Later, Mendel drinks up his family's money at the local saloon and begins an extramarital affair with Marusia Kholodenko, a 20-year-old Gentile.
At a party to celebrate Dvoira's engagement, Rabbi Ben Zkharia declares that "everything is as it should be" and proposes a toast to the sons of Mendel Krik.
In a 1928 letter to his White emigre father, Boris Pasternak wrote, "Yesterday, I read Sunset, a play by Babel, and almost for the first time in my life I found that Jewry, as an ethnic fact, was a phenomenon of positive, unproblematic importance and power...
I should like you to read this remarkable play..."[2] According to Babel's common law wife Antonina Pirozhkova, filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein was also an admirer of Sunset and often compared it to the writings of Émile Zola for, "illuminating capitalist relationships through the experience of a single family."
Eisenstein was also quite critical of the Moscow Art Theatre, "for its weak staging of the play, particularly for failing to convey to the audience every single word of its unusually terse text.