Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams Read Free

to Israel, the United States, and other foreign countries. Between 1968 and 1980 alone, more than twenty-four thousand Odessan Jews—a little under a quarter of the Jewish population—left the Soviet Union for good. More followed during the Gorbachev era and after. 9
    The end of Jewish Odessa produced an Odessan diaspora that gave the city a new kind of life well beyond the harbor and Deribasovskaya. In time, Odessa became revered as the Soviet Union’s imaginary Mississippi Delta, a remarkable incubator for music and dreamy nostalgia, yet also a place whose creative power really became evident once people managed to escape it. The city already had its Mark Twain in Isaac Babel, a writer who grasped the distinctive speech, social mores, and colorful characters of an age whose passing few people actually regretted. What it lacked was its Robert Johnson or Muddy Waters—the musicians who provided the soundtrack for a lost world. After the Second World War, Soviet officialdom and popular culture managed to do something that Babel, shot by his Stalinist captors nearly two years before the Romanians had marched into his hometown, could not have foreseen: to transform the old city into an object of schmaltzy and melodic longing.
     
    W HEN S ERGEI E ISENSTEIN sat down to compile his fragmentary and poetic memoirs, he wondered somberly about the fate of the hundreds of extras in Battleship Potemkin , the men and women he had sent racing up and down the Odessa steps with a few shouts through his megaphone. He could remember many of them, since he had always made a point of learning the names of as many people on set as possible. But the identity of the film’s most famous actor—the baby in the carriage that bounces down the bloody staircase—remained a mystery. “He would be twenty now,” Eisenstein wrote in 1946.
    Where is he—or she? I do not know whether it was a boy or a girl.
    What is he doing?
    Did he defend Odessa, as a young man?
    Or was she driven abroad into slavery?
    Does he now rejoice that Odessa is a liberated and resurrected town?
    Or is he lying in a mass grave, somewhere far away? 10
    Any of those fates would have been possible, but the city had had enough of villains and victims. By the time the Red Army goose-stepped down Richelieu Street, with smiling faces and submachine guns strapped across worn tunics, a pantheon of heroes was already emerging in popular lore and Communist Party history-writing. There were NKVD agents such as the famed Molodtsov-Badayev gang who launched daring strikes from their hideouts in the catacombs during the defense of Odessa. The almond-eyed sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko chalked up more recorded kills than any other Soviet soldier. The boy-patriot Yakov Gordiyenko, a graduate of the school the Bolsheviks had built out of marble quarried from the defunct Preobrazhensky Cathedral, ferried secret messages to the Communist underground before being shot by the fascists in 1942.
    None of these stories was exactly untrue. Partisan units, outfitted and directed by Moscow, had disrupted the early months of the Romanian occupation. But the postwar tales of sacrifice and derring-do often exalted minor figures in Odessa’s wartime experience, marshaling bit players as evidence of the city’s valiant, if only belatedly successful, stand against fascism and foreign domination. In the rebuilt city, commemorative plaques and statues served as public surrogates for private and more complex memories. An apartment where partisans hatched their plans and a building from which Soviet commanders directed the countersiege became everyday monuments to Odessa’s misremembered heroism. These tales of sacrifice and achievement were put on display in a new Museum of the Defense of Odessa, which registered tens of thousands of visitors annually. 11
    Odessa was one of the first four Soviet cities—along with Leningrad, Sevastopol, and Stalingrad—to be awarded the title Gorod-Geroi , or “hero