WEBVTT 00:01.520 --> 00:05.510 >> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. 00:05.510 --> 00:25.070 [Silence] 00:25.070 --> 00:25.950 >> Good afternoon, everyone. 00:25.950 --> 00:28.290 I'm Guy Lamolinara from the Center for the Book 00:28.290 --> 00:30.360 in the Library of Congress here. 00:30.360 --> 00:32.890 We're the Division of the Library for those of you who don't know, 00:32.890 --> 00:34.330 who promote books and reading. 00:34.330 --> 00:38.020 And one of the things we do is organize the Author's Program 00:38.020 --> 00:40.270 for the National Book Festival. 00:40.270 --> 00:42.930 And I should just tell you that we have an affiliated center 00:42.930 --> 00:46.680 in every state in the United States plus in the District of Columbia 00:46.680 --> 00:48.870 and the U.S. Virgin Islands. 00:48.870 --> 00:53.140 And you can also find us online at read dot gov, and we have a Books 00:53.140 --> 00:56.370 and Beyond Book Club on Facebook where we invite you to come 00:56.370 --> 01:00.030 and to have discussions with other book lovers about books 01:00.030 --> 01:02.930 that we have featured here and other books. 01:02.930 --> 01:06.180 One thing I need to ask you to do is please turn off all your electronic 01:06.180 --> 01:11.240 devices, and I need to tell you that this is being recorded 01:11.240 --> 01:14.670 for a webcast, so if you should ask a question at the end, 01:14.670 --> 01:18.280 you will likely become a part of the webcast. 01:18.280 --> 01:21.250 It's now my pleasure to introduce Georgette Dorn, 01:21.250 --> 01:24.320 who heads the Division that is co-sponsoring this event with us, 01:24.320 --> 01:27.840 the European Division, where our author did his research 01:27.840 --> 01:28.960 for his book. 01:28.960 --> 01:31.200 And Georgette is a Library of Congress veteran 01:31.200 --> 01:34.950 who also is a long-time head of our Hispanic Division here. 01:34.950 --> 01:37.060 So I want to thank Georgette and all her people 01:37.060 --> 01:40.220 for bringing this wonderful book to our attention today, 01:40.220 --> 01:42.130 and please welcome Georgette Dorn. 01:42.130 --> 01:48.450 >> It is indeed a pleasure to wear my second hat, which is being head 01:48.450 --> 01:49.450 of the European Division. 01:49.450 --> 01:52.880 It is truly a marvelous division, and we have readers 01:52.880 --> 01:57.700 like Professor King, who's used the collection for his book. 01:57.700 --> 02:00.510 Professor King will discuss his latest book, "Odessa: 02:00.510 --> 02:02.710 Genius and Death in a City of Dreams." 02:02.710 --> 02:05.750 He earned his doctorate at Oxford in 1995. 02:05.750 --> 02:08.840 He used his knowledge of Russian and Romanian to research 02:08.840 --> 02:11.310 and write a dissertation on Moldova, 02:11.310 --> 02:14.850 which became a highly regarded book published by Stanford University. 02:14.850 --> 02:17.760 His five books, all critically acclaimed, 02:17.760 --> 02:19.980 focused on regions near the Black Sea 02:19.980 --> 02:22.830 and include highly praised Oxford publication 02:22.830 --> 02:25.220 on the history of the Black Sea itself. 02:25.220 --> 02:27.500 Charles King is professor with the National Affairs 02:27.500 --> 02:29.060 at Georgetown University. 02:29.060 --> 02:33.050 He lectures widely on National Affairs, Social Violence, 02:33.050 --> 02:35.300 and ethnic politics and has worked 02:35.300 --> 02:40.810 with major broadcast media such as CNN and BBC. 02:40.810 --> 02:44.180 His newest book, which has already been favorably reviewed 02:44.180 --> 02:48.170 on both sides of the Atlantic, is a result of research in archives, 02:48.170 --> 02:50.930 libraries, industries, and as itself. 02:50.930 --> 02:54.600 It traces the dynamic and troubling history of Odessa's Russian, 02:54.600 --> 02:56.570 Jewish and other communities. 02:56.570 --> 03:00.620 It has been noted that Professor King has weaved separate strands 03:00.620 --> 03:04.420 into a whole that superbly describes the history and culture 03:04.420 --> 03:05.680 of this fascinating city. 03:05.680 --> 03:07.510 Thank you. 03:07.510 --> 03:12.210 [Applause] 03:12.210 --> 03:13.160 >> Thanks, so much, Georgette. 03:13.160 --> 03:13.890 Welcome, everybody. 03:13.890 --> 03:16.050 Can you hear me okay at this level? 03:16.050 --> 03:16.840 Okay, thanks. 03:16.840 --> 03:23.280 I want to begin by thanking the European Division and the Center 03:23.280 --> 03:26.170 for the Book for sponsoring this talk. 03:26.170 --> 03:29.410 It's a real honor to be here in the Pickford Theater and to be 03:29.410 --> 03:30.520 at the Library of Congress. 03:30.520 --> 03:34.380 I have a great affection for this place, not only because it's a place 03:34.380 --> 03:37.860 where I do a lot of my work; in fact, 03:37.860 --> 03:40.760 most of my previous books were written actually written 03:40.760 --> 03:43.880 under the statute of Herodotus in the Main Reading Room. 03:43.880 --> 03:46.520 And given my interest in the Black Sea, that always struck me 03:46.520 --> 03:50.570 as a particularly appropriate place to ride in the shadow 03:50.570 --> 03:54.820 of the great historian of the Black Sea among other things. 03:54.820 --> 03:57.580 And I feel like I've been connected over the last several years 03:57.580 --> 03:59.940 to the Library in very personal ways. 03:59.940 --> 04:03.480 I got locked out during the earthquake, the Main Reading Room, 04:03.480 --> 04:06.570 and my computer and notes spent the night there. 04:06.570 --> 04:10.600 I got a crick in my neck from the Cooper's Hawk, which was stuck 04:10.600 --> 04:13.150 in the Main Reading Room, you may remember and spent, 04:13.150 --> 04:16.140 probably wasted far too much time kind of just looking 04:16.140 --> 04:21.580 up at the magnificent dome and the Cooper's Hawk flying around it. 04:21.580 --> 04:24.050 So I feel like I'm very connected to the place. 04:24.050 --> 04:27.560 It's also the case that the Library was critical 04:27.560 --> 04:31.360 to researching this particular book that I'm going to talk about today, 04:31.360 --> 04:36.100 and I made a list of the reading rooms that I visited 04:36.100 --> 04:38.500 and did research in in writing about Odessa, 04:38.500 --> 04:40.670 and let me just read that to you quickly. 04:40.670 --> 04:43.640 "Main Reading Room, newspaper and current periodical, science 04:43.640 --> 04:47.830 and technology, African Middle East, European geography and manuscripts, 04:47.830 --> 04:49.790 motion picture and television, performing arts, 04:49.790 --> 04:52.250 prints and photographs and rare book and special collections. 04:52.250 --> 04:54.580 So I think I hit just about all of them. 04:54.580 --> 04:57.200 I'll even count the Hispanic because I had to walk 04:57.200 --> 04:58.560 through there to get to the European. 04:58.560 --> 05:04.610 So all of them, I think were critical to writing this book. 05:04.610 --> 05:06.740 So what is the book itself about? 05:06.740 --> 05:10.700 Well, in a sentence, it's the story of how one 05:10.700 --> 05:14.510 of Europe's great Jewish cities stopped being one 05:14.510 --> 05:16.470 of Europe's great Jewish cities. 05:16.470 --> 05:19.340 It's about how cities transform themselves, 05:19.340 --> 05:23.420 about how cities get changed, either because of things they do themselves 05:23.420 --> 05:26.360 or things that happened to them. 05:26.360 --> 05:30.690 It's also though, a book about the resilience of place, 05:30.690 --> 05:37.500 about how cities have a tendency to reproduce themselves over time, 05:37.500 --> 05:42.370 how cities have new lives to them, even after they transform themselves 05:42.370 --> 05:46.220 in their old place, how they have legs and move to new places 05:46.220 --> 05:51.130 and reproduce the ideas and cultures and charm in many ways, 05:51.130 --> 05:52.750 that defined them previously. 05:52.750 --> 05:57.280 Well, let me say a few words about what I'll be talking about today 05:57.280 --> 05:58.550 in the next half hour or so, 05:58.550 --> 06:02.930 and I hope before 1 o'clock then we have plenty of time for discussion 06:02.930 --> 06:05.770 as well and any questions you might have. 06:05.770 --> 06:10.130 First of all I'll say a few words about how I came to write this book. 06:10.130 --> 06:13.950 I want to talk then about a few of the stories and themes 06:13.950 --> 06:18.330 that animate it, and I'll go through a few of the major characters 06:18.330 --> 06:20.270 that feature in this book. 06:20.270 --> 06:22.900 And then I'll say a few words at the end 06:22.900 --> 06:27.920 about what I think is the mystery story at the heart of the book. 06:27.920 --> 06:30.710 Because even though this is a kind of history of the city told 06:30.710 --> 06:33.800 through the lives of some of the geniuses and villains 06:33.800 --> 06:38.550 that animated Odessa's cultural and historical life over the ages, 06:38.550 --> 06:40.480 it's in some ways also a mystery story. 06:40.480 --> 06:45.410 And the mystery is this: how a city that had been known 06:45.410 --> 06:49.540 for its cosmopolitanism, had defined in many ways, 06:49.540 --> 06:54.350 what European cosmopolitanism meant in the 19th 06:54.350 --> 06:59.160 and early 20th centuries, how that place learned how to devour itself 06:59.160 --> 07:01.270 over the course of the 20th century. 07:01.270 --> 07:05.140 How did cosmopolitanism as an idea and as a practice in Odessa turn 07:05.140 --> 07:10.090 out to be so fragile, actually, during the Second World War? 07:10.090 --> 07:15.290 How did this city learn to remake itself in tragic and awful 07:15.290 --> 07:20.280 and violent ways for 907 days during the Second World War 07:20.280 --> 07:25.120 when it was occupied by one of the axis powers, and I'll come back 07:25.120 --> 07:27.310 to that later on in the talk. 07:27.310 --> 07:31.400 When I first started writing this book I'd written some sort 07:31.400 --> 07:34.750 of academic histories before that perhaps some 07:34.750 --> 07:36.250 of them had made the sort of crossover 07:36.250 --> 07:40.350 to not quite academic histories and read by a few general readers 07:40.350 --> 07:43.780 as well, but I wanted to write this book in a much more accessible way, 07:43.780 --> 07:46.880 to research it with all the verve that I had researched the others 07:46.880 --> 07:50.060 but to write it in a way that would be accessible to, 07:50.060 --> 07:53.630 appealing to people beyond professional historians 07:53.630 --> 07:56.030 and area studies specialists. 07:56.030 --> 07:58.110 And my wife said the key to that is 07:58.110 --> 08:00.350 to let the subject get to you in a way. 08:00.350 --> 08:06.750 And she was absolutely right, that the more you can let a subject 08:06.750 --> 08:10.900 of a book touch you in a kind of emotional way, 08:10.900 --> 08:12.800 I think the more you'll make that connection 08:12.800 --> 08:14.740 to the readers, she said to me. 08:14.740 --> 08:17.760 And she was right, and the way it got to me, or the place it got 08:17.760 --> 08:19.950 to me was perhaps rather unusual. 08:19.950 --> 08:24.890 It was this place, which is a building in Odessa on the corner 08:24.890 --> 08:27.700 of Pushkin and Jukolvsky Streets. 08:27.700 --> 08:31.900 If you're taking a little tour of the center of the city it may be 08:31.900 --> 08:34.900 on your itinerary but it probably won't be on your itinerary. 08:34.900 --> 08:37.500 You'll just walk by it without really noticing it. 08:37.500 --> 08:40.840 It's a kind of gray-blue neo-Gothic building 08:40.840 --> 08:45.770 from the mid late 19th century, falling down in many ways, 08:45.770 --> 08:49.530 a kind of overgrown garden around its gigantic crack that goes 08:49.530 --> 08:53.040 from the foundation to the roofline. 08:53.040 --> 08:58.710 It is today the state archive of the Odessa region, so for any historian 08:58.710 --> 09:01.650 who is working on history of Odessa, 09:01.650 --> 09:03.980 this is a place you would go and spend lots of time. 09:03.980 --> 09:06.410 And I spent lots of time in this building 09:06.410 --> 09:10.990 in the unair-conditioned reading room where the windows don't open 09:10.990 --> 09:14.690 in the middle of July, so I feel 09:14.690 --> 09:17.800 like I actually did sweat bullets for this book. 09:17.800 --> 09:23.760 The staff who work there are magnificent, and against all odds 09:23.760 --> 09:26.530 and with very little in the way of budgetary support managed 09:26.530 --> 09:30.980 to save the written history of this city from destruction. 09:30.980 --> 09:34.590 They on a much smaller scale perhaps have the same kind of mission 09:34.590 --> 09:37.750 that the Library of Congress has. 09:37.750 --> 09:39.880 Before it was the state archive 09:39.880 --> 09:43.880 of the Odessa region it was called the Rosa Luxemburg Worker's Club. 09:43.880 --> 09:47.510 It was a building that was gutted and used as a place 09:47.510 --> 09:50.350 where you could go and do your calisthenics and help 09:50.350 --> 09:55.220 to create the new Soviet man and woman from the 1920s forward. 09:55.220 --> 09:57.750 before it was the Rosa Luxemburg Worker's Club, 09:57.750 --> 09:59.390 however, it was this thing. 09:59.390 --> 10:01.870 It was called the Brodsky Synagogue. 10:01.870 --> 10:04.650 It was one of the most important synagogues, 10:04.650 --> 10:09.280 not only in the Russian Empire, but I would say in all of Europe. 10:09.280 --> 10:14.550 It was a great choral synagogue, and the cantor there, man by the name 10:14.550 --> 10:18.090 of Nissan Blumenthal from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, 10:18.090 --> 10:20.760 was literally world famous at the time. 10:20.760 --> 10:27.120 And you can go into many synagogues around the world now and hear songs 10:27.120 --> 10:31.280 and harmonies that were created by Nissan Blumenthal and first sung 10:31.280 --> 10:34.670 in the Brodsky Synagogue in Odessa. 10:34.670 --> 10:40.760 It was the place where you could be progressive as a Jew, 10:40.760 --> 10:45.000 where you could be modern as a Jew, where you could be worldly 10:45.000 --> 10:49.440 and connected to the rest of Europe as a Jew in the Russian Empire, 10:49.440 --> 10:51.470 even though the city of Odessa 10:51.470 --> 10:53.790 and the Brodsky Synagogue were located right in the middle 10:53.790 --> 10:56.210 of the place where Jews in the Russian Empire were restricted 10:56.210 --> 10:59.040 to living; that is, the Pale of Settlement. 10:59.040 --> 11:03.550 But this was not a sort of synagogue in a small shettle in the Pale 11:03.550 --> 11:09.080 of Settlement; this was the Brodsky synagogue in the most dynamic city 11:09.080 --> 11:13.840 at the confluence of the Black Sea and the Russian Empire, 11:13.840 --> 11:15.170 one of the most important 11:15.170 --> 11:18.410 and cosmopolitan cities in the entire region. 11:18.410 --> 11:23.650 And it struck me as I was working there in this building, 11:23.650 --> 11:26.820 that if you want to know something about the early foundation 11:26.820 --> 11:31.430 of Odessa, its Italian and Greek predecessors, 11:31.430 --> 11:36.350 the French administrators who ruled the city in the early 19th century, 11:36.350 --> 11:39.730 if you want to know something about its Soviet past, its Russian past, 11:39.730 --> 11:43.430 its Ukrainian and Yiddish past, if you want to know something 11:43.430 --> 11:47.000 about the denunciation letters that average Odessans sent 11:47.000 --> 11:50.710 in to the Occupation Authorities in the 1940s denouncing their neighbors 11:50.710 --> 11:53.700 who happened to be Jewish and telling the Occupation Authorities 11:53.700 --> 11:56.320 where they lived, if you want to see all of that, 11:56.320 --> 11:58.570 the place you go is the Brodsky Synagogue. 11:58.570 --> 12:03.130 And that struck me as one of the dark ironies of this city, 12:03.130 --> 12:06.270 that if you want to know what happened to the Jewish community 12:06.270 --> 12:11.100 that formed a third of the total population in 1941 but that 12:11.100 --> 12:16.190 after the end of the Second World War formed no more than 12 percent 12:16.190 --> 12:19.010 at its height, if you want to know what happened to those people 12:19.010 --> 12:22.140 and the culture that they took with them when it was destroyed 12:22.140 --> 12:25.030 or when they left, the place you go is to this old synagogue. 12:25.030 --> 12:28.420 And that got to me in a way, and so I think the inspiration 12:28.420 --> 12:33.030 for the book is in some ways this building. 12:33.030 --> 12:36.030 Let me say a few words about some of the stories and themes 12:36.030 --> 12:38.910 that animate the book and weave through the book. 12:38.910 --> 12:42.680 This is very much a character-driven book, and so you're introduced 12:42.680 --> 12:46.010 to some of the key characters in the history of the city, 12:46.010 --> 12:49.490 and let me talk a little bit about them. 12:49.490 --> 12:55.190 I should say first of all, though, that Odessa grabs up famous people, 12:55.190 --> 13:01.100 like an overeager camp counselor at a Jewish summer camp or sort 13:01.100 --> 13:04.670 of defining all of the sort of great athletes who might happen 13:04.670 --> 13:07.430 to be Odessan or the great singers or the great artists 13:07.430 --> 13:09.730 or the great violinists and the great actors who happen 13:09.730 --> 13:14.080 to be Odessan, some of them were, some of them weren't. 13:14.080 --> 13:16.860 Some of the people who claimed to be Odessan weren't, 13:16.860 --> 13:18.780 and some of the people who were always thought 13:18.780 --> 13:20.260 to be Odessan weren't. 13:20.260 --> 13:22.970 But I'm going to talk to you about some of the people now 13:22.970 --> 13:26.730 who actually were, either by birth or by adoption. 13:26.730 --> 13:33.570 Odessa gobbles up the famous and makes them her own in a way. 13:33.570 --> 13:35.650 Let me start with a person 13:35.650 --> 13:40.090 who is the truest founding father of this city. 13:40.090 --> 13:44.920 And it's important to remember that Odessa as a city, is very young. 13:44.920 --> 13:49.800 It was founded in 1794, so it's actually younger than Washington, 13:49.800 --> 13:51.240 D.C., if we think of Washington 13:51.240 --> 13:53.900 as a quintessentially new world young city, 13:53.900 --> 13:58.910 Odessa for youth, beats us here. 13:58.910 --> 14:02.780 And if you dig down into Odessa's past, I mean, 14:02.780 --> 14:05.170 literally dig down into the city hoping 14:05.170 --> 14:08.910 to find some ancient Greek ruins that will demonstrate 14:08.910 --> 14:12.700 that the city was inhabited from time and memorial and that Greeks 14:12.700 --> 14:16.620 and Italians and others who went around the Black Sea 14:16.620 --> 14:20.890 from the 5th century forward happened to lay the foundations 14:20.890 --> 14:24.680 of the modern, so you will be disappointed, because unlike most 14:24.680 --> 14:29.520 of the other cities around the Black Sea, either on the sea itself 14:29.520 --> 14:36.720 or around it, Sevastopol or Istanbul or Trabzon or Senop or Varno 14:36.720 --> 14:41.920 or Costanza, Odessa can't really boast of those ancient Greek ruins 14:41.920 --> 14:44.120 and that ancient heritage. 14:44.120 --> 14:49.180 It is a quintessentially new city in a very old part of the world, 14:49.180 --> 14:50.790 and that's part of its heritage. 14:50.790 --> 14:52.830 It's part of the way in which people who came 14:52.830 --> 14:55.320 to Odessa came there precisely because it was a place 14:55.320 --> 14:57.930 where you could invent yourself in the way 14:57.930 --> 15:02.470 that the city had invented itself at the end of the 18th century. 15:02.470 --> 15:08.620 This founding father is named Jose de Ribas, and given the fact 15:08.620 --> 15:10.600 that we've been speaking about the Hispanic Reading Room, 15:10.600 --> 15:12.960 this is perhaps particularly appropriate 15:12.960 --> 15:14.800 that he's the founding father of Odessa 15:14.800 --> 15:16.990 because as his name indicates, he wasn't Russian 15:16.990 --> 15:19.340 or Ukrainian or Jewish at all. 15:19.340 --> 15:26.800 He was Neapolitan, the product of a mixed Spanish and Irish marriage. 15:26.800 --> 15:35.080 He came to prominence in the 1780s, because he, like lots of people 15:35.080 --> 15:38.920 who were looking for something to do in the 1770s and 1780s 15:38.920 --> 15:42.710 and had some military training and some aristocratic heritage, 15:42.710 --> 15:46.480 looked to the East, to the Russia of Catherine the Great, 15:46.480 --> 15:49.200 as a place where they could find adventure, 15:49.200 --> 15:53.940 do something for the service of Christendom, as she was waging wars 15:53.940 --> 15:57.000 against the Ottoman Empire. 15:57.000 --> 16:02.080 And he traveled from what would become Italy to the shores 16:02.080 --> 16:05.060 of the Black Sea, joined up with Russian fighting forces 16:05.060 --> 16:08.430 in the Russian wars against the Ottomans, 16:08.430 --> 16:14.290 particularly in the late 1780s, and ended up becoming an officer 16:14.290 --> 16:19.720 in Catherine's Navy, the Adjutant in fact to another soldier of fortune 16:19.720 --> 16:22.900 who had also made his way to the East and will be more familiar 16:22.900 --> 16:25.990 to you perhaps, a person named John Paul Jones, 16:25.990 --> 16:30.050 the founder of the American Navy, whose tomb you can see 16:30.050 --> 16:33.020 if you travel not too far from here to the U.S. Naval Academy 16:33.020 --> 16:35.970 in Annapolis, and whose papers incidentally are here at the Library 16:35.970 --> 16:39.910 of Congress and which I used for this book. 16:39.910 --> 16:44.300 de Ribas was the assistant to Adjutant liaison between Jones 16:44.300 --> 16:50.410 and a rather more famous Russian soldier, who actually was Russian, 16:50.410 --> 16:56.360 named Grigory Potemkin, we might know him as, the favorite of, 16:56.360 --> 17:00.380 lover of Catherine the Great, the effective co-ruler in fact 17:00.380 --> 17:04.660 of the Empire for a good part of the Catherinian period. 17:04.660 --> 17:07.960 Well, de Ribas proved to be a very good Adjutant. 17:07.960 --> 17:12.040 He was actually much better than Jones as a fighting man. 17:12.040 --> 17:17.990 As you may recall, Jones left Russian service after a sex scandal 17:17.990 --> 17:24.050 and was booted out of Russia in disgrace, died in penury in Paris 17:24.050 --> 17:29.380 and we don't often talk about that when we talk about John Paul Jones, 17:29.380 --> 17:32.960 the Great American hero, but that's what happened to him. 17:32.960 --> 17:37.190 de Ribas, on the other hand, his star continued to rise. 17:37.190 --> 17:40.370 He came to the attention of Potemkin, came to the attention 17:40.370 --> 17:45.030 of Catherine the Great herself, and after a series of military conflicts 17:45.030 --> 17:49.500 in which he played a leading role in the liberation of this small piece 17:49.500 --> 17:51.870 of territory on which modern Odessa sits, 17:51.870 --> 17:55.170 including the Ottoman fortress called Khadjibey 17:55.170 --> 17:56.900 that was located there at the time, 17:56.900 --> 18:00.150 of no particular strategic significance, 18:00.150 --> 18:02.360 but one of the minor battles 18:02.360 --> 18:04.010 in Catherine's War against the Ottomans. 18:04.010 --> 18:08.640 De Ribas eventually managed to convince Catherine 18:08.640 --> 18:11.670 that this could the site of a city 18:11.670 --> 18:14.920 that would be the southern equivalent of St. Petersburg. 18:14.920 --> 18:18.940 If her predecessor, he told Catherine, Peter the Great, 18:18.940 --> 18:23.820 had created his own invented city in the North, a city that would look 18:23.820 --> 18:28.960 out as a window on Europe, attracting Europeans to Russia 18:28.960 --> 18:32.950 and demonstrating the fruits of Russian civilization to Europe, 18:32.950 --> 18:36.740 so to Catherine could herself do the same thing in the South, 18:36.740 --> 18:39.680 looking out on that strategically important Black Sea 18:39.680 --> 18:41.620 and the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, 18:41.620 --> 18:44.180 looking out to the prize 18:44.180 --> 18:47.260 that Catherine wished she could eventually grab, 18:47.260 --> 18:51.880 which is of course Constantinople itself in control of the straits, 18:51.880 --> 18:55.090 she could create her own southern St. Petersburg. 18:55.090 --> 19:00.580 He convinced her to finance this, to begin building some docks there, 19:00.580 --> 19:06.360 to begin building some storehouses and a garrison and the beginnings 19:06.360 --> 19:09.200 of a port city, which she did. 19:09.200 --> 19:11.470 And it was a project that was eventually taken 19:11.470 --> 19:15.770 up in the early 19th century by several of her successors 19:15.770 --> 19:18.680 as Czar and Emperor as well. 19:18.680 --> 19:22.460 The irony of all of this is that the real founder of a city 19:22.460 --> 19:26.030 that becomes quintessentially Russian, you might say, 19:26.030 --> 19:28.540 today of course, Ukrainian, 19:28.540 --> 19:31.330 politically that becomes quintessentially Jewish 19:31.330 --> 19:35.330 over the 19th century, was a Neapolitan soldier of fortune. 19:35.330 --> 19:39.770 But that is perhaps somehow appropriate because for those of you 19:39.770 --> 19:42.540 who have been to Odessa or know something of Odessa, 19:42.540 --> 19:46.520 you'll know that it has a little bit of the seediness of Naples. 19:46.520 --> 19:53.160 In fact, it revels in that seediness as well, just as Naples does. 19:53.160 --> 19:57.810 And it also, perhaps more than any other city around the Black Sea, 19:57.810 --> 20:01.630 more than any other city in the Old Russian Empire and now in Ukraine, 20:01.630 --> 20:03.880 has a Mediterranean disposition. 20:03.880 --> 20:09.160 It's a place where people do go out an hour before sunset and walk up 20:09.160 --> 20:13.890 and down the main streets, Prymorsky Boulevard, Yevreyskaya Street, 20:13.890 --> 20:18.870 to take the paseo, just as you'll find in Madrid and other cities 20:18.870 --> 20:20.930 around the Mediterranean, 20:20.930 --> 20:25.290 so a Neapolitan founder was somehow appropriate. 20:25.290 --> 20:28.480 A couple of the other characters that I'll mention 20:28.480 --> 20:34.110 who inform the book are these. 20:34.110 --> 20:36.610 I put them in this triangular relationship because they were 20:36.610 --> 20:40.790 in fact in a triangular relationship that I'll describe in a moment. 20:40.790 --> 20:43.570 The person in the lower left-hand corner 20:43.570 --> 20:48.140 in that magnificent Napoleonic era military uniform, 20:48.140 --> 20:53.500 is a Russian governor of the region that would come 20:53.500 --> 20:55.530 to be called "new Russia." 20:55.530 --> 20:57.770 Just as there was a place called New England, 20:57.770 --> 21:00.510 still is a place called New England, was a place called New France 21:00.510 --> 21:03.800 and New Spain, the Russians created their own version 21:03.800 --> 21:08.180 of colonial implantation called New Russia. 21:08.180 --> 21:11.470 Unlike New France, New England, and New Spain, however, 21:11.470 --> 21:14.440 New Russia was actually territorially attached 21:14.440 --> 21:15.360 to the old Russia. 21:15.360 --> 21:19.430 It was simply the southern borderlands of the Russian Empire 21:19.430 --> 21:23.860 that during the Catherinian period, the Russians had managed to take 21:23.860 --> 21:26.210 from the Ottomans Crimean Tatars. 21:26.210 --> 21:30.250 Essentially the entire northern coast of the Black Sea was known 21:30.250 --> 21:33.660 as this new province of New Russia 21:33.660 --> 21:36.060 at the beginning of the 19th century. 21:36.060 --> 21:41.300 Mikhail Vorontsov, the governor of New Russia, was, 21:41.300 --> 21:43.670 even though he had a Russian name and came 21:43.670 --> 21:47.760 from a distinguished Russian family, actually more British than Russian 21:47.760 --> 21:51.770 in fact; more comfortable in English than he was in Russian, 21:51.770 --> 21:55.300 not least because he was educated at Cambridge University 21:55.300 --> 21:59.070 and had spent much of his early childhood with his father, 21:59.070 --> 22:01.790 who was the ambassador of the Russian Empire 22:01.790 --> 22:02.850 to the Court of St. James. 22:02.850 --> 22:06.360 So he had spent his summers in English country houses 22:06.360 --> 22:09.500 and his winters in London and so forth. 22:09.500 --> 22:12.690 He was, however, one of the most able administrators 22:12.690 --> 22:17.470 that one could have placed in this new colonial appendage 22:17.470 --> 22:20.840 in southern Russia that was being developed and built, 22:20.840 --> 22:24.640 where cities were springing up on the virgin step, 22:24.640 --> 22:30.090 where new colonists were being brought in, including the ancestors 22:30.090 --> 22:32.780 of my mother who were brought to this part of Russia 22:32.780 --> 22:38.260 as German Mennonite farmers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries 22:38.260 --> 22:44.210 to begin to till the soil of the steplands. 22:44.210 --> 22:47.610 Vorontsov was the person who was also responsible 22:47.610 --> 22:51.500 for really making Odessa into a modern city in the 1820s 22:51.500 --> 22:56.950 and the 1830s, laying out the street grid, improving the streets, 22:56.950 --> 23:01.930 replacing the old wooden buildings with stone buildings, 23:01.930 --> 23:06.630 and erecting probably the most famous statue in Odessa, 23:06.630 --> 23:08.530 that little statue that stands at the top 23:08.530 --> 23:12.170 of the very famous Odessa steps, the steps that lead down from the top 23:12.170 --> 23:15.140 of the heights of the city all the way down to the port, 23:15.140 --> 23:18.170 and I'll show you a photograph of those in a few moments. 23:18.170 --> 23:21.470 The little statute, the diminutive statue at the top of those steps, 23:21.470 --> 23:26.700 is one of Vorontsov's predecessors, Duke de Richelieu, a Frenchman, 23:26.700 --> 23:30.800 who was, like de Ribas and John Paul Jones, in the service 23:30.800 --> 23:36.020 of the Russian czars at the very beginning of the 19th century. 23:36.020 --> 23:38.750 Vorontsov had another asset, however, 23:38.750 --> 23:43.370 and that asset was his wife, named Elizaveta Vorontsova, 23:43.370 --> 23:48.240 or she was known to most people at the time, Liz Vorontsova. 23:48.240 --> 23:52.510 She was beautiful, or in her day she might have been called handsome 23:52.510 --> 23:55.270 rather than beautiful coquettish, 23:55.270 --> 24:00.890 from a family of Polish nobles, the Brannitsky family. 24:00.890 --> 24:04.470 She had a doting mother who was very concerned that she was unmarried 24:04.470 --> 24:10.230 at the very old age of 28, and when this dashing count, Vorontsov, 24:10.230 --> 24:13.180 made her acquaintance in Paris, Vorontsov was in Paris 24:13.180 --> 24:16.190 because incidentally he was at the end of the Napoleonic period, 24:16.190 --> 24:19.450 in charge of the Russian occupation of Paris and so was 24:19.450 --> 24:22.150 in a very prominent position. 24:22.150 --> 24:27.650 Her doting mother knew that she had a good deal in her hands 24:27.650 --> 24:31.570 and married off Eliz Vorontsova to the Count and by all accounts, 24:31.570 --> 24:37.450 the two of them were very happy as a married couple. 24:37.450 --> 24:41.520 She was known once they set up shop in Odessa, he to become governor, 24:41.520 --> 24:43.240 she to become the wife of the Governor, 24:43.240 --> 24:48.660 she was known as a supremely talented hostess, throwing parties 24:48.660 --> 24:50.840 that were well-known throughout the Empire 24:50.840 --> 24:57.250 and being the right hand person to her very busy husband as Governor. 24:57.250 --> 25:00.180 It was probably at one of these parties that she met the person 25:00.180 --> 25:04.480 in the lower right, an exiled poet. 25:04.480 --> 25:08.030 New Russia was blooming at this stage but it was still a frontier, 25:08.030 --> 25:13.190 and it was a place where if you happened to run afoul 25:13.190 --> 25:16.630 of the authorities in St. Petersburg you might be sent 25:16.630 --> 25:20.710 out to the frontier, exiled to the frontier, until you could figure 25:20.710 --> 25:23.790 out how to behave better. 25:23.790 --> 25:27.050 This particular poet you'll of course recognize -- 25:27.050 --> 25:29.610 that by the way is an image from the Prince of Photographs Division, 25:29.610 --> 25:33.870 thank you very much -- is of the Russian national poet, 25:33.870 --> 25:34.740 the person who is now known 25:34.740 --> 25:38.510 as the Russian national poet Alexander Pushkin. 25:38.510 --> 25:43.870 Pushkin spent 1823 and 1824 in Odessa itself. 25:43.870 --> 25:47.810 He had asked to be moved to the major city in New Russia. 25:47.810 --> 25:51.890 If he was going to spend years in exile, he might as well do it 25:51.890 --> 25:54.880 in some style, and he was allowed to come 25:54.880 --> 25:57.640 and work in fact, for Vorontsov. 25:57.640 --> 26:04.770 His official job was to manage or oversee the colonization 26:04.770 --> 26:09.350 of the new Russian frontier with German, Russian, Serbian, 26:09.350 --> 26:12.100 other settlers who were brought into the region. 26:12.100 --> 26:14.510 Of course, Pushkin never wrote a single report 26:14.510 --> 26:17.340 and never supervised a single aspect of colonization, 26:17.340 --> 26:19.580 but that was his official job. 26:19.580 --> 26:23.580 It was at one of these parties that he met Liz Vorontsova, 26:23.580 --> 26:24.630 it was at one of these parties 26:24.630 --> 26:27.360 that he immediately fell in love with her. 26:27.360 --> 26:32.070 As you know from reading Pushkin or reading about him he fell in love 26:32.070 --> 26:36.440 with lots of women over the course of his very storied career, 26:36.440 --> 26:40.300 and he became very quickly in 1823 26:40.300 --> 26:44.630 and 1824 the actual lover of Liz Vorontsova. 26:44.630 --> 26:48.010 You might think this was a bad idea, having an affair 26:48.010 --> 26:52.160 with your boss's wife; that's what Pushkin was essentially doing, 26:52.160 --> 26:55.410 and it was a bad idea but it wasn't unheard of. 26:55.410 --> 27:00.660 Especially at this period of European history and in this kind 27:00.660 --> 27:04.000 of city on the far-flung frontier everyone was having an affair 27:04.000 --> 27:07.460 with everyone else, if you were part of this particular class 27:07.460 --> 27:10.270 of Russian society, and these affairs were very, 27:10.270 --> 27:11.700 very, very well-known. 27:11.700 --> 27:17.200 Count Vorontsov himself was prodigious in the way that he moved 27:17.200 --> 27:20.300 through Odessan provincial society. 27:20.300 --> 27:24.730 The problem for Pushkin and for Liz is that Pushkin was a tattler. 27:24.730 --> 27:29.990 He liked to talk about things, and particularly he liked to make fun 27:29.990 --> 27:34.600 of Count Vorontsov himself, the man whom he was cuppolding. 27:34.600 --> 27:38.670 That was his great flaw, not the love affair with Liz, 27:38.670 --> 27:43.810 and you may know some are very famous quips that Pushkin made 27:43.810 --> 27:47.870 about Vorontsov, calling him half m'lord, half a shopkeeper 27:47.870 --> 27:52.260 and whole variety of other very, very derogatory remarks 27:52.260 --> 27:56.750 that were not printed anywhere in Pushkin's lifetime but circulated 27:56.750 --> 28:01.590 around Odessa making their way even as far as St. Petersburg. 28:01.590 --> 28:03.980 Well, how do we know about all of this? 28:03.980 --> 28:07.620 How do we know about all of these things, apart from the gossip 28:07.620 --> 28:09.990 that swirled around Odessa at the time. 28:09.990 --> 28:13.520 Well, because Pushkin was working on a very famous piece 28:13.520 --> 28:16.150 or what would become a very famous piece of literature that this time, 28:16.150 --> 28:20.240 his great novel in verse, called "Onegin," or "Eugene Onegin." 28:20.240 --> 28:26.450 He was working on it in Odessa, began it while he was exiled 28:26.450 --> 28:30.530 in Odessa, and as you will know from both the story itself as well 28:30.530 --> 28:34.880 as from the opera, "Eugene Onegin," the person at the center 28:34.880 --> 28:40.150 of that story is a woman who is caught between duty to her husband 28:40.150 --> 28:44.270 and an old flame who suddenly comes back on the scene. 28:44.270 --> 28:50.790 And as you will recall, the thing that she chooses eventually is duty 28:50.790 --> 28:53.610 to her husband over the prospect of love 28:53.610 --> 28:58.790 for this rather dashing former lover who comes back into her life. 28:58.790 --> 29:00.520 Well, a similar thing happened with Pushkin, 29:00.520 --> 29:07.010 because as Vorontsov becomes aware of the affair, as he is shamed 29:07.010 --> 29:10.910 by the quips that Pushkin is making publicly about Vorontsov, 29:10.910 --> 29:15.510 and perhaps even more dangerously, for this frontier city, 29:15.510 --> 29:18.170 as Pushkin begins to get hints that he's connected 29:18.170 --> 29:22.790 with liberal revolutionaries who are now engaged in the revolution 29:22.790 --> 29:27.820 in Greece who are soon to be making revolutions elsewhere 29:27.820 --> 29:33.030 in southeastern Europe, Pushkin is eventually exiled again 29:33.030 --> 29:38.840 out of Odessa and sent to another part of the Empire. 29:38.840 --> 29:41.930 This is in fact largely at Vorontsov's instigation. 29:41.930 --> 29:44.170 He begins instantly by in a very funny way, 29:44.170 --> 29:47.060 he tries to punish Pushkin by saying, 29:47.060 --> 29:50.530 the thing that I really want you to do is go make a report 29:50.530 --> 29:54.100 on locust infestation in the Odessa region. 29:54.100 --> 29:56.680 And this absolutely destroys Pushkin. 29:56.680 --> 29:59.320 He says, one, how can I possibly go out to the countryside 29:59.320 --> 30:00.940 and count locusts; and two, 30:00.940 --> 30:02.900 I've never written a single government report. 30:02.900 --> 30:06.990 What makes you think I can write a report about locust infestation now? 30:06.990 --> 30:10.880 And in fact it's that, his refusal to go on that mission 30:10.880 --> 30:13.130 and write the report that is eventually the proximate cause 30:13.130 --> 30:16.640 for his being accused of insubordination and then sent 30:16.640 --> 30:18.770 on to another form of exile. 30:18.770 --> 30:21.910 That form of exile incidentally is being sent to his mother's farm 30:21.910 --> 30:26.910 where he can be infibulated perhaps even better than in Odessa itself. 30:26.910 --> 30:31.950 But we know about all of this then from the character of Tatyana Larena 30:31.950 --> 30:37.100 in Eugene Onegin, who is very clearly connected 30:37.100 --> 30:40.980 with the real life person of Liz Vorontsova. 30:40.980 --> 30:42.700 If the character and structure 30:42.700 --> 30:44.650 of Eugene Onegin didn't convince you though, 30:44.650 --> 30:48.280 you can look at the manuscript of Eugene Onegin, 30:48.280 --> 30:52.570 which has a whole series of doodles in the margins. 30:52.570 --> 30:56.360 Pushkin was a great doodler when he was writing, and there are a number 30:56.360 --> 31:00.730 of doodles that are unmistakably Liz Vorontsova, looking very much 31:00.730 --> 31:06.700 in fact like she looks in this contemporary portrait here. 31:06.700 --> 31:10.390 Such was the frontier at the beginning of the 19th century. 31:10.390 --> 31:15.520 A couple of other characters I will mention are these. 31:15.520 --> 31:18.230 And I like this photograph in particular, 31:18.230 --> 31:25.680 because it captures together two of the most important makers of Odessa 31:25.680 --> 31:29.880 in the 20th century, people who are responsible more than anyone else 31:29.880 --> 31:33.740 for how we think of Odessa as a place today. 31:33.740 --> 31:37.400 The person on the left is of course the great Russian Jewish writer, 31:37.400 --> 31:41.760 Isaak Babel, probably the most famous 20th century writer 31:41.760 --> 31:46.200 from Odessa, who crafted a series of stories called "The Odessa Tales," 31:46.200 --> 31:50.150 all about the neighborhood in which he grew up. 31:50.150 --> 31:53.920 He was a real Odessan, born there after all, 31:53.920 --> 31:56.850 and grew up in a place called Moldavanka, 31:56.850 --> 31:59.690 which is a neighborhood not far from the city center, 31:59.690 --> 32:01.870 that was not the Jewish neighborhood. 32:01.870 --> 32:03.890 There was never a Jewish neighborhood in Odessa. 32:03.890 --> 32:06.820 Jews lived wherever they could afford to live in the city, 32:06.820 --> 32:13.510 but it was a rather poor Jewish neighborhood where his family lived. 32:13.510 --> 32:17.240 The person on the right is the filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein, 32:17.240 --> 32:22.180 who was not from Odessa, was not Odessan but was in some ways Odessan 32:22.180 --> 32:25.830 by adoption, because his most famous contribution to all 32:25.830 --> 32:30.850 of this was a film that you will be familiar with called 32:30.850 --> 32:33.310 "Battleship Potempkin" or "Battleship Potemkin," 32:33.310 --> 32:41.750 created in 1925, probably the most famous filmic representation 32:41.750 --> 32:42.890 of Odessa itself. 32:42.890 --> 32:46.540 And by the way, there is a new just released last year, 32:46.540 --> 32:50.130 what we might call a director's cut of "Battleship Potemkin" 32:50.130 --> 32:51.830 which I highly recommend to you, 32:51.830 --> 32:54.560 because I've seen the film many times before 32:54.560 --> 32:58.010 and many different cuts, but this one really is spectacular 32:58.010 --> 33:05.400 and gives you a real sense of Eisenstein's genius as a filmmaker. 33:05.400 --> 33:10.480 The film itself, "Battleship Potemkin," is as you know, 33:10.480 --> 33:15.500 the story of the Russian Revolution of 1905. 33:15.500 --> 33:19.210 And when anyone looks at Eisenstein's work, 33:19.210 --> 33:21.670 whether it's "Battleship Potemkin" or his film "October," 33:21.670 --> 33:26.530 we often think that we're looking at documentary footage. 33:26.530 --> 33:29.290 And if you watch the History Channel, 33:29.290 --> 33:30.840 although you're far too sophisticated 33:30.840 --> 33:34.900 to watch the History Channel, but if you watch the History Channel, 33:34.900 --> 33:38.440 and there happened to be a program about say the Russian Revolution 33:38.440 --> 33:42.570 or revolutions of the 20th century, they will often show scenes 33:42.570 --> 33:47.290 from Eisenstein's films sort of to make you think 33:47.290 --> 33:48.990 that there were I suppose, 33:48.990 --> 33:54.820 cameras around filming the Bolshevik Revolution sort of as it happened. 33:54.820 --> 34:00.270 But he was magnificent at creating images that both Soviets themselves 34:00.270 --> 34:03.030 and us today, we today think 34:03.030 --> 34:07.900 of as quintessentially representative of that period. 34:07.900 --> 34:11.720 Well, he was commissioned in 1925 to create a film 34:11.720 --> 34:16.630 that would celebrate the 20th anniversary of the 1905 revolution. 34:16.630 --> 34:22.060 And Eisenstein's genius in a way, was not to set his film about 1905 34:22.060 --> 34:27.400 in St. Petersburg, which we really think of as sort of the centerpiece 34:27.400 --> 34:31.640 of the 1905 rising, eventually crushed 34:31.640 --> 34:35.290 but that would create the kind of toxin for the rise 34:35.290 --> 34:38.830 of the revolutionary movement in Russia later on, 34:38.830 --> 34:45.200 culminating of course, in the Bolshevik Revolution of late 1917. 34:45.200 --> 34:50.140 Eisenstein chose instead to set his film on the periphery in Odessa 34:50.140 --> 34:56.120 and to make the centerpiece of his film the uprising or the mutiny 34:56.120 --> 35:00.980 on board an armored battleship called the Potemkin, 35:00.980 --> 35:03.240 named of course, for Grigory Potemkin, 35:03.240 --> 35:07.850 the associate of Catherine the Great and Jose de Riba and John Paul Jones 35:07.850 --> 35:10.540 and so forth from the 18th century. 35:10.540 --> 35:13.520 You may recall the story line in the film. 35:13.520 --> 35:16.510 The sailors on board the ship are hungry. 35:16.510 --> 35:20.630 They're told to eat rancid meat by their officers. 35:20.630 --> 35:22.990 They refuse to eat the rancid meat. 35:22.990 --> 35:25.600 Those who refuse are going to be shot 35:25.600 --> 35:28.250 by the Marines on board the ship. 35:28.250 --> 35:31.900 Just before they're to be taken in front of the firing squad, 35:31.900 --> 35:37.210 the entire ship rises up, throws the officers overboard, 35:37.210 --> 35:42.350 sails to the nearest port, which happens to be Odessa, 35:42.350 --> 35:46.940 take their comrade, one of their comrades who's been killed 35:46.940 --> 35:55.140 in the fight ashore, for a kind of impromptu burial ceremony. 35:55.140 --> 35:59.020 And as he lies in state, Vakulinchuk, 35:59.020 --> 36:05.360 the sailor who's been killed lies in state on the docklands of Odessa, 36:05.360 --> 36:09.200 the people of Odessa come around and realize that they can take no more 36:09.200 --> 36:13.100 of czarist oppression and they themselves begin to rise 36:13.100 --> 36:16.360 up against their oppressors. 36:16.360 --> 36:19.310 And the film ends with Battleship Potemkin sort 36:19.310 --> 36:21.620 of sailing directly toward the camera 36:21.620 --> 36:27.270 with a little hand-colored red flag flying atop the battleship, 36:27.270 --> 36:30.800 sort of illustrating that even though this revolution may have been 36:30.800 --> 36:36.840 crushed, the revolutionary movement overall will survive. 36:36.840 --> 36:40.930 You'll be familiar with the most famous scene in Battleship Potemkin, 36:40.930 --> 36:44.330 the so-called baby carriage scene. 36:44.330 --> 36:48.110 This is the scene of the so-called massacre on the steps 36:48.110 --> 36:51.750 when the people of Odessa have come out to see the funeral 36:51.750 --> 36:55.080 of the sailor, to see this mutinous battleship that has sailed 36:55.080 --> 37:00.920 into the harbor, they're clamoring around those famous Odessa steps 37:00.920 --> 37:05.180 that run from the highlands in the center of the city 37:05.180 --> 37:09.370 down to the docklands, and they're told to disperse. 37:09.370 --> 37:14.970 They refuse to disperse, and a long line of soldiers starts the top 37:14.970 --> 37:19.970 of the steps, jackbooted soldiers with their white tunics and rifles, 37:19.970 --> 37:25.510 and they march down the steps one by one, firing indiscriminately 37:25.510 --> 37:28.250 into the crowd as they march, and at the bottom of the steps, 37:28.250 --> 37:32.910 mounted Cossacks come and kill the people who are fleeing 37:32.910 --> 37:36.650 from the soldiers marching down the steps from the top. 37:36.650 --> 37:39.750 The baby carriage, there's a woman out walking her baby 37:39.750 --> 37:42.200 in this carriage sort of ill-advisedly, 37:42.200 --> 37:47.790 in the middle of what is a revolution in 1905, 37:47.790 --> 37:52.340 and she is shot herself, lets go of the baby carriage at the top 37:52.340 --> 37:56.490 of the steps and it bounces all the way down this granite cataraqui. 37:56.490 --> 37:59.610 You see some amazing shots from the top. 37:59.610 --> 38:03.350 You see the baby kind of lying in the baby carriage as it's bouncing 38:03.350 --> 38:05.580 down the steps, and we assume in the film 38:05.580 --> 38:08.450 that the baby did not meet a good end. 38:08.450 --> 38:12.590 This is probably the most copied scene in all 38:12.590 --> 38:15.280 of film history, by the way. 38:15.280 --> 38:19.570 Everyone from Terry Gilliam in the film "Brazil" to Brian DePalma 38:19.570 --> 38:22.220 in the film "The Untouchables," and there are many, many, 38:22.220 --> 38:23.440 many other examples of this. 38:23.440 --> 38:25.950 In fact, someone on YouTube has put together a collection 38:25.950 --> 38:27.980 of copies of this scene. 38:27.980 --> 38:34.200 Woody Allen in one of his films, has a version of it. 38:34.200 --> 38:37.360 It's the thing that made "Odessa" famous, at least in film 38:37.360 --> 38:41.200 because what Eisenstein managed to do through the vehicle 38:41.200 --> 38:45.760 of "Odessa" is to give a pre-history to the Bolshevik Revolution. 38:45.760 --> 38:48.440 Keep in mind he's doing this film in 1925. 38:48.440 --> 38:53.300 He's trying to craft a way in which he can show 1917, 38:53.300 --> 38:56.360 the Bolshevik Revolution, not as a coup de tat, 38:56.360 --> 39:00.490 which is effectively what it was, but as the long end 39:00.490 --> 39:06.780 of a revolutionary wave from 12 years earlier in 1905. 39:06.780 --> 39:10.630 He crafts a way of seeing the Bolshevik past 39:10.630 --> 39:14.900 that makes October 1917 inevitable and makes the summer and fall 39:14.900 --> 39:18.870 of 1905 in Odessa the predecessor, 39:18.870 --> 39:24.840 which is a brilliant way of achieving his end. 39:24.840 --> 39:31.420 When Eisenstein sat down to write his memoirs, and they're a real pain 39:31.420 --> 39:33.380 to read because they're written in this kind of stream 39:33.380 --> 39:36.150 of consciousness style, sort of as 39:36.150 --> 39:39.710 if James Joyce had written his memoirs in the way 39:39.710 --> 39:44.990 that he wrote some of his novels. 39:44.990 --> 39:47.680 Eisenstein reflected on what happened to the baby, 39:47.680 --> 39:51.710 and there's a very touching scene in his memoirs in which he says, 39:51.710 --> 39:55.020 you know, and he's writing them in 1946-1947. 39:55.020 --> 39:57.380 And he says, you know, I wonder what happened 39:57.380 --> 40:00.470 to that baby who was in the carriage. 40:00.470 --> 40:04.350 I never knew his name or her name, he says. 40:04.350 --> 40:08.470 He didn't know if it was a girl or a boy baby, in fact. 40:08.470 --> 40:12.660 And there's this poignant series of sentences in which he says, 40:12.660 --> 40:16.810 did that person die for the Fatherland in the Second World War? 40:16.810 --> 40:20.940 Is that person lying in a mass grave somewhere, he says. 40:20.940 --> 40:26.250 Did that person have a family and grow up in Odessa, that Odessan baby 40:26.250 --> 40:28.570 who bounced down the steps. 40:28.570 --> 40:31.780 And what I find very poignant about that is of course all of those fates 40:31.780 --> 40:35.880 that Eisenstein himself could have identified could have been possible 40:35.880 --> 40:39.870 for that kid who was less than a year old in 1925 40:39.870 --> 40:43.700 when Eisenstein was making the film. 40:43.700 --> 40:47.380 Because the thing that of course is left out of "Battleship Potemkin" 40:47.380 --> 40:50.060 and the thing that if you were living through 1905 40:50.060 --> 40:52.220 in Odessa you would have experienced yourself, 40:52.220 --> 40:56.510 is the single largest incident of violence, the anti-Jewish pogrom 40:56.510 --> 41:01.070 in Odessa in 1905, which doesn't feature into Eisenstein's film. 41:01.070 --> 41:03.720 There was no such thing as a massacre on the steps. 41:03.720 --> 41:05.710 Eisenstein invented it. 41:05.710 --> 41:08.790 There were plenty of people killed, but the largest number of people 41:08.790 --> 41:09.880 who were killed in Odessa 41:09.880 --> 41:14.900 in 1905 were actually Jews, not revolutionaries. 41:14.900 --> 41:17.560 And that struck me as a sort of poignant way of thinking 41:17.560 --> 41:21.090 about what would happen to Odessa during the Second World War 41:21.090 --> 41:28.880 from 1941 to 1944, when the city was besieged by and then occupied 41:28.880 --> 41:33.740 by an axis power, not Nazi Germany but one 41:33.740 --> 41:35.970 of Germany's allies, Romania. 41:35.970 --> 41:39.020 It was the largest Soviet city 41:39.020 --> 41:44.610 under non-German occupation throughout the period of the War. 41:44.610 --> 41:49.600 It was led during that period of occupation, 41:49.600 --> 41:53.900 by the person who is standing behind the desk here, 41:53.900 --> 41:56.930 a person by the name of George Alexianu. 41:56.930 --> 42:00.890 The person of the mural on the wall is of course a picture 42:00.890 --> 42:04.910 of Jon Antonescu, who was the Generalissimo or effective leader 42:04.910 --> 42:08.080 of Romania during the Second World War. 42:08.080 --> 42:13.640 Alexianu sort of in a way succeeded Voronsov. 42:13.640 --> 42:17.070 He was the effective governor of one little slice of New Russia 42:17.070 --> 42:19.620 that the Romanians called Transnistria. 42:19.620 --> 42:23.850 It was a piece of territory occupied by Romania throughout the war. 42:23.850 --> 42:25.420 Its governor was Alexianu. 42:25.420 --> 42:31.660 He had been the Romanian King's regent or representative 42:31.660 --> 42:37.020 in another part of Romania before the war and had experience 42:37.020 --> 42:44.940 with dealing with restive frontiers, as Transnistria ended up being 42:44.940 --> 42:49.080 for Romania throughout the period of the war. 42:49.080 --> 42:53.210 Another picture of Alexianu, just on the right-hand side here, 42:53.210 --> 42:56.250 giving a salute that is not the Nazi salute but was the Romanian 42:56.250 --> 43:02.200 or Roman salute used by Romania during the war. 43:02.200 --> 43:07.980 The city was occupied for 907 days, but interestingly, 43:07.980 --> 43:11.770 very little has been written about, by Odessans themselves, 43:11.770 --> 43:14.960 by Soviet historians or indeed by Romanian historians, 43:14.960 --> 43:21.060 about this period, even though it was unique in so many ways; 43:21.060 --> 43:24.120 the largest Soviet city occupied by non-Germans. 43:24.120 --> 43:26.020 And in fact, Odessa after the war became one 43:26.020 --> 43:30.110 of the first five hero cities, so named by the Soviets 43:30.110 --> 43:32.810 because of the way they had spent the war either fighting the 43:32.810 --> 43:36.480 occupiers or under occupation themselves. 43:36.480 --> 43:38.260 And omen of the things I wanted to do in this book, 43:38.260 --> 43:40.350 particularly by working in the Odessa archives, 43:40.350 --> 43:43.120 was to try to tell this story. 43:43.120 --> 43:44.410 There are a lot of twists 43:44.410 --> 43:47.490 to Odessa's occupation history during the War. 43:47.490 --> 43:50.430 It was the first time in Odessa's history a Jewish ghetto was 43:50.430 --> 43:51.470 ever created. 43:51.470 --> 43:54.270 There was never such thing as a Jewish ghetto 43:54.270 --> 43:56.880 in the city before the Romanians created one 43:56.880 --> 44:00.520 at the end of 1941 and 1942. 44:00.520 --> 44:03.260 The other twist is that during this period of occupation, 44:03.260 --> 44:06.260 Odessa witnesses the near total elimination 44:06.260 --> 44:08.670 of its Jewish population. 44:08.670 --> 44:14.890 Jews had numbered somewhere around 200,000 people in the summer of 1941 44:14.890 --> 44:18.100 in the city, about a third of the city's total. 44:18.100 --> 44:21.960 Probably half of that number, half to two-thirds of that number, 44:21.960 --> 44:27.480 actually managed to evacuate the city by road, by rail, by ship, 44:27.480 --> 44:31.900 before the Romanians take over in October of 1941. 44:31.900 --> 44:35.920 But there are probably somewhere around 70 or 80,000 Jews left 44:35.920 --> 44:38.910 in the city when Romania takes control. 44:38.910 --> 44:41.840 When the Soviet Union comes back in, the Red Army comes back 44:41.840 --> 44:48.160 in the spring of 1944 they do a very quick census and they find 48 left. 44:48.160 --> 44:52.140 That's not 48,000; that's 48 people who are left 44:52.140 --> 44:55.530 as part of the Jewish community. 44:55.530 --> 44:59.870 Very few people have written about what happened to that sort of, 44:59.870 --> 45:05.190 the remainder of the population who experienced the war there. 45:05.190 --> 45:09.010 Rather few people had bothered to ask. 45:09.010 --> 45:12.690 But what happened to them is essentially this, 45:12.690 --> 45:20.900 that there was a large deportation effort in the fall of 1941 and 1942, 45:20.900 --> 45:26.770 which is preceded by massacres that take place in the city 45:26.770 --> 45:29.680 at Romanian instigation, also at the instigation of one 45:29.680 --> 45:34.420 of the German Einsatzgruppen, or the mobile killing units of the Reich 45:34.420 --> 45:37.640 that come through the city along with the initial period 45:37.640 --> 45:40.570 of occupation in October. 45:40.570 --> 45:44.720 It ends up being the largest instance of planned deportation 45:44.720 --> 45:48.890 or killing by an axis power other than Nazi Germany. 45:48.890 --> 45:52.180 What happened in Odessa has that status, 45:52.180 --> 45:55.550 even though we haven't spent a great deal of time thinking about it, 45:55.550 --> 45:58.870 but it's a very important part of the Second World War experience. 45:58.870 --> 46:02.830 So I tell in the book the story of Alexianu himself, 46:02.830 --> 46:05.630 who incidentally is executed in 1946 46:05.630 --> 46:10.650 by the Romanian Communist authorities after the war. 46:10.650 --> 46:13.310 He's executed for crimes against humanity. 46:13.310 --> 46:16.710 You can in fact watch the film of that execution. 46:16.710 --> 46:20.940 It was filmed along with Antonescu, the Generalissimo of Romania, 46:20.940 --> 46:25.740 was filmed by Romanian newsreel at the time. 46:25.740 --> 46:29.910 The amazing thing to me in that film footage is that Alexianu, 46:29.910 --> 46:34.310 unlike the other three people who are being executed at the same time, 46:34.310 --> 46:36.540 sort of stands ramrod straight, 46:36.540 --> 46:39.310 either out of conviction or out of fear. 46:39.310 --> 46:43.000 Antonescu salutes the people who are about to kill him, the others sort 46:43.000 --> 46:49.070 of squirm and Alexianu stands straight as a whole. 46:49.070 --> 46:52.260 The book tells the story of how Alexianu got there, 46:52.260 --> 46:55.120 what he did during the war, but it's also 46:55.120 --> 46:56.990 about the much more intimate experience 46:56.990 --> 46:58.820 of what the occupation was like, 46:58.820 --> 47:00.810 in particular about the very difficult subject 47:00.810 --> 47:04.070 of collaboration during the war. 47:04.070 --> 47:07.250 It's easy to tell the story of Odessa's occupation as something 47:07.250 --> 47:11.500 that foreigners did to Odessa, but what you find in the archives 47:11.500 --> 47:14.190 if you go there is plenty of information about what Odessans did 47:14.190 --> 47:18.930 to themselves; that is the hundreds and hundreds of letters that I found 47:18.930 --> 47:23.170 in the archives that I think no one has seen since 1945, hundreds 47:23.170 --> 47:29.430 and hundreds of letters of average Odessans denouncing their neighbors 47:29.430 --> 47:31.880 to the Romanian occupation authorities. 47:31.880 --> 47:35.230 And they are searing reading, because what you're looking 47:35.230 --> 47:41.740 into is the dark underside of a city that prized its cosmopolitanism, 47:41.740 --> 47:45.830 that took its cosmopolitanism very seriously, but during this period 47:45.830 --> 47:49.860 of tragedy, of occupation, of war, of scarcity, 47:49.860 --> 47:52.880 learned very quickly how to devour itself. 47:52.880 --> 47:54.270 So the book ends up trying 47:54.270 --> 47:59.320 to describe how fragile social order can actually be, how one has to sort 47:59.320 --> 48:04.760 of work at keeping an orderly and cosmopolitan society. 48:04.760 --> 48:07.790 Jews came back to Odessa after the war but they never came back 48:07.790 --> 48:11.940 in the numbers that were there before the war. 48:11.940 --> 48:14.960 Many of those who had spent the war outside the city were living 48:14.960 --> 48:17.710 in central Asia, either stayed there or came back 48:17.710 --> 48:19.710 to other parts of the Soviet Union. 48:19.710 --> 48:24.940 Many of those in the 1970s and '80s eventually moved abroad to places 48:24.940 --> 48:28.800 like Brighton Beach, for example, or Little Odessa in New York, 48:28.800 --> 48:31.570 which is actually where the book ends. 48:31.570 --> 48:34.340 Pushkin once said that in Odessa you can smell Europe, 48:34.340 --> 48:37.190 but if you go to Brighton Beach you can smell Odessa, 48:37.190 --> 48:41.220 and that is the combination of axle grease and parsley 48:41.220 --> 48:46.040 and old cooking oil and sour milk, perfume, flowers, 48:46.040 --> 48:51.370 that incredible combination of smells along with a fair amount 48:51.370 --> 48:56.750 of sea air and saltwater that defines I think the identity 48:56.750 --> 49:02.010 of Odessa and defines the identity of Brighton Beach Avenue as well. 49:02.010 --> 49:04.890 Brighton Beach is a rather melancholy place 49:04.890 --> 49:07.550 but also a very hopeful place, and it is a place 49:07.550 --> 49:10.790 where I think you can learn the major lesson of Odessa, 49:10.790 --> 49:13.040 which is this, that being neighborly, 49:13.040 --> 49:15.800 being a good neighbor, takes work. 49:15.800 --> 49:18.290 It's not something that just comes naturally to all of us. 49:18.290 --> 49:22.420 Being cosmopolitan isn't a virtue; it's more like a project. 49:22.420 --> 49:28.260 And at times of tragedy and sadness of occupation and war, 49:28.260 --> 49:34.920 when people stop working at being cosmopolitan, it can go away 49:34.920 --> 49:38.690 like dust kicked up by a sea breeze. 49:38.690 --> 49:42.010 Odessa shows I think how cosmopolitanism succeeds, 49:42.010 --> 49:44.160 how it can succeed, how it can be a magnificent way 49:44.160 --> 49:47.260 of organizing ourselves and our communities but also the tragedy 49:47.260 --> 49:49.490 that ensues when we stop working at it hard enough. 49:49.490 --> 49:53.510 I'll stop there and I'm delighted to take your questions. 49:53.510 --> 50:01.390 [Applause] 50:01.390 --> 50:02.670 >> How much time do we have, by the way? 50:02.670 --> 50:04.390 >> We've got about 8 or 9 minutes. 50:04.390 --> 50:05.680 >> Okay, excellent. 50:05.680 --> 50:08.660 >> Where was the deportation of the Jews? 50:08.660 --> 50:11.690 >> Okay, so the deportation actions. 50:11.690 --> 50:14.180 They're deported to camps and ghettos 50:14.180 --> 50:17.230 that the Romanians themselves create in this band 50:17.230 --> 50:20.180 of territory called Transnistria. 50:20.180 --> 50:23.510 Survival rates in Transnistria were probably an order 50:23.510 --> 50:26.910 of magnitude higher than in German occupied areas. 50:26.910 --> 50:31.030 So the Romanians, once Jews are deported from the city, 50:31.030 --> 50:34.460 the Romanians don't have the equivalent of German Einsatzgruppen 50:34.460 --> 50:39.220 or mobile killing units that are there to kill as many Jews 50:39.220 --> 50:43.540 as possible, but a large number of people do die from typhus 50:43.540 --> 50:47.930 or from starvation or from exposure in places where they're sent 50:47.930 --> 50:49.450 by the Romanian authorities. 50:49.450 --> 50:51.640 Yes, ma'am? 50:51.640 --> 50:57.160 >> To what extent is Odessa Ukrainian? 50:57.160 --> 51:04.680 You describe the Russian origin of the city, but to what extent-- 51:04.680 --> 51:06.360 >> Well, Odessa is certainly Ukrainian 51:06.360 --> 51:08.240 in the sense that it's in Ukraine. 51:08.240 --> 51:12.800 It's a part of the independent country of Ukraine now, 51:12.800 --> 51:17.540 and there have been efforts over the last 5 of 10 years in particular, 51:17.540 --> 51:22.850 to Ukrainianize, in a small way, the sort of public space in Odessa. 51:22.850 --> 51:28.620 For example, if you go to the old Odessa City Center you'll find new 51:28.620 --> 51:32.040 street signs that are in the Ukrainian language. 51:32.040 --> 51:34.180 They're made to look very old, so you think you're looking 51:34.180 --> 51:38.080 at a 19th century street sign but it's with Ukrainian spelling 51:38.080 --> 51:41.000 which would never have happened in the 19th century. 51:41.000 --> 51:45.410 In fact, until the 1840s most street signs in Odessa were in Italian, 51:45.410 --> 51:50.970 not in Russian because it was a kind of lingua franca around that part 51:50.970 --> 51:55.110 of the Black Sea, and a very large Italian community still living 51:55.110 --> 51:55.680 there then. 51:55.680 --> 51:58.270 There have been other efforts to sort of -- 51:58.270 --> 52:01.190 in fact, what has happened in Odessa over the last 10 years 52:01.190 --> 52:04.110 in particular, is a kind of war of monuments. 52:04.110 --> 52:07.060 So there will be a pro-Russian, or what's perceived 52:07.060 --> 52:11.640 as a pro-Russian monument erected and then a private society 52:11.640 --> 52:14.390 or the local city council will erect something that's perceived 52:14.390 --> 52:18.570 to be pro-Ukrainian monument or Ukrainian national hero or a poet 52:18.570 --> 52:20.430 or something along those lines. 52:20.430 --> 52:24.560 And there were small riots when a statute 52:24.560 --> 52:29.270 of Catherine the Great was put up in the city; actually, restored, 52:29.270 --> 52:33.390 the statue was put back to where it had been in the 19th century, 52:33.390 --> 52:36.860 but it was perceived as being an overly, by some local Ukrainians, 52:36.860 --> 52:39.710 perceived as being an overly pro-Russian statement 52:39.710 --> 52:42.450 to put this Russian Empress in Sarina right in the middle 52:42.450 --> 52:45.200 of the city, near the Odessa steps. 52:45.200 --> 52:49.970 The city though is in ethnic terms, majority Ukrainian now, 52:49.970 --> 52:56.140 even though in sort of terms of ethnic population, even though many 52:56.140 --> 52:59.490 of those people are actually Russian speaking and the language 52:59.490 --> 53:03.040 that you hear in public overwhelmingly is still Russian 53:03.040 --> 53:04.890 rather than Ukrainian. 53:04.890 --> 53:05.620 Yes? 53:05.620 --> 53:07.770 >> There was such inference of Italian artists 53:07.770 --> 53:10.280 in Eastern Europe toward the 19th century. 53:10.280 --> 53:14.350 Was this there in Odessa, Italian culture, Italian art? 53:14.350 --> 53:18.090 It was very much there in Hungary and Poland, in other countries. 53:18.090 --> 53:23.040 >> Yeah, this begins to decline by the middle of the 19th century, 53:23.040 --> 53:27.590 primarily because of shifts in who the main benefactors 53:27.590 --> 53:30.550 of that kind of art would be. 53:30.550 --> 53:33.300 Italians sort of control the grain trade 53:33.300 --> 53:35.410 at the very beginning of the 19th century. 53:35.410 --> 53:39.800 They controlled shipping in Odessa, but as more and more Jews began 53:39.800 --> 53:42.880 to move to the city from the 1830s forward, 53:42.880 --> 53:45.720 it becomes the economic space, the public space 53:45.720 --> 53:48.540 of the city becomes much more dominated 53:48.540 --> 53:50.570 by the local Jewish community. 53:50.570 --> 53:54.830 And so what you find is that there's a real shift in the nature 53:54.830 --> 53:56.850 of the demographics in the city 53:56.850 --> 53:59.530 and the Italian influence begins to wane. 53:59.530 --> 54:02.330 People are collecting, whether they're Jewish, Russian, Ukrainian, 54:02.330 --> 54:05.720 whatever, they're collecting artists from all around Europe and all 54:05.720 --> 54:08.730 around the world and in fact there's some magnificent collections, 54:08.730 --> 54:13.940 private collections in the city that remain up through the Soviet period. 54:13.940 --> 54:18.190 But the Italian influence in the public space in Odessa begins 54:18.190 --> 54:20.620 to decline already by the 1830s. 54:20.620 --> 54:24.720 >> Were the pogroms of the Russians in Odessa during the turn 54:24.720 --> 54:26.690 of the 20th century like they were in Russia? 54:26.690 --> 54:32.870 >> Yes, so you have a sort of wave of pogroms in Odessa in 1871, 1881, 54:32.870 --> 54:37.810 and then most spectacularly 1905, 1906, which the 1905 pogrom was 54:37.810 --> 54:40.470 at the time the largest most destructive pogrom 54:40.470 --> 54:44.750 in Russian history, which also interestingly then doesn't make it 54:44.750 --> 54:47.910 into Battleship Potemkin, Even though you were living 54:47.910 --> 54:51.440 through that period it's the thing that you would have remarked on. 54:51.440 --> 54:55.970 There is a wonderful novel of Odessa from this period, 54:55.970 --> 54:59.490 recently translated a couple of years ago, called the Five. 54:59.490 --> 55:03.000 So if you're interested in the 1905-06 period, 55:03.000 --> 55:05.500 it's written by a man may be familiar to some of you, 55:05.500 --> 55:07.130 named Vladimir Jabotinsky. 55:07.130 --> 55:10.480 Jabotinsky was the founder of revisionist Zionism, 55:10.480 --> 55:15.540 and is now the sort of inspiration for example Likud party in Israel, 55:15.540 --> 55:19.550 very famous right-wing Zionist who also happened 55:19.550 --> 55:22.480 to be quite a good writer, I think and has recently been translated 55:22.480 --> 55:26.400 into English and is worth looking at. 55:26.400 --> 55:27.400 Yes, ma'am? 55:27.400 --> 55:31.660 >> What kind of multinational company opened business right now 55:31.660 --> 55:32.980 in Odessa? 55:32.980 --> 55:36.080 >> What kind of multinational companies are in Odessa? 55:36.080 --> 55:40.930 You name it, just about anything you can imagine you can find 55:40.930 --> 55:42.130 in Odessa these days. 55:42.130 --> 55:46.510 I don't know much about levels of investment or which countries 55:46.510 --> 55:49.270 or which companies are most represented there, 55:49.270 --> 55:54.070 but there are people doing everything from retail sales 55:54.070 --> 55:56.280 to investment in the port to shipping, 55:56.280 --> 55:58.280 just about anything you can imagine. 55:58.280 --> 56:03.670 In fact, if you want to go to Isaak Babel's apartment, which is not open 56:03.670 --> 56:07.410 to the public but there's a little plaque on the building 56:07.410 --> 56:10.820 where he lived in the Odessa City Center, you have to pass 56:10.820 --> 56:14.660 under Bang & Olufsen, the sign and sort 56:14.660 --> 56:20.310 of the Bang & Olufsen Music Shop and Hifi Shop right 56:20.310 --> 56:21.390 at the on the ground floor. 56:21.390 --> 56:24.470 So the city is really sort of transformed and is very, 56:24.470 --> 56:26.740 very European in terms of the shops and what is there. 56:26.740 --> 56:27.920 Yes, ma'am. 56:27.920 --> 56:34.690 >> If I were interested in doing genealogy for Odessan families 56:34.690 --> 56:37.670 where would you suggest starting? 56:37.670 --> 56:41.020 >> Well, maybe the Genealogy and Local History Reading Room 56:41.020 --> 56:41.940 at the Library of Congress. 56:41.940 --> 56:43.120 That would be one place. 56:43.120 --> 56:47.480 But it's also -- for Odessa itself there are a number of travel guides 56:47.480 --> 56:51.180 and genealogical guides, especially if you're interested 56:51.180 --> 56:56.240 in Jewish heritage in Odessa, which is sort of easier to trace perhaps 56:56.240 --> 56:57.790 because there are more resources. 56:57.790 --> 57:00.950 When I was working in the archives there, 57:00.950 --> 57:03.920 there was a professional genealogical researcher, 57:03.920 --> 57:06.670 who was Polish actually, who had been hired by someone 57:06.670 --> 57:08.700 to do some research in the archives. 57:08.700 --> 57:12.110 The archives are in a very, very bad state, I have to say, 57:12.110 --> 57:15.130 not because there aren't very talented people 57:15.130 --> 57:17.180 and committed people trying to keep them in a good state 57:17.180 --> 57:19.380 but it's simply for budgetary reasons. 57:19.380 --> 57:23.780 So you would need to hire somebody in order to do that work for you. 57:23.780 --> 57:27.530 But the -- is this a Jewish family history? 57:27.530 --> 57:31.500 Well, all of the old marriage records from synagogues 57:31.500 --> 57:35.460 in Odessa are concentrated in the Odessa regional archives now, 57:35.460 --> 57:40.260 because all of the synagogues were either destroyed, closed, whatever, 57:40.260 --> 57:43.140 during the Soviet and remaining occupation periods. 57:43.140 --> 57:45.280 But so much of that stuff was actually saved 57:45.280 --> 57:47.510 in the regional archives, so that's the place you would go rather 57:47.510 --> 57:52.220 than to an individual synagogue archive. 57:52.220 --> 57:59.230 >> How are religions represented in Odessa, 57:59.230 --> 58:00.010 Russian Orthodox, synagogues? 58:00.010 --> 58:01.970 >> How are religions represented? 58:01.970 --> 58:03.890 Because it's an overwhelmingly sort 58:03.890 --> 58:05.790 of Russian-speaking Ukrainian community, 58:05.790 --> 58:10.980 it's an overwhelmingly Orthodox city in terms of religious practice. 58:10.980 --> 58:14.950 Some of the major cathedrals have been restored. 58:14.950 --> 58:18.150 The old Spaso-Preobrazhenskiy Cathedral, 58:18.150 --> 58:19.990 which is the main cathedral in Odessa, 58:19.990 --> 58:22.150 right in the City Center and is quite lovely. 58:22.150 --> 58:26.720 It's where incidentally the Voronsov family is buried, so you can go 58:26.720 --> 58:31.730 and visit the grave of Count Voronsoz and Liz Voronsova there. 58:31.730 --> 58:36.280 That was utterly destroyed, down the foundations by the Bolsheviks 58:36.280 --> 58:41.760 in the 1930s, and about 7, 8 years ago it was reopened 58:41.760 --> 58:46.620 and has been completely rebuilt to its 19th century style. 58:46.620 --> 58:50.250 The old main synagogue in Odessa has also been restored. 58:50.250 --> 58:52.060 There's a kosher restaurant in the basement 58:52.060 --> 58:55.870 and very active community associated with that synagogue, 58:55.870 --> 58:58.240 and the Odessan authorities are trying 58:58.240 --> 59:03.900 to restore the Brodsky Synagogue to the Jewish community, 59:03.900 --> 59:06.130 which would be a very good thing for the community. 59:06.130 --> 59:08.610 For researchers it would be a tough situation 59:08.610 --> 59:10.670 because that would mean the archives would probably be closed 59:10.670 --> 59:15.170 for a very long time, so managing that is going to be a challenge. 59:15.170 --> 59:18.000 There's also a very, very large Jewish community center now 59:18.000 --> 59:23.390 in Odessa which is magnificent and huge and glass and steel 59:23.390 --> 59:27.040 and absolutely gorgeous, even though the Jewish community is quite small. 59:27.040 --> 59:30.060 Thank you. 59:30.060 --> 59:37.980 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. 59:37.980 --> 59:40.320 Visit us at loc dot gov.