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Cosmopolitan Spaces in Odesa: A Case Study of an Urban Context is the first book to explore Odesa’s cosmopolitan spaces in an urban context from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. Leading scholars shed new light on encounters between Jewish, Ukrainian, and Russian cultures. They debate different understandings of cosmopolitanism as they are reflected in Odesa’s rich multilingual culture, ranging from intellectual history and education to music, opera, and literature. The issues of language and interethnic tensions, imperialist repression, and language choice are still with us today. Moreover, the book affords a historical view of what lay behind the Odesa myth, as well as insights into the Jewish and Ukrainian cultural revivals of the early twentieth century.
“...[A]n intriguing collection filled with rich insights into Odesa’s unique urban character and local culture, the history and identity of Odesa’s Jewish community and several of its leading figures, what exactly was “cosmopolitan” about Odesa in the past, and the legacy of its past diversity today.”
— Felix Cowan, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies
“…[T]he technically flawlessly produced volume, with few but meaningful illustrations, not only provides largely insightful information and analysis. It also raises numerous, undoubtedly pertinent questions at the right time. Some of them are still waiting to be answered.”
— W. Koschmal, Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie
(translated from German)
“…[T]his volume offers an original and vital illumination of the subject…This rich collection with its fascinating analyses is an important contribution to research on Odesa and to larger scholarly debates on cosmopolitanism and urban life. The chapters are interrelated in a coherent and approachable way, each one presenting a different “cosmopolitan space” as a critical lens for assessing the socially diverse environment of Odesa.”
— Marina Sapritsky-Nahum, Russian Review
"A rich, consistently fascinating volume that provides more than ample evidence of the fascination inspired by this city - forever intertwined, of course, with a complex welter of mythology. With use of a wide range of sources, the book is testimony to a scholarly arena that continues to attract impressive talent."
— Steven J. Zipperstein, Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History, Stanford University
Mirja Lecke is Professor of Slavic Literatures and Cultures at the University of Regensburg, Germany. Her academic interests include Polish literature as well as Russian literature of the imperial and post 1991 eras in their entanglements with neighboring cultures. She is the author of Westland: Polen und die Ukraine in der russischen Literatur von Puškin bis Babel' (Peter Lang, 2015), a monograph about the representation of the Western borderlands in Russian imperial literature, and with Elena Chkhaidze she co-edited Rossiia – Gruziia posle imperii [Russia – Georgia after empire] (Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2018), a volume on Russian-Georgian literary relations in the post-Soviet era.
Efraim Sicher is Emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. He has published widely on modern Jewish culture, including Jews in Russian Literature After the October Revolution: Writers and Artists Between Apostasy and Hope (Cambridge University Press, 1995), and has edited the unexpurgated stories of Isaak Babel in Russian, English, and Hebrew. His book Babel in Context was published by Academic Studies Press in 2012. Among his recent books are The Jew’s Daughter: A Cultural History of a Conversion Narrative (Lexington Books, 2017); Re-envisioning Jewishness: Reflections on Identity in Contemporary Jewish Culture (Brill, 2021); and Postmodern Love in the Contemporary Jewish Imagination: Negotiating Identities and Spaces (Routledge, 2022). His new book (with Daniel Feldman), Poesis in Extremis: Literature Witnessing the Holocaust is forthcoming from Bloomsbury.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Mirja Lecke and Efraim Sicher
1. Localism and Cosmopolitanism in Odesa: The Case of the Odesan Literary-Artistic Society, 1898–1914
Guido Hausmann
2. The Ukrainian Odes(s)a of Vladimir Jabotinsky
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern
3. Merchants, Clerks, and Intellectuals: The Social Underpinnings of the Emergence of Modern Jewish Culture in Late Nineteenth-Century Odesa
Svetlana Natkovich
4. Elitism and Cosmopolitanism: The Jewish Intelligentsia in Odesa’s School Debates of 1902
Brian Horowitz
5. Ethnic Violence in a Cosmopolitan City: The October 1905 Pogrom in Odesa
Robert Weinberg
6. The Cosmopolitan Soundscape of Odesa
Anat Rubinstein
7. Gender, Poetry, and Song: Vera Inber and Isa Kremer in Odesa
Mirja Lecke
8. The End of Cosmopolitan Time: Between Myth and Accommodation in Babel’s Odesa Stories
Efraim Sicher
9. Where the Steppe Meets the Sea: Odesa in the Ukrainian City Text
Oleksandr Zabirko
10. The Ukrainization of Odes(s)a? On the Languages of Odesa and Their Use
Abel Polese
11. Rereading Babel in Post-Maidan Odesa: Boris Khersonsky’s Critical Cosmopolitanism
Amelia M. Glaser
Contributors
Bibliography
Index