Tales of Old Odessa derives from Sylvester’s dissertation, and follows the pattern set by Louise McReynolds and Joan Neuberger of using periodical literature to analyze middle-class values that emerged during the late Imperial era.^[1] Whereas Neuberger has focused upon the construction of hooliganism as a way to discuss Petersburgers’ value system, Sylvester would at first seem to be similarly using the notion of a “city of thieves” to discuss Odessa’s moral climate. Unfortunately, however, Tales lacks its predecessor’s theoretical and analytical sophistication. Oddly enough for what is essentially a study of literature, Sylvester employs no theoretical apparatus for her analysis of Odessan newspapers. She quotes Mark Steinberg to the effect that culture comprises masquerades and deceptions, which in turn allow for the creation of multifarious and indeterminate personal identities; but despite his being cited in the bibliography, this hint at Bakhtin leads to little, especially if the implication is that Odessa was something of a carnival in type-set. This is necessarily just a guess, as the book’s superficial explication renders palimpsestic any effort to read more deeply into it.
Odessa’s mix of Russians, Jews, and “everybody else” made it a uniquely cosmopolitan Russian city, where strident national chauvinism ran side by side with quixotic revolutionary idealism. Yet the assertion that “In the absence of a clear ethnic majority, social-class status emerged as the sine qua non of individual identity” remains unconvincing, not least of which because of the 1905 pogrom. One might also question Sylvester’s second assertion, that “a secularized Jewish culture in a very real sense became the dominant culture [in Odessa]” (P. 5), apparently thanks largely to the newspapers she surveys roughly between 1905 and 1914. The prominence of Jewish writers and editors in Odessa’s publishing industry certainly allowed Jewish tastes to be expressed in Odesskaia pochta, Krokodil, and other popular periodicals, and thus to influence the culture city-wide; but as Sylvester readily acknowledges, these newspapers collectively catered to a hybrid and very lately established middle-class culture that embraced Jews and Gentiles alike. That being said, Patricia Herlihy, in her study of Odessa, writes that Jews prospered and that Judaism (in the form of synagogues, etc.) was more in evidence there than in any other Russian city.^[2] Most Jews were crowded into the Moldavanka district, the majority of whom earned livings as shopkeepers or artisans, though a disproportionately high number were professionals. However, beginning even before the period Sylvester is looking at, Jews continually declined as a percentage of Odessa’s overall population; and almost fifty thousand left after the 1905 pogrom. Another problem is that Tales, as literary studies commonly do, relegates “culture” to the published word, and moreover offers little evidence beyond the newspapers under consideration. Some information about Odessa’s prosperous and influential Jewish elite is provided, but there is not enough about them or what this Jewish culture is supposed to have consisted of for Sylvester’s claim to be persuasive.
Her third argument, that Odessa’s late imperial press was a primary source of middle-class values, is much more firmly grounded, if only because similar research has already proven the case for other cities. Sylvester is in her element when she presents as evidence of these values a number of newspaper “tales” ranging from that of a well-off young man’s trial for murdering a prostitute, to an incredibly fat wrestler named Foss who reportedly caused city-wide food shortages, to a mad, anthropomorphized elephant who won sympathetic Odessans’ hearts. Her style is fluid, sure, and conveys her enthusiasm, though in places such as her facetious account of the “criminal ‘types’” described in newspapers, it becomes unsettlingly similar to those of the slumming journalists she is attempting to deconstruct. Tales nonetheless works best when it celebrates the criminal, comical, or absurd aspects of a city that as a result can be better understood as the origin of Isaak Babelґ and other unique talents; though several sections (particularly one recounting a caricature of a Jewish meshchanstvo family’s match-making deliberations) dwell far too long on minutiae in lieu of analytical substance. Sylvester concludes her recounting of each tale with a conclusion concerning these conclusions’ significance, but its content is, like that of the introductory sections, typically fairly obvious and provides little to support the claim that Odessan middle-class values were in any way unique. The intentionality supposedly informing these stories is questionable as well; although many writers’ intentions are admittedly obvious, such as a desire to tutor readers on the proper comportment for theater-goers or intelligentnye women, or the intention behind many crime reports. Like any city, Odessa was a combination of upper and lower-class neighborhoods, of which Moldavanka – which provided newspapers a never-ending succession of incidents by which to titillate readers concerning the iniquities of the criminals, debauchees, whores, and child-thieves supposed to characterize its constituents – was the most infamous. As numerous studies on the construction of criminality have similarly shown, Odessan journalists used such persons to create an Other against which middle-class readers could favorably compare themselves. But such character studies are less frequently appreciated as reflecting an interest in exploring human psychology. A crude, Lombrosian-influenced psychoanalysis was, for example, the popular Odessan journalist Vlas Doroshevich’s stock-in-trade, though oddly enough he merits only a footnote in Tales. Sylvester does provide convincing examples showing how writers transmogrified luckless Moldavankans so as to satiate middle-class readers; but such examples do not support her claim that these same writers equated criminality with the specifically lower-class Jews who lived there. Perhaps there are sources that make this equation explicit (though if so, they would vitiate her suggestion that class and not ethnicity was the “sine qua non of individual identity”), but the argument needs to be better made. Also problematic for her claims about the intentions behind these articles is the absence of information about their authors. Despite discussing the oeuvres of prolific columnists “Satana” and “Faust,” Sylvester provides almost no biographical details about them or the other writers and editors she says were so influential. Such information would have immeasurably deepened her study and possibly supported her argument about Odessa’s dominant culture. More importantly, it would better explain how what seems to have been a large number of secularized Jewish newspapermen helped make Odessan culture unique.
Unfortunately, Tales contains no explanation of this or any other relevant historical change. Like its illustrations of Cafй Fankoni and The Grand Stairway, this is but a snapshot of an “old” Odessa which is really the Odessa of 1905-1914. Why this study is so temporally framed is not explained, but in any case, what is described here is not an old city, but one as modern as many other cities in the world at the time. This goes far towards explaining why the expression of middle-class values in Odessa does not appear to have been all that unique, as any reader familiar with Peter Gay’s Education of the Senses or any number of other books on Victorian sensibilities will quickly realize.^[3] Therefore, while it does indeed seem “that Russia’s middle class was not ‘missing’…” (P. 5), it is strange that the ostensibly dominant and unique Odessan Jewish middle class is missing from this tale. The group that Sylvester argues so espoused middle-class values is here (at best) in disguise: is it “Faust,” who contrary to middle-class values actually defended Moldavanka’s wretches; is it Krokodil’s “the Stranger,” pseudonym of Boris Danylovich Flit, or his literary creations, the thoroughly meshchanstvo Perelґmuter family; is it Lorberbaum, the trainer who could not bear to witness the execution of his mad elephant; or is it the readers of Odesskaia pochta, about whom Sylvester provides some (but certainly not enough) information? Or is it, as many snapshot histories imply, unknowable, obscured in this case behind Bakhtinian masquerade and deception? And if it is, then what is Tales of Old Odessa really about?