Portrait of a Soviet Seaport

...A leading American scholar and specialist in Soviet affairs, he concentrated on their cultural and intellectual pursuits, as well as their interethnicity, yet managed to capture a sense of what Russians call byt—everyday life...

...Yakov Smirnov, who emigrated to the U.S., has made it here as a stand-up comic and has even been invited back home to take part in a city-wide "Day of Laughter...

...Anti-Semitic stereotypes portrayed the Jews as clannish, dishonest and suspicious persons who worked too hard and did not drink...

...It was the home of the founders of modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature, Mendele Mocher Sforim and Chaim Nachman Bialik...

...Clearly, such people were not to be trusted...

...Censorship of the cinema is detailed by a theater director, who reports that "during previews of foreign films to Party dignitaries, censors would quite literally use scissors and tape to cut out erotic sequences...

...The answer is, "A port on the Black Sea that is the locale of Sergei Eisenstein's classic film, The Battleship Potëmkin...

...Two years ago, I visited a new literary museum that was opened there in the 1980s...

...Reviewed by Gene Sosin Former Director of Program Planning, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Suppose that you are playing Jeopardy and the category is Russian cities...

...The Province Committee of the Party (obkom) was the real repository of the power that trickled down to lowly Party functionaries...

...Hospitals, for instance, would distort statistics by prematurely discharging or even refusing to admit seriously ill patients if their deaths might damage the institution's image...

...The administrative director of the Odessa Opera tells Friedberg that the secretary of the Party's opera organization was far more powerful than the director of the opera itself...

...This despite the fact that most of them are Jewish and were hampered by official discrimination in their search for decent educational and employment opportunities...

...Public lectures, chiefly organized by the Znanie (knowledge) society, were an important part of Odessa's intellectual life, but the text of each talk had to be cleared with Glavlit, the censorship agency, and the lecturer was expected to read the approved material without improvising...

...Friedberg drew from this reservoir for his interviews...

...They lived apart from the masses, much like the aristocracy before the Revolution, and had cafes and stores for their exclusive use...

...He spent hours in "unstructured Russian conversation" with 102 respondents, including engineers, scientists, university teachers and students, physicians, and musicians...

...Disposable medical equipment was almost unknown and nearly everything had to be reused over and ? ver, resulting in a very large number of postoperative infections and toxic reactions...

...A novelist recalls that an acquaintance who was engaged in research on Freud had to obtain permission from the university's Party organization to get hold of a volume he needed...

...In the early 19th century it was celebrated for its scientific, literary and musical activity: Dmitri Mendeleyev, who developed the periodic table of the elements, was a resident...

...Thus it makes an interesting focus for Maurice Friedberg's study of the cultural and intellectual climate of the Brezhnev era...

...the void was then filled by the rise of virtuosi David Oistrakh and Emil Gilels...

...Although his interlocutors have been here for a while, Friedberg maintains that conditions in Odessa have not changed much in the past 15 years or so, except for increased freedom of expression and aggravated shortages of food, medicine, clothing, and housing...

...Aleksandr Glazunov, Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov conducted orchestras in the famous Odessa Opera...

...A more subtle type of anti-Semitism is related by a well-known novelist, who was told to avoid Jewish subject matter in his writing: "We don't want you to become another Babel...

...The Party acted as the guardian of ideological purity...

...There was no mention of the fact that he was a Jew, however, or that he perished in Stalin's purges...

...corruption was almost universal...

...Petersburg in the North, wrote part of Eugene Onegin and other poems there...

...Many of the people with whom Friedberg spoke expressed genuine nostalgia and affection for their native city...

...Not surprisingly, the Party elite enjoyed the privileges of a ruling class...

...It was filled with beautifully mounted exhibits of memorabilia of leading writers who were active in Odessa during the last two centuries, and I was pleased to see that Babel was represented...

...Writers and teachers, painters and journalists, librarians and actors, stubbornly persisted in their efforts to preserve against all odds a degree of professional integrity...

...In theperiod of détente, someone quipped that the Soviet-American cultural exchange consisted of "sending our Odessa musicians to the USSR, while their Odessa musicians come to the U.S...

...Friedberg's sources describe the appalling state of medical practice, particularly the chronic shortage of drugs and basic supplies: "It was not unusual to have 20 thermometers for 80 patients in a hospital...

...Odessans are noted for their satirical bent and witty anecdotes, a tradition perpetuated by professionals such as the popular writer-raconteur Mikhail Zhvanetsky...

...Odessa was founded in 1794, during the reign of Catherine the Great...

...A professional chess player recalls that "rigid Jewish quotas existed for the admission of Jews to institutions of higher learning and for hiring...

...For all of its watchdogs, says Friedberg, the Party "could not quite destroy the resilience of the city's musicians and artists, the professional pride of its physicians and engineers, or the curiosity and daring of its young...

...Medical equipment had to be purchased illegally or through outright bribes...

...When it became possible to leave in the 1970s, thousands more Jews departed, most of them settling in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, now dubbed "Little Odessa...

...Every attempt was made to flunk Jews in secondary schools and at entrance examinations to the universities...

...Needles for blood transfusions often turned dull from overuse and nurses would have to sharpen them manually...

...The early post-Revolution years saw the emergence of well-known writers like Isaak Babel, Yuri Olesha, Valentin Katayev, and the humorists Ilyallf and Eugeny Petrov...

...If you reply, "What is Odessa...

...The pogroms of the early 1900s impelled thousands of Jews to emigrate, mainly to America...

...Those who remained and their descendants suffered both local and State-sponsored anti-Semitism throughout most of the Soviet period...

...The city is one of the largest in the now independent Ukraine...

...But this bustling cosmopolitan seaport and resort is thoroughly Russified: The language spoken in the streets and taught in the schools is almost exclusively Russian, and there is little sense of Ukrainian nationalism...

...That this entailed many painful compromises goes without saying...

...you are right, even though strictly speaking it is in the Ukraine...

...Aleksandr Pushkin, exiled briefly from his native St...

...Odessa was also a vibrant center of Jewish life and culture in Tsarist times...

...The revolution of 1991, speeding the demise of Soviet and Communist Party rule, has contributed to an atmosphere of liberation in Odessa, but it will take longer for the quality of byt to improve...

...It was the Communist official who "recommended" the opera's repertory...

...The title of Friedberg's fascinating narrative is taken from one of Babel's Odessa Tales...

...If a personnel director chose to disregard instructions and hired too many Jews at his factory, office, or laboratory, he risked losing his own job...

...Subsequently, these slides were sold as pornographic postcards, with the Party big shot and the technician splitting the profits...

...Distinct from most big Soviet cities in many ways, including a mild climate that has long attracted writers and artists as well as vacationers, Odessa nevertheless did not escape the baleful influence of the Communist Party...

...Now that the Communist Party has been banned and the Soviet Union itself is dissolving, perhaps things will at last be done differently in a free Odessa...

...Indeed, the book presents a vivid case history of life in the "period of stagnation" that pervaded the USSR for almost two decades...

...After the 1917 Revolution, a number of the city's outstanding musicians came to the West and achieved world renown...

...He points out that Isaak Babel, whose short stories immortalized Jewish Odessa, was never published in the city itself...