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Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams

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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 entertains 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.

This book is easy to praise, but it is hard to categorize. It presents serious scholarly work, but also makes entertaining reading, and it is truly the best of both worlds.

I disagree with the reader who feels that this book attempted `to cover all the bases.' On the contrary, its focus is very clear: the puzzle of a city that surprisingly quickly rose `from scratch' to world glory in the 19th century, and then declined into structural and social decay in the course of the 20th century. This is not an encyclopedia of Odessan history; rather, it is a narrative composed of a set of themes and stories, just like a Monet painting is made up of accentuated strokes of brush.

The mastery of King's narrative is manifested in two notable aspects. One is his skill of unexpected but insightful comparisons. For example, he makes interesting parallels between communities of frontier Cossacks in Ukraine and pirate communities of the Caribbean. Another example is how he identifies common features in the city planning philosophies of Odessa and Washington, DC.

The second notable aspect of King's narrative is his skill of telling a well-known story in a very new way. A perfect example is the chapter on Pushkin and Vorontsov where the story of the poet and the ruler is rendered without the traditional bias in favor of the poet.

This book differs from most others written about Odessa -- the city where I grew up -- in one important way: it is a commendably honest account of history. Odessa easily charms her biographers and portrayers into emphasizing the city's most likable traits. Charles King is no doubt among her sympathizers, yet his view is unbiased and balanced. King shows Odessa's history as an ongoing struggle between the ideas and practices of modernity - that included cosmopolitan social freedom and liberal entrepreneurialism - and the anti-modern traits of insularity, prejudice, oppression and terror.

Most importantly, this book is not about the history of a city, but about the history of civilizations. Was the Soviet civilization truly modern? King's book convincingly demonstrates that it was not. It cultivated the attitudes of hatred and envy, as well as the skills of survival mimicry and denunciation - as was shown during the Romanian occupation interlude in the years of World War II. Charles King refers to this phase of Odessa's history as `self-devouring'. Soviet civilization was antithetical to the spirit and culture of modernity that, according to King, had been making Odessa in its early days so similar to the American New World.

For me, Odessa (Russia, then the U.S.S.R., now in the Ukraine) has long been one of the most distinctive and fascinating cities in the world (though I have never been there - which of course may be part of the reason I find it so intriguing). So I jumped on this book by Charles King when I saw it in the bookstore last week. On this occasion, my impetuosity was rewarded.

ODESSA the book is an engaging historical overview, from about 20,000 feet, of Odessa the city. Early in the book, author King summarizes Odessa's identity as follows: "a taste for the witty and the absurd; a veneer of Russian culture laid over a Yiddish, Greek, and Italian core; a boom-and-bust economy; a love of the dandy in men and the daring in women; a style of music and writing that involved both libertine abandon and controlled experimentation; and an approach to politics that swung wildly between the radical and the reactionary." And then the book proceeds to flesh out that description.

Surprisingly (to me), Odessa was not founded until the 1790s. It quickly became the principal outlet for the wheat grown on the Ukrainian and Russian steppes and, thus, the breadbasket for much of the Western world. It reached its economic high water mark in the 1850s; its gradual decline was initiated by the Crimean War and the opening of the Suez Canal. For about a half century, though, it remained vibrant and vigorous, in large part because of its ethnic diversity and relative freedom from the repressive and conservative ethos of Moscow. Much of its energy, character, and flavor came from its ever-growing Jewish population, drawn to the city from all over Russia and Eastern Europe by its comparatively tolerant treatment of Jews, the business prospects, and the Mediterranean climate.

All that began to change towards the end of the 1800s. Sadly, the once tolerant city became the site of the first large-scale pogroms in modern Russian history, culminating in 1905 in the deadliest and most notorious pogrom in Russian history. That same year Odessa also experienced some of the early bloodshed of political anarchy and revolution. (Sergei Eisenstein and the Soviets later created a blatantly revisionist myth of that year in the film "Battleship Potemkin".) The city was then wracked and ravaged by war and revolution through 1945, by which time it had lost almost all of its Jewish population and been stripped of its distinctive character.

For the first two-thirds of the book (which, to me, are the better two-thirds), much of the narrative drive is supplied by King's telling his story through the personalities and exploits of some of the major figures in the history of Odessa: Potemkin, John Paul Jones (the one and the same of American Revolution fame), the duc de Richelieu, Vorontsov, Pushkin, Lev Bronstein (a/k/a Leo Trotsky), Ilya Menchikov, Isaac Babel, and Vladimir Jabotinsky.

To my disappointment, King completely ignores Odessa's remarkable legacy as a cradle of distinguished violinists and pianists - among them, violinists Nathan Milstein and David Oistrakh, as well as Josef Roisman and violist Boris Kroyt of the Budapest String Quartet, and pianists Benno Moiseiwitsch, Vladimir de Pachmann, Shura Cherkassky, Emil Gilels, and last (but certainly not least) Sviatoslav Richter.

King tells his story of Odessa with verve, excellent pace, and lively prose. I wish there were comparable books on about a dozen other lesser-known cities of the world with which I have become similarly intrigued.

This book was recomended to me by a friend, and I was not desapointed. This is a beautiful history of a city on the Black sea.It is very well written and researched. I hope more people will come to visit it after the book.

This is not a in-depth book. But it's a great overview of the history of this strangest of cities. Don't expect to learn everything there is to know. But do except some good stories about Pushkin, about WWI, and about Soviet Realism. Enjoy!

This is not a conventional history, but the city as presented here, is not a conventional city. Author Charles King explains how unique Odessa is by fulfilling the promise of his subtitle. While providing an historical backdrop he mainly writes of the "genius" and "dreams" of Odessa through the personalities who built, influenced and otherwise defined this unusual city. The later chapters focus on "... and Death" as he describes the city's role in persecuting Jews before and during WWII.

Field Marshall Potemkin won this land for his queen/consort, Catherine the Great. Left somewhat to its own devices the city grew into a freewheeling international port, a magnet for traders, adventurers and artists, dreamers and geniuses. Anti-Semitism existed, but was not as extreme as other places so a thriving Jewish community (over 1/3 of the population prior to the pogroms) put down roots.

King brings to life the motley crew that graced Odessa's inception which includes: Potemkin, himself, an interesting champion, considering his role in the court of Catherine the Great and his legacy of "Potemkin Villages"; John Paul Jones, a hero of the American Revolution was ironically unable to translate his success on behalf of for democracy for North America to success on behalf of Russia's autocracy; Jose de Ribas, born in Naples of Spanish/Irish heritage, who served as Odessa's founding father; Armand Richelieu from a famous French family who led the city in its early development and through plague outbreaks; Mikhail Vorontsov who appears as a banal aristocrat in Tolstoy's Hadji Murad (1912) and whose wife, Lise, a great-niece of Potemkin, had an affair (in Odessa) with the dreamer/genius Alexander Pushkin.

Later history includes the eccentric Nobel Laureate Ilya Mechnikov and a host of writers and entertainers. Considering the size of the city's Jewish population and the persecution it suffered, it is not surprising that prominent members of the Zionist movement were from Odessa.

The "and Death" part of the book describes the different attempts to rid the city/region of one of its largest ethnic groups, the Jews. The WWII round of persecutions at the hand of the Romanians (who occupied the city for the Axis powers) was every bit as grim (if not more so) than the more famous persecutions by Nazi Germany. It appears that freewheeling Odessans, while not particularly anti-Semetic, used the situation to personal advantage, for instance exposing neighbors for a financial goal. Those who protested or assisted Jews in hiding or in escape were the exception. King gives the staggering statistics with heart-wrenching human stories that live through bureaucratic documentations.

When you come to the end, with a trip to "Odessa in America" (Brighton Beach), you feel a need to visit the original and climb the Potemkin Stairs.

Most, but not all, of the book is engrossing at the page turning level. I recommend it for anyone interested in the Ukraine, Odessa or the region in general.

Although I eagerly anticipated reading this book, I found it quite disappointing. It is like a survey course in which the author manages to cover all the bases, but does not really dwell on anything (except the Holocaust) in detail. All of the shapers of Odessa are present, but they appear more as ciphers than as human beings with their own strengths and foibles. Certainly Catherine the Great, Voronshkov, Babel, or Pushkin could have been portrayed in greater detail. The author does seem obsessed, however, with giving us a detailed picture of Odessa's economic foundation. In each period beginning with the Hellenic presence, we learn what Odessa was importing and exporting. Frankly, this gets a bit boring.

It is only near the end of the book, the period beginning with the German/Romanian occupation in 1941, that the author really gets rolling. He seems intent on putting the blame for the atrocities on the hands of the Romanian occupiers, rather than the Germans. The fact that the Romanians would not have been in Odessa altogether were it not for the Nazi invasion of Russia and Ukraine seems to be overlooked.

In sum, this book is a good effort at describing the complexity and contradictions of Odessa, but, in my opinion, it falls short in conveying the taste of the city and its major personages.