Nathalie Babel Brown

Ms. Babel Brown was the editor of "The Complete Works of Isaac Babel" (Norton, 2002), which collected his writings - stories and sketches, journalism, Soviet propaganda, diaries and even screenplays, all previously available only in partial collections. The first complete English edition, it featured new translations by Peter Constantine.

Nathalie Babel was born in Paris to Evgenia Gronfein Babel, a painter who had married Babel in 1919. A dedicated revolutionary like him, she had grown disillusioned and stayed in France after going there to study.

Nathalie's only personal memory of Babel was from when she was 5; Babel, then a privileged Soviet writer, visited an international writers' congress in Paris, along with Boris Pasternak, in 1935.

"There were great pressures on him to stay in France," Ms. Babel Brown told The Times in 1990. Instead, Babel returned home to write. He was arrested in 1939 by Stalin's secret police and executed on Jan. 27 the next year. His work was banned until after Stalin's death and then published only in carefully edited versions. It wasn't published as written until the demise of the Soviet Union; his complete works in Russian finally appeared in the 1990's, said Jennifer Lyons, Ms. Babel Brown's literary agent.

Ms. Babel Brown and her mother, a Soviet citizen, survived the deprivations and dangers of being Jews during the German occupation of France. Ms. Babel Brown graduated from the Sorbonne and came to New York in 1961 to teach French at Barnard College. She continued studying at Columbia, receiving a master's in Slavic studies in 1964 and a doctorate in comparative literature in 1970.

She also taught in Texas, California and Ottawa. In the late 1970's and 1980's she worked as an antiques dealer in the Washington area.

She reluctantly found herself becoming a Babel scholar. She edited a collection of her father's letters, "The Lonely Years, 1925-1939: Unpublished Stories and Private Correspondence" (Farrar, Straus; 1964), and "You Must Know Everything: Stories 1915-1937" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), before collaborating on the new translation of his complete works in a single volume.

She was married for 36 years to Richard H. Brown, a sociologist at the University of Maryland; he died in 2003. She is survived by their son, Ramiro Brown of Zihuatanejo, Mexico; two granddaughters; and a half-sister, Lidya Babel, of Silver Spring, Md.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/13/arts/13babel.html