Odessa. Geniusz i śmierć w mieście snów

by Charles King, Hanna Pustuła-Lewicka (Translator)

Puszkin, Babel, Żabotyński, Eisenstein… To tylko kilku z długiej listy wybitnych mieszkańców Odessy. Tę legendarną przystań kosmopolityzmu i wolności nad Morzem Czarnym zamieszkiwali Rosjanie, Żydzi, Turcy, Grecy, Włosi, Niemcy i Rumuni, wspólnie tworząc prawdziwie światową metropolię.

Charles King odtwarza historię czarnomorskiego portu od jego imperialnych początków po tragiczny wiek dwudziesty, nie omijając także sfery mitów i dyktowanych nostalgią rojeń. Odessa jest jednocześnie monografią historyczną i elegią – barwną kroniką wspaniałego wielokulturowego miasta o nadzwyczajnej witalności i zdolności regeneracji, miasta, którego dzieje są piękne i równocześnie bolesne.

Książka nagrodzona National Jewish Book Award.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Ukraine, Russia, Cities, European History, Jewish

320 pages, Hardcover

First published February 28, 2011

About the author

Charles King is a New York Times-bestselling author and a professor at Georgetown University. His books include EVERY VALLEY (2024), on the making of Handel's Messiah, which was a New York Times Notable Book; GODS OF THE UPPER AIR (2019), on the reinvention of race and gender in the early twentieth century, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Francis Parkman Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Award; MIDNIGHT AT THE PERA PALACE (2014), on the birth of modern Istanbul, which was the inspiration for a Netflix series of the same name; and ODESSA (2011), winner of a National Jewish Book Award.

Reviews

[Mihai Zodian · Rating 4 out of 5]

The port city of Odesa, some six hundred kilometers away. Russia targeted the town three times with missiles and drones. Over two million Ukrainian refugees entered my country, Romania since the Russo-Ukrainian War has started, in February last year. Around one hundred thousand remained, according to UNCHR. Many were from Odesa and neighboring regions, according to the anthropologist Volodymyr Artiukh. The post-communist transition ended in a major war, and the future is difficult to ascertain.

Charles King`s wrote Odessa in happier times, in 2011. The Moldovan publisher Cartier published the Romanian translation in 2019 at Chișinău. Two dates, two eras apart. It is an important book, and a difficult reading for a Romanian, but necessary. The reader must face the crimes and foolishness of one’s ancestors. The main drawback of this book is the author`s attempt to define the Odesan mentality, which escapes him often.

From the beginning, the author takes his precautions. The city`s name is spelled Odesa in Ukrainian and Odessa in Russian, and the author chooses the more popular variant in English. Charles King tells the history of this major port in a post-modernist key. A preference for frontier spaces and ambiguous realities is here, which also characterized another of King`s works, The Black Sea. His approach is chronological, and the author describes the major events since 1794, the founding of the city, until up right after WWII.

A major turning point was the Romanian occupation, under the Ion Andronescu regime. During WWII Romania allied itself with Nazi Germany, took part in the siege of the city and received Odesa with surrounding territories. These formed a special administrative unit, called Transnistria (Romanian for Trans-Dniester). In this imperialist moment, Romania conducted a significant part of its genocide of Jews and Roma, a distinct chapter of the Holocaust, in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed.

Charles King compares the Odesa massacre of October-November 1941 with the one of Babi Yar, Kyiv (167). At least 25.000 Jewish people died (p. 176). The Romanian authorities then build a ghetto, several camps and killed a substantial number of people in places like Berezovka (Berezivka). The author devotes two chapters to these issues, one for the genocide and the other, for the occupation as such. These sections are significant since the facts are not always known by the Romanian public. They warn us against the evil of fascism, imperialism, and genocide, some of which are still present today.

The historian avoids explanation and causality. The reader doesn`t understand very well why these events happened. Charles King is more interested in mentalities and ideologies, an attempt at understanding, but an unfinished one. One of his repeated focuses is to understand or retell the atmosphere and mentality of the city dwellers.

This mentality is supposed to be cosmopolitan, slick, easy going, artistic. This is but a side of Odesa, the other is that of intolerance and collective prejudices. In a way, Charles King uses the contrast of these two themes to organize the flux of his book. There is another contrast, between facts and myths, excellently exemplified by the famous Eisenstein movie, Battleship Potemkin, itself a potemkiniad. The entire movie is a fake, but it created many myths, like the fight on the stairs, the lion.

I`m not convinced by the emphasis on mentalities and myths. Everything that King recounts about the Odesan is available for any big city in the world. Including the one where I live. He also has an end of history mentality which is not obsolete but is not his fault. Most people and specialists in the West around 2011 didn`t thought possible the return of traditional wars in Eastern Europe.

Maybe I`m missing something. Perspectives vary and sometimes an outside view offers a mirror, allowing us better understanding. Other times mirrors distort even more, a real dilemma. NATO enlargement and EU`s integration stimulated the possibility of an open debate on previously avoided subjects like the massacre of Odesa and the deportations to Trans- Trans-Dniester. A truth often forgotten by the recent critics. And debates are mandatory in a democracy, even if they are difficult.

An arc in time. These days, the media is full of news about strikes in Odesa or about the grain deal, on which part of city`s exports are depending. Last year, many Ukrainian refugees went to the Black Sea, on the Romanian side, around 400 km away from Odesa. Some trade is done through several railroads. The hopes raised by postmodernism and the end of history are still far away.

Bottom line: even if the conclusions are outdated, the book is interesting. French dukes, American adventurers, famous writers (Isaac Babel) or political adventurers (Lev Trotsky, Vladimir Jabotinsky) are here. There is also an interesting underworld in Moldavanka. Charles King also raises tough questions.

Sources: Volodymyr Artiukh, “Between Securitization and Fragmentation: Identity Formation of Refugees from Ukraine in Romania” (conference, 26 May 2023); Reuters news; UNCHR reports and the Yad Vashem Museum.

For more on Romania and the Holocaust, check The Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, available for free on the web.

For Eastern Europe in the last century, see Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands.

[Elena Druță · Rating 3 out of 5]

O non-ficțiune interesantă și bine documentată, deși pe alocuri se aude foarte clar lipsa de imparțialitate a vocii narative. Odessa este un oraș pe care aș vrea să-l vizitez cândva, iar acest volum mi-a oferit o imagine a orașului ce a trecut prin nenumărate schimbări în ultimele câteva sute de ani.

[Zuberino · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even as I was walking its sunny streets, exploring its parks and squares, looking out over its harbor and seafront, even as I was diligently doing all of these things last week, I could never quite shake off the incredible sense of disbelief that I was actually IN Odessa, in this place that is almost as extravagantly mythical as Eldorado or Atlantis and indeed if you had said to me that I was transported to an underwater world or to a city made of solid gold, my joy and astonishment could not have been any greater than when I was there, in that charmed city, in Odessa, just last week.

The names and the myths spool off my tongue as they did off King’s typewriter - Catherine the Great and her boyfriend Potemkin, Count Vorontsov and De Ribas, the immortal Pushkin who doubly immortalized Odessa at the end of Eugene Onegin, and whose statue I visited over and over again. Babel’s gangster Odessa, Teffi’s Odessa of flight, Paustovsky’s Odessa of rosy nostalgia. The only reason - the ONLY reason - I chose to stay at the Londonskaya was because Chekhov had stayed there and Stevenson had stayed there - but what do I discover leafing through Teffi? She had stayed there too on her headlong sardonic southward escape from the Bolsheviks - in room 16. Simenon himself had stayed there in the 30s. Georges fuckjng Simenon! What does it even say when no fewer than half a dozen of your BIGGEST literary gods and heroes all moved through the same lobbies and boulevards, were all drawn to the same glittering sun and salty sea breeze? Doesn’t that make Odessa far better than lousy Eldorado and measly Atlantis?

There were other giants littered throughout the landscape - Eisenstein and Mayakovsky, Kuprin and Chukovsky of blessed childhood, Chekhov and Stanislavsky of the stage, even Meyerhold who was martyred by Stalin just like Babel. The fleet-footed pair of Duncan and Plisetskaya and the growling Russian songsters Vysotsky and Utyosov. All there. Clear and present. And of course Potemkin’s Stairs - that incredible escalade so monumental that it appears near-immortal like the Pyramids - and guess what? Eisenstein cooked up the whole movie in his head while walking up and down Primorskaya and put it all to pen and paper in his room - also, naturally, at the Londonskaya. It is only one of the greatest films of all time and so Odessa has its place in cinema history too.

*

King tells his tale with plenty of brio, from the dusty Turkish village of Hadjibey in medieval times all the way down to today’s post-Soviet temple of hedonism. As I was observing my fellow guests at the Londonskaya, all in T-shirts and garish shorts, I couldn’t help but wonder how many of them knew this storied history or how many even cared?

Today’s Odessa is all about the beaches, the casinos, the nightclubs that are famous throughout the region. I heard of Ibiza while down there but never quite made it to the club. Perhaps next time! King too totally elides much of this story, the seedy reputation that seems to have gotten seedier in recent years, and as some reviewers mention, his account becomes entirely focused on the Jewish identity and its loss in the second half of the book. A closer look at the city as it simply is today might not have gone amiss.

Regardless, the book is wonderfully well-written, the author’s evident literary ambitions matched by the writerly skills at his disposal. This is really a very nicely done popular history of one of the most remarkable cities of our times. I couldn’t have taken a better guide with me.

[Lauren Albert · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book suffers from a split personality. King seems to have started out writing a comprehensive history of Odessa but at some point it turned into the history of Jewish Odessa. Now, that story is absolutely essential to the overall history but the book seems imbalanced for its strong focus on that—particularly during World War II. I think it would have been a better book had King just written a book on Jewish Odessa—there is more than enough there to write a whole book.

With that said, I found the book interesting. I hadn’t known that Odessa was such a young city—founded by Catherine the Great in the 1790s. I also thought it an interesting fact that a Richelieu—having escaped from France--had been the leader of the city in its early days.

[Mal Warwick · Rating 5 out of 5]

My father’s parents emigrated to the United States in 1901 with the three oldest of their eight children. I was led to believe they were survivors of a pogrom in the Russian Empire, but they wouldn’t talk about the experience—or anything at all about their lives in the Old Country. At any rate, I was much too young to question them closely during the one or two brief times they visited us while still alive. All I could learn later was that they had lived in the Pale of Settlement in some sizable town or city (not a shtetl) somewhere in what is today western Ukraine. There, the roots of antisemitism run deep.

I don’t know with certainty that my grandparents had been among the huge Ashkenazi Jewish population of Odessa, but they couldn’t have lived far from there. And their lives were undoubtedly influenced by what took place in the great city, which set the tone for all of southern and western Ukraine. All of which explains why I turned to Charles King’s superb account of the history of Odessa for insight into the lives of my forebears.

A CITY WITH A COLORFUL HISTORY SECOND TO NONE
There are 10,000 cities on Planet Earth (defined as urban centers with a population of 50,000 or greater). But the names of only a relative handful come readily to mind. The biggest ones, of course: Shanghai, Tokyo, Mumbai, New York, Mexico City, and perhaps a couple of dozen others. Some are memorable for other reasons: Geneva, Venice, Berkeley, Salzburg. Odessa falls into that second category. It’s not large as cities go, with a population of only about 1.2 million. But this is a city with an outsized reputation.

Odessa is “a city that had been scouted by a Neapolitan mercenary, named by a Russian empress, governed by her one-eyed secret husband, built by two exiled French noblemen, modernized by a Cambridge-educated count, and celebrated by his wife’s Russian lover.” Over the years, the city became home to such notable figures as poet Alexander Pushkin, revolutionary Lev Bronstein (Leon Trotsky), Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, authors Sholom Aleichem and Isaac Babel, poet Anna Gorenko (Anna Akhmatova), and others who are less well known today but were among the best and brightest of the Russian Empire in their time. Few places anywhere on Planet Earth can lay claim to such a colorful history, and Charles King does the story proud.

A STORIED AND TRAGIC HISTORY
In his treatment of Odessa’s epic history, King traces the antecedents of the modern city from the era of the Tatars and Genghis Khan. He follows the site’s transformation from a tiny village on the shore of the Black Sea into a bustling, planned town during the reign of Catherine the Great and her successors, and later into the fourth largest city of Imperial Russia during the 19th century. Its population topped 400,000 by the beginning of the 20th century. But the focus of this book is the history of the city’s Jews, who constituted as many as one-third of its inhabitants by the year 1900. And their fate reflected the rise of virulent antisemitism and its genocidal expression in the Holocaust that followed. It’s no surprise that Odessa won a National Jewish Book Award.

THE ROOTS OF ANTISEMITISM
In the 1870s and 80s, Odessa became “the site of the first large-scale pogroms in modern Russian history.” But why? And why then? King offers a partial explanation. “Jews did not dominate economic life overall, given the city’s reliance on shipping and agricultural output, areas in which Christian proprietors and producers still held pride of place. But their role tended to be public, prominent, and precisely in those spheres where they and Odessa’s newer immigrants were in most direct contact. Given state-imposed restrictions on landownership and access to particular professions, Jews were naturally concentrated in the roles still open to them by law and convention.”

AN ECONOMIC EXPLANATION?
“By the beginning of the 1880s,” King writes, “Jews accounted for two-thirds of the city’s registered merchants and traders, nearly three-fourths of the innkeepers and proprietors of public houses, and two-thirds of veterinarians and pharmacists. By contrast, Christians made up over 80 percent of he city’s workers, including some three-fourths of the workforce employed in Jewish factories.” And it was those workers, egged on by antisemitic Orthodox priests and officials and protected by the police, who perpetrated the recurrent rampages through Jewish shops and homes. In King’s view, envy, frustration, and anger over the unfairness of life as well as religious motives and official encouragement nurtured the roots of antisemitism.

But those events were merely a warm-up to much worse. “In Odessa a concatenation of factors led to its own version of [the Revolution of] 1905, producing the deadliest and most notorious pogrom in Russian history. . . [P]erhaps three hundred Jews and another hundred non-Jews fell victim to the violence of October, adding to hundreds of people, both Jewish and Christian, killed the previous June.” All this, in the wake of the Russian Empire’s defeat in the inglorious war with Japan.

THE HOLOCAUST IN ODESSA
When Nazi Germany invaded the USSR on June 22, 1941, Odessa’s population stood at roughly 600,000, of whom some 180,000, or 30 percent, were Jews. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, “At least half of the city’s Jewish population had fled Odessa before Axis troops surrounded the city. Between 80,000 and 90,000 Jews remained in Odessa after the Romanian occupation.” Because it was not the Germans but their Romanian allies who laid siege to the city and later subjugated it. And by the time the Soviet Army liberated Odessa in April 1944, the Jews were all either dead or imprisoned in concentration camps.

As King explains, “In one of the least-known episodes of the Holocaust, at least 220,000 Jews were killed in or en route to a string of ghettos and concentration camps established in portions of Soviet Ukraine and overseen by the Romanian state.” Germans alone weren’t solely responsible for the Holocaust. Millions of Romanians, Ukrainians, Poles, and other Eastern Europeans were willing, even eager participants.

“Today,” King writes, “no one knows exactly how many Jews make up the small community in a city of 1.2 million people; some estimates put the figure at 36,000, although that is probably too high since the last Ukrainian census, in 2001, recorded only 13,000 Jews in the entire Odessa district.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charles King is the author of eleven books, many of them examining the history of the six nations fronting the Black Sea. He is professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University, where he has served as chair of both the Department of Government and the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.

King’s author website reveals that he “grew up on a cattle farm in the Ozark foothills of northwest Arkansas, one hollow over from J. William Fulbright’s rural home at Rabbit’s Foot Lodge. He studied history and philosophy at the University of Arkansas and later earned master’s and doctoral degrees at Oxford University, where he was a British Marshall Scholar. Before coming to Georgetown, he was a junior research fellow at New College, Oxford, and a research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, the writer and anthropologist Margaret Paxson.”

[Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Matthew J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A darned fascinating read about a unique city. Odessa isn't like other European cities. It doesn't have a deep history. It's about the same age as Washington D.C. It wasn't built on the ruins of some ancient Greek or Roman settlement. It didn't exist in the Middle Ages. A city of merchants, cut-throats, artists, revolutionaries, and complicated ethnic conflicts, its history features some stunning highs, and some gut-wrenching lows. What was at one point a marvelous mix of peoples from around the world, talking, trading, eating, and singing together, turned into an Orwellian nightmare of neighbor turning in neighbor, friend turning on friend, and everyone...EVERYONE turning on the Jews. Author Charles King refers to what happened in Odessa as a forgotten part of the Holocaust, and he's right. Nobody ever talks about it, least of all Odessans. It was later re-framed by the Soviets as a heroic resistance by the 'workers,' but it was a wholesale slaughter of Jewish people, and a near total removal of them from the fabric of a city that once held so many.
The book is definitely a must read for History buffs. It connects to the American Revolution, Catherine the Great, World War I and World War II, art, science, literature, theater, and film-making. There are compelling characters from throughout the city's life. Like so many history books, it's a lesson in what might have been (had better choices been made), and a warning of what could always happen again (if the same mistakes are made).

[Andrei · Rating 2 out of 5]

Charles King writes well and is obviously highly knowledgeabla about his subject. Though it is getting a bit frustrating that in the last years he has produced only introductory-level works on Caucasus, the Black Sea and now Odessa and very little substantial original research. He is too inclined to anecdotes and is unable to grasp social and economic history, which is detrimental to writing histories of human communities.

[Meg - A Bookish Affair · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Odessa" is a nonfiction book by Charles King, a professor and historian who focuses on eastern Europe. Odessa is a gorgeous city on the coast of Ukraine that has belonged to different countries at different times. Because of its location, it is an incredibly desirable place strategically! This book is the history of this wonderfully interesting city that will appeal to my fellow history lovers.

What initially drew me to this book is the fact that several years ago in 2011 I visited Ukraine and had a chance to go to Odessa. After being in cities like Kyiv, Odessa is incredibly different. It has a very interesting history. It was basically a planned city by Catherine the Great, one of my favorite historical figures to read about. The city was to act as a haven for Russian royalty. It sits on the Black Sea, which means that it was coveted by many other people throughout its history.

In this book King talks about many of the people who had a hand in making Odessa what it is today. It's a fascinating story even if you have never been to Odessa. I actually wish that I had read this book before I went to Odessa so I had a little bit more of a background as to what I would see. This book will appeal to history lovers and those who especially loved eastern European history.

[Katia N · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written book. But when i feel that the first part of the book is really well researched, this feeling is fading after the chapter on the Second World War. The book creates an impression, partly intentionally i think, that the city's life was very uneventful and not distinctive after the War. While i do not know much about Odessa of this period i would not agree and wish i could find out more from this book.

3.5 stars

[Alvin · Rating 3 out of 5]

As history this is a bit spotty, but it's a reasonably entertaining read.

[Adysnewbox · Rating 4 out of 5]

I waited a LONG LONG time to read this book (it was on hold for me at the library for MONTHS; I reserved it at Russia's initial invasion of Ukraine). It may not be a book WORTH waiting for for months on end; however, I was still pleasantly surprised by how much I learned and how engaging it was (at least in parts). The book is essentially the "story of a city," which basically means there aren't any prominent characters and a bunch of consecutive events that may or may not be thematically connected (a nasty habit of non-fiction books). But I think author Charles King did a remarkably good job at weaving together a variety of events, cultures, political movements, and more into a rough "narrative" of the rise and fall of Odessa.

Being a Russophile myself, I knew that reading this book would be obligatory for me. I spent most of my time in Russia in Moscow, with a few visits to some outlying towns. Sadly, I never made it near Odessa, although I heard much about it. This was a very useful history book for me; it helped me understand the different "flavor" Odessa had compared to the Russian cities farther north. I was intrigued by the accounts of the multiculturalism, the aggressive dark economy, and the proliferation of a Jewish subculture in the city over the centuries. Odessa was revealed as a city of contrasts; it's a temperate vacation destination for northern visitors, AND it's a port city teeming with corruption, filth, and disease. It's a celebration of multiculturalism with a huge Jewish community, AND it's later the site of one of the biggest massacres of Jews in all of World War II (less remembered because it was perpetrated by the occupying Romanian army, not the Nazis).

I would strongly recommend this book for history buffs who want to learn more about a particularly turbulent region of Russia, one that went through drastic changes throughout its existence. Author Charles King did a wonderful job researching the history of the region and created a rich tapestry of individuals and events, and putting them all into a comprehensive historical, political, and social context. There was more mention of Odessa's Jewish population than I had at first expected, but when the WWII chapters began, I realized it was important to paint what the city WAS so that what it BECAME would have more impact on the reader. It is a book both amusing and heartbreaking, and I was so grateful to learn so much in such an engaging way.

[Padmin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Descrizione
A partire dalla sua fondazione, nel 1794, fino a oggi, Odessa ha lottato per sopravvivere tra i due opposti poli del successo e dell'autodistruzione. Come molte altre vivaci città portuali e come molti tessuti urbani multiculturali, essa ha sempre liberato i suoi demoni più vitali, quegli spiritelli che incarnano le muse palpitanti della società metropolitana e i creatori instancabili dell'arte e della letteratura. Spesso, tuttavia, ha lasciato emergere anche i lati più oscuri, quelli che stanno in agguato nei vicoli e bisbigliano parole di odio religioso, invidia di classe e vendetta etnica. Quando tutto andava per il meglio, Odessa era in grado di formare artisti e intellettuali il cui talento seppe illuminare il mondo. Quando invece tutto crollava, il nome della città divenne sinonimo di fanatismo, antisemitismo e bieco nazionalismo. Questo libro segue l'arco della storia di Odessa sin dagli albori della sua esplosione urbanistica, passando dalle tragedie che hanno costellato il XX secolo, fino a quella che si può considerare la sua consacrazione al regno del mito e della leggenda. Intende tracciare la storia attraverso cui generazioni di odessiti, nativi o trapiantati, hanno costruito una città con un assetto unico nel suo genere, un luogo chiamato a diventare il porto piú ambito della Russia e la fonte di ispirazione di scrittori come Aleksandr Puskin e Isaak Babel’. La storia della città si intreccia con quella di alcune vite individuali emblematiche, celebri od oscure, che l'hanno resa la patria prediletta di ebrei, russi, ucraini e molti altri.

[Michael Lewyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is interesting but depressing. Odessa's main reason for existence in the 19th century was the grain trade, as grain from the Russian hinterlands was shipped through there around Europe and Asia. The rise of competing ports made Odessa less important economically, and the Jewish population was destroyed through pogroms, wars, and the Holocaust. After World War II, Odessa was mostly a sun-drenched tourist site for Russians. But since Odessa is now part of Ukraine and Russians with money can afford beaches further away, even this reason for existence seems to have disappeared.

After reading this book, I wondered whether Odessa has any reason to be a significant city. But in fact, Odessa has about a million people, far more than before WW 2. So King's book leaves me with one question: if the traditional reasons for Odessa's importance are gone, how come Odessa is so big now?

[Viktoria Cusnir · Rating 5 out of 5]

On sfârșit am ajuns și la Charles King - Odessa. Geniu și moarte într-un oraș al visurilor.
Ca e o carte interesanta, știam, dar ca o sa ma tina treaza o bucata de noapte, nu presupunem. Curioase abordările pe alocuri: mai mari, mai mici, ma dragi, mai străine, mai controversate, sau adorate, personalitatile (multe) din aceasta carte, la fel si evenimentele care au constituit istoria orașului, privite la scara larga, sau îngustă. Privirea de pe baricade diferite a acelorași întâmplări și oameni, toate fac din cartea asta un soi de turn Babel, prin care nu ezitați sa treceți!

[Dariusz Płochocki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perła Morza Czarnego, która zrodziła Babla i wychowała Trockiego. Koniecznie "nada" sięgnąć po to dobro. Czasem może trochę za mocno po łebkach, ale i tak urocza podróż po historii miasta. Szczególnie dobrze opisano historię wojenną miasta, trochę gorzej czasy radzieckie.

[Kathleen McRae · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written and very enjoyable book on the Black Sea port city of Odessa.It was created as a model of enlightenment by Catherine the Great and was to be the Russian Empires gateway to the Middle East.It built itself as a city of many nationalities and religions and became a place for cultures to merge and clash. It was home to one of the most vibrant Jewish communities in Europe and its decimation of its Jews is a different one from most of Europe.

[Valentina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very quick read (finished it in one day) and a good introduction to the history of Odessa. Not very detailed, though. I wish that it had been longer, or narrower in scope. Much of the early history is told through "great men" and then the book morphs into a history of Jewish Odessa. A very important topic, and crucial to understanding the city, but not the only story worth exploring in a book which claims to tell the whole history of the city.

[Filip Olšovský · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderfully researched, written in an excellent style but lacking a bit of a balance. As someone already pointed out, somewhere in the middle King switches from the history of Odessa to the history of Jewish Odessa and then almost completely ignores the period between 1945 and 1991. The chapters on the foundation of the city are great and the book is able to hold one's attention the whole time but had the author spent more time on its second half, it could have been THE book about Odessa.

[Barry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I devoured every scrap. Magnificent.

[B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written with much gusto and eloquence, Charles King tells the quasi-tragic story of a relatively young city on Pontus Euxinus (“the world that welcomes strangers”) that emerges from a provincial backwater and a flimsy military Ottoman outpost as Khadjibey into a cosmopolitan trade powerhouse (benefiting from its status of free port), then agonizing under successive waves of pogroms (a word, curiously derived from “grom” meaning thunder in Russian) and revolutionary fervor, before finally succumbing to oblivion in the Soviet era.

It is no dry history of the city. The author’s poetic writing gives soul to the main characters of the city (at times, wheeling and dealing, and bordering on amoral ways), breathes air into its freshly built boulevards, its famous escalier monster (Potemkin steps), art nouveau buildings (mainly designed and manicured by the famous descendent of the French cardinal Richelieu), its colourful districts such as Moldovanka and allows the reader to partake in its topsy-turvy events.

Indeed, the reader has the impression of hopping on a time machine traveling from the Russo-Ottoman wars to Decembrist plot, to the occupation of the pro-Nazi Romanian forces, all through the eyes of the colourful celebrities, from the mischievous, and gauche adventurous such as the John Paul Jones (the purported founder of the US navy, no less), to the ways of the womanizing Pushkin, to Mechnikov (the “explorer” of the immunity and the phagocytosis process), to political radicals like Trotsky and the Zionist leader Jabotinsky, to writers and artists like Babel, Eisentein, Utesov and others…

I have also learned a great deal about historical names such as Volhynia, Podolia that neighbours Galicia in present-day Ukraine, Poland and Slovakia; and Jewish conceptual terms such as Kehillah, Haskalah (“Jewish enlightenment”) and its adherents the progressive maskilim, hadar (the national way of being for Jewish), shtetls, “Pale of settlement” (where the Jews were allowed to settle under the Czarist regime), meshchane (petty bourgeoisie in the “estate” system of Russian society), and the Karaim sect.

Interesting side note: In demographic and sociological ways, Odessa of the 19th century bore striking resemblance to Selanik (Thessaloniki): both nurtured the progressive currents of their respective empires in 19th century and had a sizeable Jewish minority at the peak of their golden eras.

Some quotes:

“Odessa did not have any tradition, but it was therefore not afraid of new forms of living and activity. It developed in us more temperament and less passion, more cynicism, but less bitterness.” -Jabotinsky

“Odessa’s experience reveals the creative power as well as the everyday difficulty of being diverse. In the exacting art of urban flourishing, teetering between genius and devastation may be the normal state of affairs.”

“Cheat learned their profession in Pera (Istanbul/Constantinople) but practiced it in Odessa.”
“The Soviet version of Odessan patriotism covered a darker and more recent past: the inescapable fact that the Jewish heritage celebrated mainly in code had been actively erased in the living memory of those who now sought to recreate it.”

“In the short space between the two monuments (an empty chair and a statue of a round man recalling Ostap Bender, the fictional swindler of Ilf and Petrov’s novels the Twelve Chairs and the Golden Calf), between a wholly invented life and an energetically embellished one, lies the past of the real Odessa – a city that remains largely improvisational, shifting wildly between the solo and the communal and always threatening to slip out of control.”

[Oleh Voloshyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author aimed to write about the Jewish community of Odesa through history and little-known facts about the Holocaust in Odesa during WWII destroying that community and changing the city forever. The author points out the dangers of creating Ukrainian, Romanian, and even Soviet mythology, but ironically he repeats word-for-word Russian mythology about the city in the first 92 pages that has nothing to do with the Jewish community. The book has many questionable references that contradict other parts of the book. In reciting Russian mythology the author overstates Russian influence on the city, which thrived despite being part of the Russian Empire. As a professor in Foreign Affairs, Mr. King should know that the Pale of Settlement was designed to keep "unwanted people" like Jews on the outskirts of the Empire in disputed territories, which Ukraine and Kochubej/Hadjubey/Odesa were. For any city to survive it should have access to fresh water, and Odesa doesn't have it. This is why the Lithuanian-Polish (and Ukrainian/Rusin) Commonwealth built a small fortress to facilitate grain trade with Byzantium in the 1400s. The Ottomans kept this fortress small to protect their ships in Odesa Harbor. When the Russian Empire took over, the city grew and prospered by the vision and efforts of foreign noble governors (DePibas, Richelieu, and Langeron) who created a European city, while their homeland was in turmoil. The golden times of the city were when the status of Porto-Franco was initiated by Governor Langeron, a duty-free trade within the part of the city for over forty years that enriched all people of Odesa and its surroundings while paying nothing to the coffers of the Empire. The golden age ended signaling the decline of the Empire and Odesa when the Russian Empire started its next war with the Ottomans called the Crimean War and lost it.

[Andrakuf · Rating 2 out of 5]

Czytałem to czystym przypadkiem i jak to zwykle bywa z przypadkową lekturą albo jest to petarda i miłe zaskoczenie, albo niestety totalne dno. W tym przypadku jednak mamy do czynienia z tą drugą sytuacją. Nie zrozumcie mnie źle, ja jestem z wykształcenia historykiem i naprawdę wiele tego typu książek w życiu przeczytałem. Prócz tego typu opowieści pracowałem też na źródłach więc jakieś pojęcie o tym mam. W tej historii nie ma niczego, absolutnie niczego. Oczywiście już sam tytuł rzekomo obiecuje nam niezwykłą podróż i może po części dlatego sięgnąłem po tą pozycję. W sumie miasto orientalne, licznie opiewane w rozmaitych utworach literackich, ale sposób pokazania tego tutaj jest zaiste tragiczny. Ta książka jest totalnym chaosem wydarzenia przeplatają się z ludźmi, ludzie z grupami społecznymi, potem jest powrót do pisarzy i muzyków, potem z kolei znowu nawrót do warstw społecznych. Zupełnie nie da się tej książki opanować, a moim skromnym zdaniem również niewiele da się z niej wynieść ciekawego. Nie będzie przesadnym stwierdzeniem, że podczas całej, bardzo długiej (jest niesamowicie nudna) lektury nie trafiłem na nic co byłoby warte zapamiętania.
Trochę ratuje całość końcówka odnośnie drugiej wojny światowej, ale tylko trochę, na pewno nie na tyle, żeby zmienić ogólne zapatrywanie.

[Bob Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

My mother's family comes from near there in Moldova. I grew up hearing about Odessa and Kiev. Kiev for it's majesty. but Odessa because, for them, it was the most interesting city they knew. I came close to visiting it: several 3 month trips to Turkey. It's an overnight ferry ride from Istanbul, and each trip I would try to get on it, but my first trip to Turkey was just after the Russians had invaded Crimea, and the ferry was "temporarily" cancelled. It still is "temporarily" cancelled.

I bought this book on the recommendation of a friend. She was right. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's full of things that delight and surprise. I had no idea that Odessa was named after the Odyssey ....that it's younger than Washington, DC, and that so many artists, writers, and politicians came from there.

King captures all of this. I read it in two sittings, and now am re-reading it since the new Russian invasion puts it in peril. More than ever, I want to visit for a few months....a copy of Odessa in my back pack. Political reality in 2020 makes me aware that this visit may be postponed for some time. This book is the next best thing. I think you will enjoy it enormously.

[Lianne]

I am a student of Eastern European History and have always wanted to visit Odessa. However, I am reconciling myself to the reality that it is still in a war zone and I am unlikely to get there in my lifetime. Odessa has a glorious romanticized history but also has been the location of dark chapters especially in the pre and post-revolutionary years of Russia's revolution. Thanks especially to Queen Catherine the Great and her consort Potemkin, Odessa was cultivated as a port city that would give land-locked Russia access to the Mediterranean. Odessa was famous for its multicultural culture of art, opera and architecture and for its many larger than life characters such as the poet Pushkin and filmmaker Eisenstein.. But Odessa had its dark moments, multiple occupiers, famine and decades of pogroms. It was once a great center for Jewish vitality. Odessans even now are known for their creativity during the war in Ukraine keeping the cafe world alive and well in the midst of drone attacks. Exceeding well researched and engagingly written, this history portrays the wide sweep of truth and myth with respect and even love.

[Fasca · Rating 3 out of 5]

La început, cartea părea scrisă foarte obiectiv, până când Chișinăul a devenit „rusesc”. Da, a fost sub ocupație, dar totuși nu era Rusia în adevăratul sens al cuvântului.

În ceea ce privește cuvântul "pogrom", în carte este indicată greșit originea acestuia.

Încă două momente mi s-au părut ciudate. Primul: românii sunt numiți ocupanți (ceea ce, istoric, este adevărat), însă și rușii au ocupat Odesa — și ei au fost ocupanți. Totuși, autorul tratează această ocupație ca pe o acțiune firească, de parcă ar fi avut un drept istoric asupra regiunii. Mi se pare că autorul are o simpatie prea mare pentru ruși în acea zonă.

Al doilea aspect: autorul afirmă că națiunea ucraineană s-a format abia după anul 1900 (nu mai rețin exact anul), dar în același timp îl menționează pe Anton Holovaty ca pe un erou proto-ucrainean din secolul al XVIII-lea. Această contradicție ridică semne de întrebare.

Sper că restul faptelor din carte sunt prezentate cu mai multă acuratețe.

Citit in româna, editura Cartier.

[Tom Schulte · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating and detailed history of the city. While it certainly takes the city up to modern times, it does not directly comment on the recent dramatic years. I was surprised to learn that city itself is of the same vintage as Washington DC. Also, the port city is cosmopolitan in history with the rich confluence of peoples producing a lot of art and music ... some even say the birth of jazz. It reads like a spiritual sister to the closest metropolis to me: New Orleans. This history is also bloody and full of travail, including much persecution of Jews from pogroms to The Holocaust. The latter brings in Transnistria which is in recent news.

Noted persons covered include the writers Alexander Pushkin and Isaac Babel to Zionist activist Vladimir Jabotinsky and immunologist Ilya Mechnikov.

[Kathleen (itpdx) · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a biography of the city of Odessa, its antecedents, its growth, and its struggles. Odessa was/is a "frontier city"--Ottoman, Russian, Soviet, Romanian and now Ukrainian.
King makes a case that the cosmopolitan, multicultural and unruly nature of the city made it a breeding ground for culturally significant men (they are all men).
And, for me, that is where he got somewhat off-base--going into the biographies of the men even when they were far afield from Odessa.
But the history of the city is very interesting and King writes this well--giving us a feeling for how the various rulers have re-written the history over and over to reflect their version.
I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who is going to visit Odessa or the Black Sea.

[Jim Rimmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This probably isn't a shared experience but for me Odessa is one of those places that captures the imagination. Not as old or storied as Marseille, Naples or Cadiz but still full of promise and dollops of danger. Unfortunately I've never been able to visit and it now seems even more unlikely for the foreseeable future given the circumstances at the time of writing (Ukraine under threat of Russian invasion).

This is a great outline of Odessan history, an engaging yarn that strikes to right balance of depth and breadth. Though I'd bumped into a number of the characters in previous books there were plenty of new and unusual people to meet along the winding path of this city's intriguing story.

I'm now even keener to one day walk the Potemkin Stairs.

[Ian · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book reads as though the author submitted a focused manuscript on the Jewish history of Odessa, but the publisher wanted something with broader appeal so asked the author to tack on a few other set pieces to justify embellishing the dust jacket with more exciting marketing copy. The most informative parts for me were the premodern history and the founding of the city, but after that the book focused on a small number of Jewish experiences, neighborhoods, artists, and intellectuals. Obviously those figures are all important to the history and image of Odessa, but they should not have been the only figures represented. Also the book, published in 2011, stops at 1944! Ultimately I felt like I had a holistic picture of the city through the mid-19th century, but lost the threads after that; and I got no insight at all into post-war, much less post-Soviet Odessa.