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

city.” Leningrad held out against a withering German siege for nearly two and a half years. Sevastopol withstood nine months of heavy artillery barrages. Stalingrad was the anvil on which Germany’s war on the eastern front was eventually crushed. Odessa was an oddity in that illustrious group. Most of the population spent the war safely evacuated to the east. Much of the rest found ways of cooperating, either actively or grudgingly, with the Romanians. But Odessa was the only major Soviet center held captive by an invader other than Nazi Germany, and being a martyr, however ambiguous, conferred a special kind of status.
    In time the hero city came to outshine the real one. The Soviet narrative of resistance and valor signaled Odessa’s passing fully into the realm of nostalgia. The myth of its experience in the Second World War was now woven into a new set of characteristics that were thought to define it: amicable multiethnicity, good beaches, faux-Mediterranean jocularity, and a zest for life that was only vaguely Jewish. As a favorite and sun-drenched locale for workers’ holidays, Odessa was becoming famous again as precisely the frontier destination that Catherine had intended, an important attraction on the Soviet Union’s southern coast.
    The whole process of remaking Odessa had begun even before its liberation. Just as Gherman Pântea was overseeing the reconstruction of the Odessa opera house and Gheorghe Alexianu was finding the most efficient way of squeezing a profit out of Transnistria, the Soviets were making another Odessa movie. Two Warriors is a forgettable piece of wartime propaganda produced by the Tashkent Film Studios, home to filmmakers and actors evacuated from occupied parts of the Soviet Union. The picture is the Soviet equivalent of minor Hollywood films that were eventually eclipsed by those with some claim to greatness, the handful of Errol Flynn and John Wayne vehicles that added complex characters to the standard model-navy battle sequences and patriotic sermonizing.
    The film tells the story of Arkady Dzyubin and Sasha Svintsov, the two soldiers of the title, and their adventures during the siege of Leningrad. The comrades share the deep bond of frontline friendship, the kind that allows Dzyubin to rib Svintsov to the point of anger, but also the kind that pushes Svintsov to rush into danger—twice—to save his friend from certain death. Dzyubin is a wingman par excellence. When the tongue-tied Svintsov gives up on getting the girl, a charming blonde Leningrader with a winning smile, Dzyubin steps in to ghost-write the love letters that win her heart.
    Critics didn’t think much of the movie when it was released in 1943. The plot is shaky at best, and the musical numbers are pasted awkwardly into the script. But behind the front lines, Soviet movie-goers were soon humming the signature tunes and laughing at the antics of Dzyubin and Svintsov. It was exactly the kind of feel-good flick that the Soviet Union required at the time, even as its western reaches were under foreign control. According to the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, these weren’t just actors “but real, authentic people” going through the same traumas and everyday triumphs of their Soviet comrades. 12
    No one who saw the film could have missed the basic message. Svintsov is from the Ural Mountains, the end point of European Russia and the place beyond which, in the middle of the war, millions of Soviet citizens had found refuge. Dzyubin was from Odessa, the Soviet Union’s southern paradise, which now lay beneath the fascist boot. The two men were from different places, but they were fighting for essentially the same thing: Svintsov to hold on to what the Soviet Union had managed to retain, Dzyubin to take back what the foreign invader had wrenched away. Beyond the patriotism, at the film’s core is the wish that many of the film’s viewers would have shared—the simple desire to be done with war and go home. For the