City of Rogues and Schnorrers: Russia's Jews and the Myth of Old Odessa

by Jarrod Tanny

Old Odessa, on the Black Sea, gained notoriety as a legendary city of Jewish gangsters and swindlers, a frontier boomtown mythologized for the adventurers, criminals, and merrymakers who flocked there to seek easy wealth and lead lives of debauchery and excess. Odessa is also famed for the brand of Jewish humor brought there in the 19th century from the shtetls of Eastern Europe and that flourished throughout Soviet times. From a broad historical perspective, Jarrod Tanny examines the hybrid Judeo-Russian culture that emerged in Odessa in the 19th century and persisted through the Soviet era and beyond. The book shows how the art of eminent Soviet-era figures such as Isaac Babel, Il'ia Ilf, Evgenii Petrov, and Leonid Utesov grew out of the Odessa Russian-Jewish culture into which they were born and which shaped their lives.

Genres: History, Jewish, European History

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Addison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great history, lots of scholarly repetition

[Peter Rowe]

interesting but mad repetitive..odesssa is cool i wanna readd more babel and the otherh heads

[David Arthur Smithers · Rating 4 out of 5]

City of Rogues and Schnorrers: Russia’s Jews and the Myth of Odessa by Tarrod Tanny, 2011. I became interested in Odessa after reading a book on political conservatism in Israel which had from Odessa to Hebron as its subtitle. I then read: The Five: A Novel of Jewish Live in Turn-of-the-Century Odessa by Vladimir Jabotinsky, translated from the Russian by Michael R. Katz; and then, Odessa Stories by Isaac Babel, translated by Boris Dralyuk, Pushkin Press, London, 2016 (1916-1937; 2002).
Odessa was a unique Russian/Soviet city in this volume. The subject of its fate as a city in the modern and besieged nation of Ukraine is outside the scope of this book. Jarrod Tanny is a history professor and fellow of Jewish History at the University of North Carolina. One must also say that Odessa was a city of “The Pale of Settlement” where Jews could live in the Russian Empire, and that area covered parts of modern Poland, Ukraine and Russia.
“Odessa, like Warsaw, was multiethnic. Culturally cosmopolitan and heavily Jewish…’New Russia’…was founded and built by immigrants, including Italians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Frenchmen, Jews, Russians, and Ukrainians… like New York…But the myth…as an exotic city of sin, a balmy paradise beyond civilization, at the edge of an untamed frontier.” (page 19).
Contents: Introduction (Why Is This Town Different from All the Rest?); Chapter 1 (The Birth of Old Odessa; Chapter 2 (Crafting Old Odessa); Chapter 3 (The Battle for Old Odessa); Chapter 4 (Revival and Survival; Chapter 5 (Rewriting Old Odessa’s Mythical Past); Epilogue (The End of Old Odessa).
The old Odessa, existing at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, became, in a Rabelaisian way, a part of the folk literature and memory of the unofficial Russian, Soviet, and Ukrainian (I would hope) as an unofficial celebration shared beyond what Odessa was and what it became imagined. The myth is much attached to the billingsgate of commerce, the languages and myths of and about the Jews, and the criminality and humor of and beyond work and trade, and interaction in an international community.
By the way, a schnorrer is a beggar who wheedles his needs from another, a derogatory and humor, of, in this case of a Jewish rogue making you see his reasoning as now that of the victim’s reasoning, as well. The humor of old Odessa arrived from the shtetls of Eastern Europe, and filled the lives, literature and art of Isaac Babel, Il’ia Il’f, Evegenii Petrov, and Leonid Utesov.
Could Catherine the Great have imagined this future from a territory just wrested from the Ottoman Empire, and that this new Russia would enrich wider culture. Tanny has done well, for me, in synthesizing some of the Odessan literature that I have begun to explore.