Kvetching and Carousing under Communism: Old Odessa as the Soviet Union’s Jewish City of Sin

Odessa has often been branded a “Jewish city.” Much like their counterparts in New York and Warsaw, Odessa’s Jews have historically played a fundamental role in the city’s demographic makeup, economic life and culture. But Odessa is unique among Jewish cities because it has been mythologised as a city of sin, a frontier seaport boomtown whose commercial prosperity and balmy climate attracted legions of adventurers, gangsters and swindlers seeking easy wealth and earthly pleasures. Old Odessa was the Russian Jew’s golden calf – gilded, wicked and ostentatious in its intemperance. Odessa’s carnivalesque environment was fertile ground for the blending of different cultures, and the Jews spearheaded this process, adopting a Yiddish‐inflected Russian as their language for celebrating their profligate city. By the 1917 Revolution the foundations had been laid for the emergence of Isaac Babel, Leonid Utesov, Mikhail Zhvanetskii and the many other Jews who subsequently left Odessa for Moscow and the Soviet interior. They would go on to disseminate the Odessa myth using literature, comedy and music, and their immense popularity ensured that Odessa was indelibly marked as a Jewish city of sin, inhabited by comical rogues whose colourful escapades were rooted in an idiom of Jewishness.

Kvetching and Carousing under Communism: Old Odessa as the Soviet Union’s Jewish City of Sin Academic Article