A WIDOW'S MOVING MEMOIR OF HER LIFE WITH ISAAC BABEL.

Byline: Richard Bernstein The New York Times

Title: ``At His Side: the Last Years of Isaac Babel''

Author: A.N. Pirozhkova. Translated by Anne Frydman and Robert L. Busch

Data: Illustrated. 171 pages, Steerforth Press; $22

Our rating: Four Stars

One of the stories about the writer Isaac Babel told by his widow, Antonina Nikolaevna Pirozhkova, has the great storyteller finding himself in 1934 in the awkward company of Genrikh G. Yagoda, the chief of the NKVD, Stalin's secret police. In order to break the uncomfortable silence, Babel asked what seems in light of subsequent events to have been an incredibly impertinent question: ``Tell me, how should someone act if he falls into your men's paws?''

Yagoda quickly replied: ``Deny everything, whatever the charges, just say no and keep saying no. If one denies everything, we are powerless.''

The advice did not work, of course, not for Yagoda himself, who was cashiered and executed a few years after Babel met him, and not for Babel either. Babel, whose few dozen stories are of such diamondlike perfection that they place him among the greats of 20th-century literature, disappeared forever into the gulag archipelago in 1939, and for decades thereafter his exact fate remained a mystery.

We now know from the files of Case No. 419, I.E. Babel, made available after the Soviet collapse, that he tried to follow Yagoda's instructions after he fell into the NKVD's paws, but after three days of torture, he signed whatever his interrogators put in front of him, incriminating not only himself but other Soviet writers as well. He then spent several months writing letters trying to retract his forced testimony, but on Jan. 26, 1940, the 45-year-old writer was sentenced to death, the sentence being carried out the next day.

His last known words were spoken to his tribunal: ``I slandered myself and others under duress.'' Pirozhkova's tale of her husband's encounter with Yagoda is in a way the climax of this affectionate and revealing memoir of Babel, published in uncensored form in the Soviet Union in 1989. For anyone interested in Babel, about whom no full biography has ever been written, this glimpse into his last few years on earth, written by the person closest to him, will be a treasured possession.

Pirozhkova, not a professional writer but a structural engineer who worked for years on the Moscow subway, was Babel's second wife; his first had moved to Paris with his daughter and refused to return to Moscow. Pirozhkova, who met Babel in 1932, tells her story with unassuming straightforwardness, scrupulously avoiding the twin temptations of hagiography and self-dramatization. Much is left out or glossed over in her account. She says almost nothing, for example, of Babel's political views. She does not provide any explanation or even background for the famous moment in 1934 when Babel, speaking at the first Congress of the Soviet Writers' Union, declared his intention to practice a new genre, what he called ``the genre of silence.''

Her explanation of her own and Babel's seemingly naive vision of things as the Stalin purges picked up their mad momentum and people around them started getting arrested is too cryptic to be of much use. ``In those years none of us could allow even into our minds the possibility of torture in Soviet prisons,'' she writes. But Babel's conversation about ``your men's paws'' with Yagoda, indicates that Babel was less naive than Pirozhkova suggests. After all, Babel was a master of shrewd observation.

Still, Pirozhkova has rendered a great service by setting down her memories. Three elements stand out. One is Babel's jubilant spirit, his love of pranks and jokes, his cheerful curiosity, his immeasurable kindness and capacity for love. Babel was the sort of man always giving things away, including things that belonged to his wife. He was a person who could suddenly back out of a room, a sly smile on his face, claiming that he could not turn around because there was a hole in his pants.

Second is Pirozhkova's description of the life of writers in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, a life of privilege and ease - until the police came and carted them away. Babel consorted with foreign writers like Andre Malraux and Andre Gide, as well as with fellow members of the Soviet cultural elite: Maxim Gorky, Sergei Eisenstein, Boris Pasternak, Ilya Ehrenburg and others. Surprisingly, Babel was not only acquainted with Yagoda but was on friendly terms as well with the wife of Yagoda's successor, Nikolai I. Ezhov and with Ezhov himself. This was a friendship that seems, if file No. 419 can be believed, to have counted heavily against him after Ezhov, too, fell afoul of Stalin and was arrested and executed.

Finally, Pirozhkova's account of Babel's arrest and her own dealings with the security police, who practiced their own Kafka-esque version of the genre of silence, are heart-rending and terrifying. Pirozhkova is stoical and understated in these passages of her book, and yet it is not difficult to understand how intensely she suffered, not knowing if her husband was alive or dead, not knowing where he was, not knowing what he could possibly have done to deserve his fate.

Pirozhkova went on with life, working on the Moscow subway, taking care of her mother and Lida, the daughter she had with Babel. Only many years after her husband was taken away and she learns, finally, that he was judicially murdered, does she tell us what she felt: ``The anguish of loss never leaves me, and the thought that for eight months in an NKVD prison he had to endure a mass of insults, humiliation and torture, and that his last day on earth was lived with the knowledge of his impending execution - all of this tears at my heart.'' And at the hearts of others as well, those who have been enriched by Babel's amazing stories and who know him so much better now, thanks to this document of love and fidelity, published in English 56 years after he was shot to death.