noir

\”King of Odessa\” by Robert Rosenstone (Northwestern, $24.95).

In an impressive effort of literary boldness, historian Robert Rosenstone fills in some of the blanks in Issac Babel\’s life and work in a first novel, \”King of Odessa.\” He writes as though he has recovered a lost Babel manuscript, imagining what one of Babel\’s final years might have been like. Other than a few postcards sent to his family, no records remain of the summer and autumn of 1936, when Babel, then 42, returned to Odessa, the city of his birth.