City of Rogues and Schnorrers: Russia’s Jews and the Myth of Old Odessa
Overview
Additional document info
View All
Overview
Abstract
My book examines the “myth of old Odessa,” a unique Russian-Jewish cultural creation which developed in nineteenth-century Odessa and later formed a fundamental component of Soviet life. Old Odessa has been mythologized as a frontier boomtown where legions of adventurers gathered to seek easy wealth and to lead wicked lives of debauchery and excess. Such seekers of earthly gratification transformed Odessa into a fabled city of thieves, but unlike other such cities (be it New Orleans, San Francisco’s Barbary Coast, or Shanghai), Odessa has been imagined as a judeo-kleptocracy, a city overrun and controlled by Jewish gangsters and swindlers. Odessa’s unique Jewishness, however, does not end there, as Odessa is also depicted as a land of wit and irony, where thieves and lowlifes evoke laughter through their crooked and dissolute behavior. With the Revolution of 1917 many of Odessa’s mythmakers migrated to Moscow and the interior, and disseminated the Odessa myth throughout the USSR using literature, comedy, and music. More than anyone else, Isaac Babel popularized the image of Odessa as a city of swashbuckling Jewish swindlers and sinners, who all at once embodied the physical strength, revelry, and wit for which Odessa was famous. The larger-than-life Jewish gangster emerged as the prevailing icon of Odessa in Soviet culture, and he was depicted in stark contrast to the stereotypically passive shtetl-Jew of Eastern Europe who was steeped in tradition and piety, and victimized in an endless cycle of pogroms. Despite frequent attacks by the Soviet government for its frivolity, its celebration of criminals through folksongs and anecdotes, and its Jewish roots, the Odessa myth survived the twentieth century and continues to flourish today.
