Childhood at the Margins: Structures of Power, Violence, and Social Memory in Babel’s The Story of My Dovecote

This paper is an interdisciplinary attempt at examining Russian author Isaac Babel’s semi-autobiographical short story The Story of My Dovecote through a sociological-literary lens. It explores how literary representations of childhood can be used to address broader questions of identity and memory, especially shaped by structural violence and social exclusion. Diverging from romanticized depictions of innocence and youthful abandon associated with classical children’s literature, Babel’s narrative portrays childhood as a site of economic precarity, communal polarization, and fractured identity. By locating the narrative in the historical context of early 20th-century Russia and specifically the 1905 Odessa pogrom and Tsarist policies of marginalization, the paper aims to explore how education for the protagonist became symbolic of Russian Jews’ broader aspiration for upward mobility. The paper argues that Babel’s story underscores the enduring dynamics of systemic oppression, cultural resilience, and loss of innocence – while challenging dominant discourse casting children’s literature as apolitical.