Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams [Hardcover]

One of the most famous visitors to Odessa was Mark Twain. He found a city that was full of people from various nationalities and religions. He had visited the city in 1867 and was one of the many who stepped ashore to see its famous cascade of stone steps, while observing the "city center, buzzing with the business of trade, shipping and exchange". Because of this, he was reminded of his America.
Thus Mr.King starts his fascinating tale of the city's history-a city founded on the shores of the Black Sea. Later on you could find in it everything and everyone: Russians, Romanians, Jews, Greeks, Italians, Germans. The city has attracted all kinds of people. Many of them were prominent figures and they included Alexander Pushkin, Grigory Potemkin, Jose de Ribas, Isaac Babel and various Jewish writers and Zionist activists. It was a city where intellectuals, crooks and raconteurs were living side by side. Like most sea and river ports, Odessa became a haven for the underworld and this thing in itself "became one of the deepest and most enduring features". Criminals, delinquents, Jewish artful dodgers and schemers populated the city, which was built originally by Catherine the Great as a model of Enlightenment. One of the most famous personalities was Illya Mechnikov, the famous immunologist who earned the Nobel prize and whose tragic life is well told here. His story is only part of a greater picture of the terrible and endless plagues which were rampant in Odessa throughout the centuries. This resulted in many quarantines imposed by the authorities on ships and travellers alike. Another plague, that of locusts during the nineteenth century, caused the inhabitants of Odessa to find comic solutions, such as the creation of enough noise to scare the insects away. One lady had even organized an annual parade to deal with the pests, "by engaging her husband to use a large bell, then the gardener hanging on a water bucket, then the footmen clanging on shovels, followed by housemaids striking pots and kettles, and lastly the children tapping with toasting forks on tea boards".
Not only was the city a magnet for merchants and businessmen.It was to become one of the bloodiest places for the Jews and the famous pogroms these unfortunate people have gone through are retold here in detail. Pogrom survivors came from all professions and social classes. Students, traders, clerks, teachers and port workers comprised the majority, while another group was that of housewives. Thus the city was also a place of tremendous violence and this continued through World War Two, when the famous Roumanian- administered Transnistria Area, which contained tens of ghettoes, was established between the Bug and the Dniester. Odessa was its capital and Mr.King writes that " the horrors of Transnistria and its capital city, Odessa, had analogs in the more extensive and well-documented atrocities committed in the infamous death camps of occupied Europe and at the hands of the German military". Hundreds of thousands of Jews perished there. The chapter on the capture and trials of many well- known Romanian Fascist leaders is extremely interesting. Some of these included Ion Antonescu, Mihai Antonescu and the Governor of Transnistria, the murderous professor Gheorghe Alexianu, whose headquarters during the war was to be found in the former palace of Counts Mikhail Vorontsov, another prominent man who developed Odessa. Some Odesssan Jews who left the city formed the Odessan diaspora ,many of whom ended up on Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.
The book is superbly researched, using many new and unknown sources and containing as rich bibliography. It is a history of courage, tragedy, fun, crime, murders, intellectuals and artists, villains and geniuses, and it is also a tale of optimism that characterized the city of dreams. This book is highly recommended because it is a tale of courage and glory of a world that was and will probably never exist again.

because my memory is my only homeland.
Anselm Kiefer

I've never been to Odessa but I think I've built my own memory of this city out of stories I heard growing up. On July 11, 1896 my grandfather Chaim arrived at Ellis Island. He had left his native city, Odessa, in 1895 and somehow made his way from Odessa to Hamburg and from there to New York. He then sent for his wife and five children. Upon the arrival of the ship his wife told him the five children had died of typhus while in port in Antwerp. They proceeded to have six more children, including my father. Growing up I heard stories from my father that consisted of his retelling of the Odessa stories that he heard from his father. What always struck me was how Odessa sounded so much like New York. It was a noisy, brash, sometimes scary melting pot that because of its natural harbor served as a crossroad of world trade. It was a place of great trade and petty cons, a new city that was proud of being unlike any other city in its country and one that was not limited by hundreds of years of tradition. I heard that Odessa was the one place in the Pale of Settlement (the areas in the Russian empire where Jews were allowed to live) where Jews could break out of the chains of shtetl poverty and make a living. A place that, while not necessarily a haven of political liberty, had a passion for business and trade that allowed people to break out of the economic class that they were born in. Last I heard it was a place of thriving culture as befit a city that took in traders and travelers from around the world. It was no surprise to learn that my great-grandfather was an actor who travelled around the Pale of Settlement putting on Shakespeare's plays in Yiddish. My father always claimed that Odessa and my native New York were sister cities in form, substance, and energy.

So I picked up Charles King's "Genius and Death in a City of Dreams: Odessa" with some small amount of trepidation. When you grow up hearing stories of a place you do build up a "palace of memory" and I was a bit concerned that the actual story of Odessa, its `real' history would end up consigning my stories to that of family mythology. I need not have been concerned on that account and, in any event, King's book turned out to be a very well-written, entertaining, and informative account of a fascinating city.

The book is a straightforward chronological narrative. It begins with an account of how even before it became a city the area served as a trading post from the time of the ancient Greeks (hence the name Odessa, after Odysseus) and takes us through Catherine the Great's decision to found a city that would stand as the Black Sea's version of St. Petersburg. It struck me that even in its infancy, Odessa was a world city one founded not just by Russians such as Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin but also Jose Pascual deRibas (born in Naples) and Armand Emmanuel du Plessis, the grand nephew of Cardinal Richilieu amongst others.

Although the book is meticulously researched and annotated the book is conversational in tone rather than overly academic and one that should be easily appreciated by anyone with an interest in the subject matter. Odessa flourished, for the most part throughout the 19th-century but not surprisingly the 20th-century brought change and tumult. The Russo-Japanese War almost shut the city down economically, the 1905 Revolution, WWI, and the Russian Revolution and Civil War hit Odessa hard. Finally, occupation in WWII by Germany's Romanian allies ensured that Odessa had its `piece' of the Holocaust.

The book ends, fittingly enough given my own family story, with a look at modern-day Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, known to many as Little Odessa.

The bottom line is that I enjoyed this book a lot. I felt as if I learned a lot about a region, a city, and its people, and I learned it while being entertained by the writing. That is not a bad combination at all. Recommended. L. Fleisig

This is an excellent example of popular history. It reads well and is accessible to a general audience, but is backed by solid scholarship. The story is of a city that arose to become one of the great diverse and culturally productive cities in Russia - Odessa. In the first, "genius", part, the focus is on the extraordinary cultural vibrancy of the city, stimulated by the many groups living there -- most notably Jews, but also Greeks, Armenians, Ukrainians and Russians among others. The second, "death," part deals with how the city tore itself apart in the 20th century.

As King notes, in 1905 Odessa experienced "the deadliest and most notorious pogrom in Russian history." (p. 160) Research done at the time on the refugees from the pogrom found that "just under a third had lost at least one family member in a pogrom, around 44 percent of them losing one or both parents." (p. 181) The ferocity of these at least partially state-sponsored outbursts of violence against Jews led to the creation of Jewish self-defense organizations. I would have liked to have had a bit more on these organizations, but overall the section on the pogrom and its aftermath was very evocative.

Unfortunately, the pogrom was not an aberration. In what I think is the most fascinating and most important part of the book, King details how the Romanian allies of the Nazis carried out their own section of the Holocaust in Odessa. Although they were not quite as organized as the Nazis, the leadership of the Romanian occupation's willingness to use violence and belief in anti-Semitism rivaled that of the Nazis. As King states, this is an almost unknown aspect of the Holocaust. I'm a Russian historian and taught a class on the Holocaust, and I hadn't previously come across this aspect of the Holocaust. It's true that Romania usually is presented relatively positively in general works on the topic because they weren't zealous in killing their own Jews. However, the story of the Romanian occupation of Odessa and surroundings is a very different one and an important piece of the puzzle. Only someone like King, who knows Romanian and Russian, plus English, could have researched and written this story. The section on denunciations against Jewish neighbors is also fascinating and shows how important the archives are.

King ends by stating that the erasure of memory of these events in present-day Odessa is crippling their ability to deal with the future. He suggests that the town begin to come to terms with the past in order to recapture their glory days as a vibrant cultural capital on the Black Sea.

Those interested in the Holocaust, as well as Russian and Jewish history and culture, would do well to read this book.