Tales of Old Odessa: Crime and Civility in a City of Thieves by Roshanna P. Sylvester (review)

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REVIEWS 165 theworld. This is a significant contribution to the cultural history of both the Russian Baltic and theRussian Empire, and italso extends our knowledge of the 'popular Enlightenment' inEurope as a whole. Strongly recommended. Nottingham Roger Bartlett Sylvester, Roshanna P. Tales of Old Odessa: Crime and Civility in a City of Thieves.Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2005. x 4- 244 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $38.00. Roshanna P. Sylvester's is a lively and engaging account of good and bad conduct in one of theLate Russian Empire's least typical, butmost influential cities. The primary sources at the work's core are the fact, fiction and 'faction' reported in the port's newspapers and periodicals in the years just before the FirstWorld War. Even thosewell acquainted with the era will be struck anew by the vanguard ofmodernism, alive and well, ripe for thepruning that war and revolution would bring. Singles advertise for partners in the Odessa Marriage List, admittedly with a little irony; thieves, known as skokary, specialize in stealing from apartments theypretend to be viewing to let; and a feeding frenzy develops in the press over the head (and trunk) of an elephant gone mad in a travelling menagerie. The book uses once popular, but now disesteemed, discourses to unearth the long forgotten significations ofOdessa's various districts and their inhabit ants during the second decade of the twentieth century. In one sense, the veracity of each individual storymatters little; the narratives would all have flowed together in theminds of reader-inhabitants to create a polyvalent but coherent picture of the city they lived in. Following an opening brief on the development of Odessa, Sylvester devotes three chapters to the seedy and criminal results of poverty indifferentparts of the city: the port district,Pere syp and Slobodoka-Romanovka in 'Horrors of Life'; theJewish Moldavanka in 'City of Thieves'; and the city centre around Deribasovskaia Street in 'Under the Cover of Night'. The last four chapters are not topographic, each instead examining a different aspect of social life. 'Making an Appearance' looks at issues of authenticity and falsity inpublic displays. 'The Little Family' finds itself in the thick of a battle to shed and acquire certain middle-class identities throughmatrimony. Continuing the domestic theme, 'Revenge of theQueen of Stylish Hairdos' provides examples, some of them bizarre, of familial violence beneath a veneer of respectability and behind closed doors. The book ends with the elephant 'lambo's Fate', an attempt to draw together itsmany strands in a semi-allegorical way. Sylvester's selection of subject matter might seem diffuse, but the spheres of society's putatively polite middle and itspoor underside were closely linked in Odessa. Neighbourhoods abutted one another, men and women moved freely between them in daytime and at night, and swiftchanges in people's fortunes could quickly make petty theftmandatory for some, while polite manners could just as suddenly become de rigueur for others. In the sources i66 SEER, 86, I, 2008 depicted in this work, the criminal dominates the civil,which turnsout almost invariably to be only an elaborate subterfuge. The impact of some of these texts has diminished littlewith time. In particular, journalists' writings about children at the very bottom of society can still produce a strong reaction. In Odesskaia pochta, the columnist Faust wrote of'A two-year-old boy [who] was made drunk and died', adding, 'True, thiswas done by his own little sister,who is also a baby. But whose example are they following? That of their parents and those around them' (p. 62). Little better are the 'wholly proper-looking, intelligentnyi young men' (p. 97) in N. Moskvich's regular Odesskii listokcolumn, one of whom invites a woman to join him in his hotel room, renders her unconscious by spilling a strong smelling liquid on her dress and then rapes her. Of course, in such examples, the old quandary of themarket-driven journalist is evident, feeding the very appetites he or she deplores, and therefore reliant on them for copy. Sylvester is a littleguilty of thisherself,when on occasion her prose styleand narrative persona become hard to distinguish from those of the tabloids she cites. Nonetheless, her concept...