Bettina Kaibach

Raised in Odessa, as a young man a reporter in the Russian-Polish War, later a witness to the famine in Ukraine enforced by Stalin – the work, but also the entire life of the great Jewish-Russian-Ukrainian writer Isaak Babel (1894-1940) is gaining a whole new relevance these days. The volumes My Dovecote and, most recently, Wandering Stars, translated by Bettina Kaibach (with Peter Urban), show Babel as a contemporary witness of epic conflicts that continue to have an impact today, but also as a vivacious narrator, playwright, and screenwriter who lovingly memorializes his multicultural hometown of Odessa. With these two books, Isaak Babel’s entire oeuvre has now been newly translated into German.

Dr. Bettina Kaibach studied Slavic and American Studies in Heidelberg and at Emory University, Atlanta, and has been a lecturer at the Slavic Department of the University of Heidelberg since 2007. She translates prose and poetry from Russian and Czech and works as a publicist.