Book description
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.
"Traces the emergence, development, and persistence of the
myth of Odessa as both Garden of Eden and Gomorrah, a unique
Russian/Soviet city that promised its residents easy money and all
pleasures of the flesh.... A joy to read-well crafted, cogently
argued, and compellingly written." -Robert Weinberg, Swarthmore College
Jarrod Tanny is Assistant Professor of History and Block
Distinguished Fellow of History at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.
