky paints a rare and moving portrait of the master storyteller. Re-creating these years of intense hardship and bracing intellectual enterprise, Paustovsky again demonstrates his ability to involve the reader completely in the drama of Russia’s recent past. The gentle wit and humble wisdom that grace his prose provide memorable commentary on the nature of literature and the quality of life in this most exciting era.