Introduction

To understand the history of Odessa is to have the ability to see through a mirage of romanticism, propaganda, and popular culture into the real and mostly just as unbelievable truth, yet still accept the mirage as just as valid.  Just as valid, because it presents a side of history that can't be told through mere chronology.


"Odessa's history is encased in legends of imagined gilded and wicked past, a body of lore that has been compiled, enriched, embellished, and passed down for more than two centuries" -Jarod Tanny


It is a place that escapes definition, almost as if it has tried to.  Catherine the Great's "pearl on the Black Sea" was decorated perfectly for regality and flaunting, like her very own St. Petersburg, but there existed a lively underworld of endearing criminals, prostitutes, and sailors; and the two worlds seemed to live side-by-side, even mesh together, only in Odessa, where bandits could be heroes and the only lifestyle that was best was the one that made for the best stories.  


There on the Black Sea also took place a transformation of Jewish life into a cosmopolitan and lucrative lifestyle that spread across the Pale and survived despite it's home's brutal pogroms and the horrors of the Holocaust.  In Odessa a new kind of "jewishness" flourished and tied both worlds of the rich and the poor together, creating writers like Isaac Babel, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and Ahad Ha'am as well as inspiring a young Lev Bronstein to become Leon Trotsky.  


The history of Odessa can be seen in Mark Bernes' acting, Eisenstein's famous movie, and Babel's character Benya Krik... that is if one is able to separate the fact from the fiction, where the former might even be more unbelievable than the latter.

King, Charles. Odessa: Genius And Death In A City Of Dreams. New York: W.W.
     Norton & Company, Inc., 2011. N. pag. Amazon Kindle. Web. 4 Apr. 2012.