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

Abstract

525 Ab Imperio, 1/2007 tentially ambivalent translation suggests that he conducted them in Russian. This could have significance in terms of who is interviewed (I suspect Acharians in the hinterland had a weak knowledge of Russian). For interviewees, the nuances of Georgian, especially if Russian is poorly spoken, may convey a different meaning than Russian . Finally, despite a concluding section that deals with post-socialist developments, there is little attention to the peculiar political context of Achara compared to the rest of Georgia. Achara was controlled by an authoritarian leader with its own internal border with the rest of Georgia. Under Abashidze, many Georgians told me it was easier to cross the Georgian-Turkish border than the Acharan-Georgian one. Could it be that the restrictions on this Georgian-Acharan border and the fear of separation from the rest of the country, had its own peculiar impact on the debate about Acharan identity? It should be explored in a book about Acharan borders. However, these are minor criticisms of a splendid book that despite its focus on a small corner of a small country, has significantly broader lessons for students of nationalism , identity formation, and borderlands. This is a fascinating read for all interested in Caucasian identity and politics. Andrew GENTES Roshanna P. Sylvester, Tales of Old Odessa: Crime and Civility in a City of Thieves (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005). x+244 pp. Notes, Maps, Photographs , Bibliography, Index. ISBN: 978-0-87580-346-3. 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 1 L. McReynolds. The News Under Russia ’s Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press. Princeton, 1991; J. Neuberger. Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900 – 1914. Berkeley, 1993. 526 Рецензии/Reviews 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 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...