>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C.
[Silence]
>> Good afternoon, everyone.
I'm Guy Lamolinara from
the Center for the Book
in the Library of Congress here.
We're the Division of the Library
for those of you who don't know,
who promote books and reading.
And one of the things we do is
organize the Author's Program
for the National Book Festival.
And I should just tell you that
we have an affiliated center
in every state in the United States
plus in the District of Columbia
and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
And you can also find us online at
read dot gov, and we have a Books
and Beyond Book Club on Facebook
where we invite you to come
and to have discussions with
other book lovers about books
that we have featured
here and other books.
One thing I need to ask you to do is
please turn off all your electronic
devices, and I need to tell
you that this is being recorded
for a webcast, so if you should
ask a question at the end,
you will likely become
a part of the webcast.
It's now my pleasure to
introduce Georgette Dorn,
who heads the Division that is
co-sponsoring this event with us,
the European Division, where
our author did his research
for his book.
And Georgette is a
Library of Congress veteran
who also is a long-time head
of our Hispanic Division here.
So I want to thank
Georgette and all her people
for bringing this wonderful
book to our attention today,
and please welcome Georgette Dorn.
>> It is indeed a pleasure to wear
my second hat, which is being head
of the European Division.
It is truly a marvelous
division, and we have readers
like Professor King, who's used
the collection for his book.
Professor King will discuss
his latest book, "Odessa:
Genius and Death in
a City of Dreams."
He earned his doctorate
at Oxford in 1995.
He used his knowledge of
Russian and Romanian to research
and write a dissertation on Moldova,
which became a highly regarded book
published by Stanford University.
His five books, all
critically acclaimed,
focused on regions
near the Black Sea
and include highly
praised Oxford publication
on the history of the
Black Sea itself.
Charles King is professor
with the National Affairs
at Georgetown University.
He lectures widely on National
Affairs, Social Violence,
and ethnic politics and has worked
with major broadcast
media such as CNN and BBC.
His newest book, which has
already been favorably reviewed
on both sides of the Atlantic, is
a result of research in archives,
libraries, industries,
and as itself.
It traces the dynamic and troubling
history of Odessa's Russian,
Jewish and other communities.
It has been noted that Professor
King has weaved separate strands
into a whole that superbly
describes the history and culture
of this fascinating city.
Thank you.
[Applause]
>> Thanks, so much, Georgette.
Welcome, everybody.
Can you hear me okay at this level?
Okay, thanks.
I want to begin by thanking the
European Division and the Center
for the Book for sponsoring
this talk.
It's a real honor to be here in
the Pickford Theater and to be
at the Library of Congress.
I have a great affection for this
place, not only because it's a place
where I do a lot of
my work; in fact,
most of my previous books
were written actually written
under the statute of Herodotus
in the Main Reading Room.
And given my interest in the
Black Sea, that always struck me
as a particularly appropriate
place to ride in the shadow
of the great historian of the
Black Sea among other things.
And I feel like I've been connected
over the last several years
to the Library in very
personal ways.
I got locked out during the
earthquake, the Main Reading Room,
and my computer and notes
spent the night there.
I got a crick in my neck from the
Cooper's Hawk, which was stuck
in the Main Reading Room,
you may remember and spent,
probably wasted far too much
time kind of just looking
up at the magnificent dome and the
Cooper's Hawk flying around it.
So I feel like I'm very
connected to the place.
It's also the case that
the Library was critical
to researching this particular book
that I'm going to talk about today,
and I made a list of the
reading rooms that I visited
and did research in in
writing about Odessa,
and let me just read
that to you quickly.
"Main Reading Room, newspaper
and current periodical, science
and technology, African Middle East,
European geography and manuscripts,
motion picture and
television, performing arts,
prints and photographs and rare
book and special collections.
So I think I hit just
about all of them.
I'll even count the Hispanic
because I had to walk
through there to get
to the European.
So all of them, I think were
critical to writing this book.
So what is the book itself about?
Well, in a sentence,
it's the story of how one
of Europe's great Jewish
cities stopped being one
of Europe's great Jewish cities.
It's about how cities
transform themselves,
about how cities get changed, either
because of things they do themselves
or things that happened to them.
It's also though, a book
about the resilience of place,
about how cities have a tendency
to reproduce themselves over time,
how cities have new lives to them,
even after they transform themselves
in their old place, how they
have legs and move to new places
and reproduce the ideas and
cultures and charm in many ways,
that defined them previously.
Well, let me say a few words about
what I'll be talking about today
in the next half hour or so,
and I hope before 1 o'clock then we
have plenty of time for discussion
as well and any questions
you might have.
First of all I'll say a few words
about how I came to write this book.
I want to talk then about a
few of the stories and themes
that animate it, and I'll go through
a few of the major characters
that feature in this book.
And then I'll say a
few words at the end
about what I think is the mystery
story at the heart of the book.
Because even though this is a
kind of history of the city told
through the lives of some
of the geniuses and villains
that animated Odessa's cultural
and historical life over the ages,
it's in some ways also
a mystery story.
And the mystery is this: how
a city that had been known
for its cosmopolitanism,
had defined in many ways,
what European cosmopolitanism
meant in the 19th
and early 20th centuries, how that
place learned how to devour itself
over the course of the 20th century.
How did cosmopolitanism as an idea
and as a practice in Odessa turn
out to be so fragile, actually,
during the Second World War?
How did this city learn to
remake itself in tragic and awful
and violent ways for 907 days
during the Second World War
when it was occupied by one of the
axis powers, and I'll come back
to that later on in the talk.
When I first started writing
this book I'd written some sort
of academic histories
before that perhaps some
of them had made the
sort of crossover
to not quite academic histories
and read by a few general readers
as well, but I wanted to write this
book in a much more accessible way,
to research it with all the verve
that I had researched the others
but to write it in a way
that would be accessible to,
appealing to people beyond
professional historians
and area studies specialists.
And my wife said the key to that is
to let the subject
get to you in a way.
And she was absolutely right, that
the more you can let a subject
of a book touch you in
a kind of emotional way,
I think the more you'll
make that connection
to the readers, she said to me.
And she was right, and the way
it got to me, or the place it got
to me was perhaps rather unusual.
It was this place, which is a
building in Odessa on the corner
of Pushkin and Jukolvsky Streets.
If you're taking a little tour of
the center of the city it may be
on your itinerary but it probably
won't be on your itinerary.
You'll just walk by it
without really noticing it.
It's a kind of gray-blue
neo-Gothic building
from the mid late 19th century,
falling down in many ways,
a kind of overgrown garden around
its gigantic crack that goes
from the foundation to the roofline.
It is today the state archive of the
Odessa region, so for any historian
who is working on history of Odessa,
this is a place you would
go and spend lots of time.
And I spent lots of
time in this building
in the unair-conditioned reading
room where the windows don't open
in the middle of July, so I feel
like I actually did sweat
bullets for this book.
The staff who work there are
magnificent, and against all odds
and with very little in the way
of budgetary support managed
to save the written history
of this city from destruction.
They on a much smaller scale perhaps
have the same kind of mission
that the Library of Congress has.
Before it was the state archive
of the Odessa region it was called
the Rosa Luxemburg Worker's Club.
It was a building that was
gutted and used as a place
where you could go and do
your calisthenics and help
to create the new Soviet man and
woman from the 1920s forward.
before it was the Rosa
Luxemburg Worker's Club,
however, it was this thing.
It was called the Brodsky Synagogue.
It was one of the most
important synagogues,
not only in the Russian Empire,
but I would say in all of Europe.
It was a great choral synagogue, and
the cantor there, man by the name
of Nissan Blumenthal from the late
19th and early 20th centuries,
was literally world
famous at the time.
And you can go into many synagogues
around the world now and hear songs
and harmonies that were created by
Nissan Blumenthal and first sung
in the Brodsky Synagogue in Odessa.
It was the place where you
could be progressive as a Jew,
where you could be modern as a
Jew, where you could be worldly
and connected to the rest of Europe
as a Jew in the Russian Empire,
even though the city of Odessa
and the Brodsky Synagogue were
located right in the middle
of the place where Jews in the
Russian Empire were restricted
to living; that is,
the Pale of Settlement.
But this was not a sort of synagogue
in a small shettle in the Pale
of Settlement; this was the Brodsky
synagogue in the most dynamic city
at the confluence of the Black
Sea and the Russian Empire,
one of the most important
and cosmopolitan cities
in the entire region.
And it struck me as I was
working there in this building,
that if you want to know something
about the early foundation
of Odessa, its Italian
and Greek predecessors,
the French administrators who ruled
the city in the early 19th century,
if you want to know something about
its Soviet past, its Russian past,
its Ukrainian and Yiddish past,
if you want to know something
about the denunciation letters
that average Odessans sent
in to the Occupation Authorities in
the 1940s denouncing their neighbors
who happened to be Jewish and
telling the Occupation Authorities
where they lived, if you
want to see all of that,
the place you go is
the Brodsky Synagogue.
And that struck me as one of
the dark ironies of this city,
that if you want to know what
happened to the Jewish community
that formed a third of the total
population in 1941 but that
after the end of the Second World
War formed no more than 12 percent
at its height, if you want to
know what happened to those people
and the culture that they took
with them when it was destroyed
or when they left, the place
you go is to this old synagogue.
And that got to me in a way,
and so I think the inspiration
for the book is in some
ways this building.
Let me say a few words about
some of the stories and themes
that animate the book and
weave through the book.
This is very much a character-driven
book, and so you're introduced
to some of the key characters
in the history of the city,
and let me talk a little
bit about them.
I should say first of all, though,
that Odessa grabs up famous people,
like an overeager camp counselor
at a Jewish summer camp or sort
of defining all of the sort of
great athletes who might happen
to be Odessan or the great
singers or the great artists
or the great violinists and
the great actors who happen
to be Odessan, some of them
were, some of them weren't.
Some of the people who
claimed to be Odessan weren't,
and some of the people
who were always thought
to be Odessan weren't.
But I'm going to talk to you
about some of the people now
who actually were, either
by birth or by adoption.
Odessa gobbles up the famous
and makes them her own in a way.
Let me start with a person
who is the truest founding
father of this city.
And it's important to remember that
Odessa as a city, is very young.
It was founded in 1794, so it's
actually younger than Washington,
D.C., if we think of Washington
as a quintessentially
new world young city,
Odessa for youth, beats us here.
And if you dig down into
Odessa's past, I mean,
literally dig down
into the city hoping
to find some ancient Greek
ruins that will demonstrate
that the city was inhabited from
time and memorial and that Greeks
and Italians and others who
went around the Black Sea
from the 5th century forward
happened to lay the foundations
of the modern, so you will be
disappointed, because unlike most
of the other cities around the
Black Sea, either on the sea itself
or around it, Sevastopol or Istanbul
or Trabzon or Senop or Varno
or Costanza, Odessa can't really
boast of those ancient Greek ruins
and that ancient heritage.
It is a quintessentially new city
in a very old part of the world,
and that's part of its heritage.
It's part of the way in
which people who came
to Odessa came there precisely
because it was a place
where you could invent
yourself in the way
that the city had invented itself
at the end of the 18th century.
This founding father is named
Jose de Ribas, and given the fact
that we've been speaking about
the Hispanic Reading Room,
this is perhaps particularly
appropriate
that he's the founding
father of Odessa
because as his name
indicates, he wasn't Russian
or Ukrainian or Jewish at all.
He was Neapolitan, the product of
a mixed Spanish and Irish marriage.
He came to prominence in the 1780s,
because he, like lots of people
who were looking for something
to do in the 1770s and 1780s
and had some military training
and some aristocratic heritage,
looked to the East, to the
Russia of Catherine the Great,
as a place where they
could find adventure,
do something for the service of
Christendom, as she was waging wars
against the Ottoman Empire.
And he traveled from what would
become Italy to the shores
of the Black Sea, joined up
with Russian fighting forces
in the Russian wars
against the Ottomans,
particularly in the late 1780s,
and ended up becoming an officer
in Catherine's Navy, the Adjutant in
fact to another soldier of fortune
who had also made his way to the
East and will be more familiar
to you perhaps, a person
named John Paul Jones,
the founder of the American
Navy, whose tomb you can see
if you travel not too far from
here to the U.S. Naval Academy
in Annapolis, and whose papers
incidentally are here at the Library
of Congress and which
I used for this book.
de Ribas was the assistant to
Adjutant liaison between Jones
and a rather more famous Russian
soldier, who actually was Russian,
named Grigory Potemkin, we might
know him as, the favorite of,
lover of Catherine the Great,
the effective co-ruler in fact
of the Empire for a good part
of the Catherinian period.
Well, de Ribas proved to
be a very good Adjutant.
He was actually much better
than Jones as a fighting man.
As you may recall, Jones left
Russian service after a sex scandal
and was booted out of Russia in
disgrace, died in penury in Paris
and we don't often talk about that
when we talk about John Paul Jones,
the Great American hero, but
that's what happened to him.
de Ribas, on the other hand,
his star continued to rise.
He came to the attention of
Potemkin, came to the attention
of Catherine the Great herself, and
after a series of military conflicts
in which he played a leading role in
the liberation of this small piece
of territory on which
modern Odessa sits,
including the Ottoman
fortress called Khadjibey
that was located there at the time,
of no particular strategic
significance,
but one of the minor battles
in Catherine's War
against the Ottomans.
De Ribas eventually managed
to convince Catherine
that this could the site of a city
that would be the southern
equivalent of St. Petersburg.
If her predecessor, he told
Catherine, Peter the Great,
had created his own invented city
in the North, a city that would look
out as a window on Europe,
attracting Europeans to Russia
and demonstrating the fruits of
Russian civilization to Europe,
so to Catherine could herself
do the same thing in the South,
looking out on that
strategically important Black Sea
and the Bosphorus and
the Dardanelles,
looking out to the prize
that Catherine wished she
could eventually grab,
which is of course Constantinople
itself in control of the straits,
she could create her own
southern St. Petersburg.
He convinced her to finance this,
to begin building some docks there,
to begin building some storehouses
and a garrison and the beginnings
of a port city, which she did.
And it was a project
that was eventually taken
up in the early 19th century
by several of her successors
as Czar and Emperor as well.
The irony of all of this is
that the real founder of a city
that becomes quintessentially
Russian, you might say,
today of course, Ukrainian,
politically that becomes
quintessentially Jewish
over the 19th century, was a
Neapolitan soldier of fortune.
But that is perhaps somehow
appropriate because for those of you
who have been to Odessa or
know something of Odessa,
you'll know that it has a little
bit of the seediness of Naples.
In fact, it revels in that seediness
as well, just as Naples does.
And it also, perhaps more than any
other city around the Black Sea,
more than any other city in the Old
Russian Empire and now in Ukraine,
has a Mediterranean disposition.
It's a place where people do go out
an hour before sunset and walk up
and down the main streets, Prymorsky
Boulevard, Yevreyskaya Street,
to take the paseo, just as you'll
find in Madrid and other cities
around the Mediterranean,
so a Neapolitan founder
was somehow appropriate.
A couple of the other
characters that I'll mention
who inform the book are these.
I put them in this triangular
relationship because they were
in fact in a triangular relationship
that I'll describe in a moment.
The person in the lower
left-hand corner
in that magnificent
Napoleonic era military uniform,
is a Russian governor of
the region that would come
to be called "new Russia."
Just as there was a
place called New England,
still is a place called New England,
was a place called New France
and New Spain, the Russians
created their own version
of colonial implantation
called New Russia.
Unlike New France, New
England, and New Spain, however,
New Russia was actually
territorially attached
to the old Russia.
It was simply the southern
borderlands of the Russian Empire
that during the Catherinian period,
the Russians had managed to take
from the Ottomans Crimean Tatars.
Essentially the entire northern
coast of the Black Sea was known
as this new province of New Russia
at the beginning of
the 19th century.
Mikhail Vorontsov, the
governor of New Russia, was,
even though he had a
Russian name and came
from a distinguished Russian family,
actually more British than Russian
in fact; more comfortable in
English than he was in Russian,
not least because he was
educated at Cambridge University
and had spent much of his early
childhood with his father,
who was the ambassador
of the Russian Empire
to the Court of St. James.
So he had spent his summers
in English country houses
and his winters in
London and so forth.
He was, however, one of the
most able administrators
that one could have placed in
this new colonial appendage
in southern Russia that was
being developed and built,
where cities were springing
up on the virgin step,
where new colonists were being
brought in, including the ancestors
of my mother who were
brought to this part of Russia
as German Mennonite farmers in the
late 18th and early 19th centuries
to begin to till the
soil of the steplands.
Vorontsov was the person
who was also responsible
for really making Odessa into
a modern city in the 1820s
and the 1830s, laying out the
street grid, improving the streets,
replacing the old wooden
buildings with stone buildings,
and erecting probably the
most famous statue in Odessa,
that little statue
that stands at the top
of the very famous Odessa steps, the
steps that lead down from the top
of the heights of the city
all the way down to the port,
and I'll show you a photograph
of those in a few moments.
The little statute, the diminutive
statue at the top of those steps,
is one of Vorontsov's predecessors,
Duke de Richelieu, a Frenchman,
who was, like de Ribas and
John Paul Jones, in the service
of the Russian czars at the very
beginning of the 19th century.
Vorontsov had another
asset, however,
and that asset was his wife,
named Elizaveta Vorontsova,
or she was known to most people
at the time, Liz Vorontsova.
She was beautiful, or in her day
she might have been called handsome
rather than beautiful coquettish,
from a family of Polish
nobles, the Brannitsky family.
She had a doting mother who was very
concerned that she was unmarried
at the very old age of 28, and
when this dashing count, Vorontsov,
made her acquaintance in
Paris, Vorontsov was in Paris
because incidentally he was at
the end of the Napoleonic period,
in charge of the Russian
occupation of Paris and so was
in a very prominent position.
Her doting mother knew that she
had a good deal in her hands
and married off Eliz Vorontsova
to the Count and by all accounts,
the two of them were very
happy as a married couple.
She was known once they set up shop
in Odessa, he to become governor,
she to become the wife
of the Governor,
she was known as a supremely
talented hostess, throwing parties
that were well-known
throughout the Empire
and being the right hand person to
her very busy husband as Governor.
It was probably at one of these
parties that she met the person
in the lower right, an exiled poet.
New Russia was blooming at this
stage but it was still a frontier,
and it was a place where if
you happened to run afoul
of the authorities in St.
Petersburg you might be sent
out to the frontier, exiled to the
frontier, until you could figure
out how to behave better.
This particular poet you'll
of course recognize --
that by the way is an image from
the Prince of Photographs Division,
thank you very much -- is of
the Russian national poet,
the person who is now known
as the Russian national
poet Alexander Pushkin.
Pushkin spent 1823 and
1824 in Odessa itself.
He had asked to be moved to
the major city in New Russia.
If he was going to spend years
in exile, he might as well do it
in some style, and he
was allowed to come
and work in fact, for Vorontsov.
His official job was to manage
or oversee the colonization
of the new Russian frontier
with German, Russian, Serbian,
other settlers who were
brought into the region.
Of course, Pushkin never
wrote a single report
and never supervised a single
aspect of colonization,
but that was his official job.
It was at one of these parties
that he met Liz Vorontsova,
it was at one of these parties
that he immediately
fell in love with her.
As you know from reading Pushkin or
reading about him he fell in love
with lots of women over the
course of his very storied career,
and he became very quickly in 1823
and 1824 the actual
lover of Liz Vorontsova.
You might think this was a
bad idea, having an affair
with your boss's wife; that's what
Pushkin was essentially doing,
and it was a bad idea
but it wasn't unheard of.
Especially at this period of
European history and in this kind
of city on the far-flung frontier
everyone was having an affair
with everyone else, if you were
part of this particular class
of Russian society, and
these affairs were very,
very, very well-known.
Count Vorontsov himself was
prodigious in the way that he moved
through Odessan provincial society.
The problem for Pushkin and for
Liz is that Pushkin was a tattler.
He liked to talk about things, and
particularly he liked to make fun
of Count Vorontsov himself,
the man whom he was cuppolding.
That was his great flaw, not
the love affair with Liz,
and you may know some are very
famous quips that Pushkin made
about Vorontsov, calling him
half m'lord, half a shopkeeper
and whole variety of other
very, very derogatory remarks
that were not printed anywhere in
Pushkin's lifetime but circulated
around Odessa making their way
even as far as St. Petersburg.
Well, how do we know
about all of this?
How do we know about all of these
things, apart from the gossip
that swirled around
Odessa at the time.
Well, because Pushkin was
working on a very famous piece
or what would become a very famous
piece of literature that this time,
his great novel in verse, called
"Onegin," or "Eugene Onegin."
He was working on it in Odessa,
began it while he was exiled
in Odessa, and as you will know
from both the story itself as well
as from the opera, "Eugene
Onegin," the person at the center
of that story is a woman who is
caught between duty to her husband
and an old flame who suddenly
comes back on the scene.
And as you will recall, the thing
that she chooses eventually is duty
to her husband over
the prospect of love
for this rather dashing former
lover who comes back into her life.
Well, a similar thing
happened with Pushkin,
because as Vorontsov becomes aware
of the affair, as he is shamed
by the quips that Pushkin is
making publicly about Vorontsov,
and perhaps even more
dangerously, for this frontier city,
as Pushkin begins to get
hints that he's connected
with liberal revolutionaries who
are now engaged in the revolution
in Greece who are soon to be
making revolutions elsewhere
in southeastern Europe, Pushkin
is eventually exiled again
out of Odessa and sent to
another part of the Empire.
This is in fact largely at
Vorontsov's instigation.
He begins instantly by
in a very funny way,
he tries to punish
Pushkin by saying,
the thing that I really want
you to do is go make a report
on locust infestation
in the Odessa region.
And this absolutely
destroys Pushkin.
He says, one, how can I possibly
go out to the countryside
and count locusts; and two,
I've never written a
single government report.
What makes you think I can write a
report about locust infestation now?
And in fact it's that, his
refusal to go on that mission
and write the report that is
eventually the proximate cause
for his being accused of
insubordination and then sent
on to another form of exile.
That form of exile incidentally
is being sent to his mother's farm
where he can be infibulated perhaps
even better than in Odessa itself.
But we know about all of this then
from the character of Tatyana Larena
in Eugene Onegin, who is
very clearly connected
with the real life
person of Liz Vorontsova.
If the character and structure
of Eugene Onegin didn't
convince you though,
you can look at the
manuscript of Eugene Onegin,
which has a whole series
of doodles in the margins.
Pushkin was a great doodler when he
was writing, and there are a number
of doodles that are unmistakably
Liz Vorontsova, looking very much
in fact like she looks in this
contemporary portrait here.
Such was the frontier at the
beginning of the 19th century.
A couple of other characters
I will mention are these.
And I like this photograph
in particular,
because it captures together two of
the most important makers of Odessa
in the 20th century, people who are
responsible more than anyone else
for how we think of
Odessa as a place today.
The person on the left is of course
the great Russian Jewish writer,
Isaak Babel, probably the most
famous 20th century writer
from Odessa, who crafted a series of
stories called "The Odessa Tales,"
all about the neighborhood
in which he grew up.
He was a real Odessan,
born there after all,
and grew up in a place
called Moldavanka,
which is a neighborhood not
far from the city center,
that was not the Jewish
neighborhood.
There was never a Jewish
neighborhood in Odessa.
Jews lived wherever they could
afford to live in the city,
but it was a rather poor Jewish
neighborhood where his family lived.
The person on the right is the
filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein,
who was not from Odessa, was not
Odessan but was in some ways Odessan
by adoption, because his most
famous contribution to all
of this was a film that you
will be familiar with called
"Battleship Potempkin"
or "Battleship Potemkin,"
created in 1925, probably the
most famous filmic representation
of Odessa itself.
And by the way, there is a
new just released last year,
what we might call a director's
cut of "Battleship Potemkin"
which I highly recommend to you,
because I've seen the
film many times before
and many different cuts, but
this one really is spectacular
and gives you a real sense of
Eisenstein's genius as a filmmaker.
The film itself, "Battleship
Potemkin," is as you know,
the story of the Russian
Revolution of 1905.
And when anyone looks
at Eisenstein's work,
whether it's "Battleship
Potemkin" or his film "October,"
we often think that we're
looking at documentary footage.
And if you watch the
History Channel,
although you're far
too sophisticated
to watch the History Channel, but
if you watch the History Channel,
and there happened to be a program
about say the Russian Revolution
or revolutions of the 20th
century, they will often show scenes
from Eisenstein's films
sort of to make you think
that there were I suppose,
cameras around filming the Bolshevik
Revolution sort of as it happened.
But he was magnificent at creating
images that both Soviets themselves
and us today, we today think
of as quintessentially
representative of that period.
Well, he was commissioned
in 1925 to create a film
that would celebrate the 20th
anniversary of the 1905 revolution.
And Eisenstein's genius in a way,
was not to set his film about 1905
in St. Petersburg, which we really
think of as sort of the centerpiece
of the 1905 rising,
eventually crushed
but that would create the
kind of toxin for the rise
of the revolutionary
movement in Russia later on,
culminating of course, in the
Bolshevik Revolution of late 1917.
Eisenstein chose instead to set
his film on the periphery in Odessa
and to make the centerpiece of his
film the uprising or the mutiny
on board an armored
battleship called the Potemkin,
named of course, for
Grigory Potemkin,
the associate of Catherine the Great
and Jose de Riba and John Paul Jones
and so forth from the 18th century.
You may recall the
story line in the film.
The sailors on board
the ship are hungry.
They're told to eat rancid
meat by their officers.
They refuse to eat the rancid meat.
Those who refuse are
going to be shot
by the Marines on board the ship.
Just before they're to be taken
in front of the firing squad,
the entire ship rises up,
throws the officers overboard,
sails to the nearest port,
which happens to be Odessa,
take their comrade, one of
their comrades who's been killed
in the fight ashore, for a kind
of impromptu burial ceremony.
And as he lies in state,
Vakulinchuk,
the sailor who's been killed lies
in state on the docklands of Odessa,
the people of Odessa come around and
realize that they can take no more
of czarist oppression and
they themselves begin to rise
up against their oppressors.
And the film ends with
Battleship Potemkin sort
of sailing directly
toward the camera
with a little hand-colored red
flag flying atop the battleship,
sort of illustrating that even
though this revolution may have been
crushed, the revolutionary
movement overall will survive.
You'll be familiar with the most
famous scene in Battleship Potemkin,
the so-called baby carriage scene.
This is the scene of the
so-called massacre on the steps
when the people of Odessa have
come out to see the funeral
of the sailor, to see this
mutinous battleship that has sailed
into the harbor, they're clamoring
around those famous Odessa steps
that run from the highlands
in the center of the city
down to the docklands, and
they're told to disperse.
They refuse to disperse, and a long
line of soldiers starts the top
of the steps, jackbooted soldiers
with their white tunics and rifles,
and they march down the steps one
by one, firing indiscriminately
into the crowd as they march,
and at the bottom of the steps,
mounted Cossacks come and kill
the people who are fleeing
from the soldiers marching
down the steps from the top.
The baby carriage, there's
a woman out walking her baby
in this carriage sort
of ill-advisedly,
in the middle of what
is a revolution in 1905,
and she is shot herself, lets go
of the baby carriage at the top
of the steps and it bounces all the
way down this granite cataraqui.
You see some amazing
shots from the top.
You see the baby kind of lying in
the baby carriage as it's bouncing
down the steps, and
we assume in the film
that the baby did not
meet a good end.
This is probably the
most copied scene in all
of film history, by the way.
Everyone from Terry Gilliam in
the film "Brazil" to Brian DePalma
in the film "The Untouchables,"
and there are many, many,
many other examples of this.
In fact, someone on YouTube
has put together a collection
of copies of this scene.
Woody Allen in one of his
films, has a version of it.
It's the thing that made
"Odessa" famous, at least in film
because what Eisenstein managed
to do through the vehicle
of "Odessa" is to give a pre-history
to the Bolshevik Revolution.
Keep in mind he's doing
this film in 1925.
He's trying to craft a way
in which he can show 1917,
the Bolshevik Revolution,
not as a coup de tat,
which is effectively what
it was, but as the long end
of a revolutionary wave from
12 years earlier in 1905.
He crafts a way of
seeing the Bolshevik past
that makes October 1917 inevitable
and makes the summer and fall
of 1905 in Odessa the predecessor,
which is a brilliant way
of achieving his end.
When Eisenstein sat down to write
his memoirs, and they're a real pain
to read because they're
written in this kind of stream
of consciousness style, sort of as
if James Joyce had written
his memoirs in the way
that he wrote some of his novels.
Eisenstein reflected on
what happened to the baby,
and there's a very touching scene
in his memoirs in which he says,
you know, and he's
writing them in 1946-1947.
And he says, you know,
I wonder what happened
to that baby who was
in the carriage.
I never knew his name
or her name, he says.
He didn't know if it was a
girl or a boy baby, in fact.
And there's this poignant series
of sentences in which he says,
did that person die for the
Fatherland in the Second World War?
Is that person lying in a
mass grave somewhere, he says.
Did that person have a family and
grow up in Odessa, that Odessan baby
who bounced down the steps.
And what I find very poignant about
that is of course all of those fates
that Eisenstein himself could have
identified could have been possible
for that kid who was less
than a year old in 1925
when Eisenstein was making the film.
Because the thing that of course is
left out of "Battleship Potemkin"
and the thing that if you
were living through 1905
in Odessa you would have
experienced yourself,
is the single largest incident of
violence, the anti-Jewish pogrom
in Odessa in 1905, which doesn't
feature into Eisenstein's film.
There was no such thing as
a massacre on the steps.
Eisenstein invented it.
There were plenty of people killed,
but the largest number of people
who were killed in Odessa
in 1905 were actually
Jews, not revolutionaries.
And that struck me as a sort
of poignant way of thinking
about what would happen to Odessa
during the Second World War
from 1941 to 1944, when the city
was besieged by and then occupied
by an axis power, not
Nazi Germany but one
of Germany's allies, Romania.
It was the largest Soviet city
under non-German occupation
throughout the period of the War.
It was led during that
period of occupation,
by the person who is
standing behind the desk here,
a person by the name
of George Alexianu.
The person of the mural on the
wall is of course a picture
of Jon Antonescu, who was the
Generalissimo or effective leader
of Romania during the
Second World War.
Alexianu sort of in a
way succeeded Voronsov.
He was the effective governor of
one little slice of New Russia
that the Romanians
called Transnistria.
It was a piece of territory occupied
by Romania throughout the war.
Its governor was Alexianu.
He had been the Romanian
King's regent or representative
in another part of Romania
before the war and had experience
with dealing with restive frontiers,
as Transnistria ended up being
for Romania throughout
the period of the war.
Another picture of Alexianu,
just on the right-hand side here,
giving a salute that is not the
Nazi salute but was the Romanian
or Roman salute used by
Romania during the war.
The city was occupied for
907 days, but interestingly,
very little has been written
about, by Odessans themselves,
by Soviet historians or
indeed by Romanian historians,
about this period, even though
it was unique in so many ways;
the largest Soviet city
occupied by non-Germans.
And in fact, Odessa
after the war became one
of the first five hero
cities, so named by the Soviets
because of the way they had
spent the war either fighting the
occupiers or under
occupation themselves.
And omen of the things I
wanted to do in this book,
particularly by working
in the Odessa archives,
was to try to tell this story.
There are a lot of twists
to Odessa's occupation
history during the War.
It was the first time in Odessa's
history a Jewish ghetto was
ever created.
There was never such
thing as a Jewish ghetto
in the city before the
Romanians created one
at the end of 1941 and 1942.
The other twist is that during
this period of occupation,
Odessa witnesses the
near total elimination
of its Jewish population.
Jews had numbered somewhere around
200,000 people in the summer of 1941
in the city, about a
third of the city's total.
Probably half of that number,
half to two-thirds of that number,
actually managed to evacuate the
city by road, by rail, by ship,
before the Romanians take
over in October of 1941.
But there are probably somewhere
around 70 or 80,000 Jews left
in the city when Romania
takes control.
When the Soviet Union comes
back in, the Red Army comes back
in the spring of 1944 they do a very
quick census and they find 48 left.
That's not 48,000; that's
48 people who are left
as part of the Jewish community.
Very few people have written about
what happened to that sort of,
the remainder of the population
who experienced the war there.
Rather few people had
bothered to ask.
But what happened to
them is essentially this,
that there was a large deportation
effort in the fall of 1941 and 1942,
which is preceded by massacres
that take place in the city
at Romanian instigation, also
at the instigation of one
of the German Einsatzgruppen, or the
mobile killing units of the Reich
that come through the city
along with the initial period
of occupation in October.
It ends up being the largest
instance of planned deportation
or killing by an axis power
other than Nazi Germany.
What happened in Odessa
has that status,
even though we haven't spent a great
deal of time thinking about it,
but it's a very important part of
the Second World War experience.
So I tell in the book the
story of Alexianu himself,
who incidentally is executed in 1946
by the Romanian Communist
authorities after the war.
He's executed for crimes
against humanity.
You can in fact watch the
film of that execution.
It was filmed along with Antonescu,
the Generalissimo of Romania,
was filmed by Romanian
newsreel at the time.
The amazing thing to me in that
film footage is that Alexianu,
unlike the other three people who
are being executed at the same time,
sort of stands ramrod straight,
either out of conviction
or out of fear.
Antonescu salutes the people who are
about to kill him, the others sort
of squirm and Alexianu
stands straight as a whole.
The book tells the story
of how Alexianu got there,
what he did during
the war, but it's also
about the much more
intimate experience
of what the occupation was like,
in particular about the
very difficult subject
of collaboration during the war.
It's easy to tell the story of
Odessa's occupation as something
that foreigners did to Odessa,
but what you find in the archives
if you go there is plenty of
information about what Odessans did
to themselves; that is the hundreds
and hundreds of letters that I found
in the archives that I think no
one has seen since 1945, hundreds
and hundreds of letters of average
Odessans denouncing their neighbors
to the Romanian occupation
authorities.
And they are searing reading,
because what you're looking
into is the dark underside of a city
that prized its cosmopolitanism,
that took its cosmopolitanism very
seriously, but during this period
of tragedy, of occupation,
of war, of scarcity,
learned very quickly
how to devour itself.
So the book ends up trying
to describe how fragile social order
can actually be, how one has to sort
of work at keeping an orderly
and cosmopolitan society.
Jews came back to Odessa after
the war but they never came back
in the numbers that were
there before the war.
Many of those who had spent the
war outside the city were living
in central Asia, either
stayed there or came back
to other parts of the Soviet Union.
Many of those in the 1970s and '80s
eventually moved abroad to places
like Brighton Beach, for example,
or Little Odessa in New York,
which is actually where
the book ends.
Pushkin once said that in
Odessa you can smell Europe,
but if you go to Brighton
Beach you can smell Odessa,
and that is the combination
of axle grease and parsley
and old cooking oil and
sour milk, perfume, flowers,
that incredible combination of
smells along with a fair amount
of sea air and saltwater that
defines I think the identity
of Odessa and defines the identity
of Brighton Beach Avenue as well.
Brighton Beach is a
rather melancholy place
but also a very hopeful
place, and it is a place
where I think you can learn
the major lesson of Odessa,
which is this, that
being neighborly,
being a good neighbor, takes work.
It's not something that just
comes naturally to all of us.
Being cosmopolitan isn't a
virtue; it's more like a project.
And at times of tragedy and
sadness of occupation and war,
when people stop working at being
cosmopolitan, it can go away
like dust kicked up by a sea breeze.
Odessa shows I think how
cosmopolitanism succeeds,
how it can succeed, how it
can be a magnificent way
of organizing ourselves and our
communities but also the tragedy
that ensues when we stop
working at it hard enough.
I'll stop there and I'm
delighted to take your questions.
[Applause]
>> How much time do
we have, by the way?
>> We've got about 8 or 9 minutes.
>> Okay, excellent.
>> Where was the deportation
of the Jews?
>> Okay, so the deportation actions.
They're deported to
camps and ghettos
that the Romanians
themselves create in this band
of territory called Transnistria.
Survival rates in Transnistria
were probably an order
of magnitude higher than
in German occupied areas.
So the Romanians, once Jews
are deported from the city,
the Romanians don't have the
equivalent of German Einsatzgruppen
or mobile killing units that
are there to kill as many Jews
as possible, but a large number
of people do die from typhus
or from starvation or from exposure
in places where they're sent
by the Romanian authorities.
Yes, ma'am?
>> To what extent is
Odessa Ukrainian?
You describe the Russian origin
of the city, but to what extent--
>> Well, Odessa is
certainly Ukrainian
in the sense that it's in Ukraine.
It's a part of the independent
country of Ukraine now,
and there have been efforts over the
last 5 of 10 years in particular,
to Ukrainianize, in a small way,
the sort of public space in Odessa.
For example, if you go to the old
Odessa City Center you'll find new
street signs that are in
the Ukrainian language.
They're made to look very old,
so you think you're looking
at a 19th century street sign
but it's with Ukrainian spelling
which would never have
happened in the 19th century.
In fact, until the 1840s most street
signs in Odessa were in Italian,
not in Russian because it was a kind
of lingua franca around that part
of the Black Sea, and a very large
Italian community still living
there then.
There have been other
efforts to sort of --
in fact, what has happened in
Odessa over the last 10 years
in particular, is a kind
of war of monuments.
So there will be a
pro-Russian, or what's perceived
as a pro-Russian monument
erected and then a private society
or the local city council will
erect something that's perceived
to be pro-Ukrainian monument or
Ukrainian national hero or a poet
or something along those lines.
And there were small
riots when a statute
of Catherine the Great was put up
in the city; actually, restored,
the statue was put back to where
it had been in the 19th century,
but it was perceived as being an
overly, by some local Ukrainians,
perceived as being an
overly pro-Russian statement
to put this Russian Empress
in Sarina right in the middle
of the city, near the Odessa steps.
The city though is in ethnic
terms, majority Ukrainian now,
even though in sort of terms of
ethnic population, even though many
of those people are actually
Russian speaking and the language
that you hear in public
overwhelmingly is still Russian
rather than Ukrainian.
Yes?
>> There was such inference
of Italian artists
in Eastern Europe toward
the 19th century.
Was this there in Odessa,
Italian culture, Italian art?
It was very much there in Hungary
and Poland, in other countries.
>> Yeah, this begins to decline
by the middle of the 19th century,
primarily because of shifts
in who the main benefactors
of that kind of art would be.
Italians sort of control
the grain trade
at the very beginning
of the 19th century.
They controlled shipping in Odessa,
but as more and more Jews began
to move to the city
from the 1830s forward,
it becomes the economic
space, the public space
of the city becomes
much more dominated
by the local Jewish community.
And so what you find is that
there's a real shift in the nature
of the demographics in the city
and the Italian influence
begins to wane.
People are collecting, whether
they're Jewish, Russian, Ukrainian,
whatever, they're collecting artists
from all around Europe and all
around the world and in fact there's
some magnificent collections,
private collections in the city that
remain up through the Soviet period.
But the Italian influence in the
public space in Odessa begins
to decline already by the 1830s.
>> Were the pogroms of the
Russians in Odessa during the turn
of the 20th century like
they were in Russia?
>> Yes, so you have a sort of wave
of pogroms in Odessa in 1871, 1881,
and then most spectacularly 1905,
1906, which the 1905 pogrom was
at the time the largest
most destructive pogrom
in Russian history, which also
interestingly then doesn't make it
into Battleship Potemkin,
Even though you were living
through that period it's the thing
that you would have remarked on.
There is a wonderful novel
of Odessa from this period,
recently translated a couple
of years ago, called the Five.
So if you're interested
in the 1905-06 period,
it's written by a man may
be familiar to some of you,
named Vladimir Jabotinsky.
Jabotinsky was the founder
of revisionist Zionism,
and is now the sort of inspiration
for example Likud party in Israel,
very famous right-wing
Zionist who also happened
to be quite a good writer, I think
and has recently been translated
into English and is
worth looking at.
Yes, ma'am?
>> What kind of multinational
company opened business right now
in Odessa?
>> What kind of multinational
companies are in Odessa?
You name it, just about anything
you can imagine you can find
in Odessa these days.
I don't know much about levels
of investment or which countries
or which companies are
most represented there,
but there are people doing
everything from retail sales
to investment in the
port to shipping,
just about anything you can imagine.
In fact, if you want to go to Isaak
Babel's apartment, which is not open
to the public but there's a
little plaque on the building
where he lived in the Odessa
City Center, you have to pass
under Bang & Olufsen,
the sign and sort
of the Bang & Olufsen Music
Shop and Hifi Shop right
at the on the ground floor.
So the city is really sort
of transformed and is very,
very European in terms of
the shops and what is there.
Yes, ma'am.
>> If I were interested in doing
genealogy for Odessan families
where would you suggest starting?
>> Well, maybe the Genealogy
and Local History Reading Room
at the Library of Congress.
That would be one place.
But it's also -- for Odessa itself
there are a number of travel guides
and genealogical guides,
especially if you're interested
in Jewish heritage in Odessa, which
is sort of easier to trace perhaps
because there are more resources.
When I was working in
the archives there,
there was a professional
genealogical researcher,
who was Polish actually, who
had been hired by someone
to do some research in the archives.
The archives are in a very,
very bad state, I have to say,
not because there aren't
very talented people
and committed people trying
to keep them in a good state
but it's simply for
budgetary reasons.
So you would need to hire somebody
in order to do that work for you.
But the -- is this a
Jewish family history?
Well, all of the old marriage
records from synagogues
in Odessa are concentrated in
the Odessa regional archives now,
because all of the synagogues were
either destroyed, closed, whatever,
during the Soviet and
remaining occupation periods.
But so much of that
stuff was actually saved
in the regional archives, so that's
the place you would go rather
than to an individual
synagogue archive.
>> How are religions
represented in Odessa,
Russian Orthodox, synagogues?
>> How are religions represented?
Because it's an overwhelmingly sort
of Russian-speaking
Ukrainian community,
it's an overwhelmingly Orthodox
city in terms of religious practice.
Some of the major cathedrals
have been restored.
The old Spaso-Preobrazhenskiy
Cathedral,
which is the main cathedral
in Odessa,
right in the City Center
and is quite lovely.
It's where incidentally the Voronsov
family is buried, so you can go
and visit the grave of Count
Voronsoz and Liz Voronsova there.
That was utterly destroyed, down
the foundations by the Bolsheviks
in the 1930s, and about 7,
8 years ago it was reopened
and has been completely rebuilt
to its 19th century style.
The old main synagogue in
Odessa has also been restored.
There's a kosher restaurant
in the basement
and very active community
associated with that synagogue,
and the Odessan authorities
are trying
to restore the Brodsky Synagogue
to the Jewish community,
which would be a very good
thing for the community.
For researchers it would
be a tough situation
because that would mean the
archives would probably be closed
for a very long time, so managing
that is going to be a challenge.
There's also a very, very large
Jewish community center now
in Odessa which is magnificent
and huge and glass and steel
and absolutely gorgeous, even though
the Jewish community is quite small.
Thank you.
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc dot gov.