A very different Russian City 5/8/21
1876 Mark Twain saw Odessa and considered that it could be a US well run city with a multinational population. Only a few years later there was horrific anti-Semitic violence at that time a third of the population was Jewish. This ended up with the holocaust with the planned killing by the help of Nazi ally Romania.
Languages spoken Yiddish,
Greek, and Italian were the core with a Russian veneer over it.
1794 it was founded and
nurtured intellectuals and artists like Alexander Pushkin, Isaac Babel.
The Dnieper, Bug and
Danube river run into the Black Sea, and the origin population were Greco Scythian
tribes. Italian towns and cities flourished built on Greek foundations
and there were Tartars, Circassians, Georgians and other peoples, with sailors from Genoa and Florentine financiers and adventurers like Marco Polo passed
through.
The Tartars were the
remnants of Genghis Kahn’s empire.
Before it became Odessa
it was Khadjibey and parts were ceded to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
1453 The Ottomans
marched into Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire melted away and they also
took the Balkans. Khadjibey citizens didn't know that they were Ottoman
subjects.
1690 Peter the Great
tried to get the area for Russia without success.
1768 to 1774 Catherine the great in a series of wars took the area and massive ship building program was started.
Under George III of England 13 colonies were lost while Catherine was colonizing the Black Sea.
Potemkin engineered the
coup and Catherine deposed her husband the ineffective Tsar Peter III. Potemkin
established Black Sea arsenals along the coast and Sebastopol which remains the
seat of the Black Sea port. Germans, Albanians and Greeks were given privileges
to establish trading ports like Kerson and Nikolayev.
1787 the Ottomans wanted
the return of Crimea. The Russians hastily pressed and army including Jewish
lancer.
In the Russian navy John Paul
Jones the American hero volunteered but never spoke a foreign language and was
not very effective he ended up in Paris inpecuniary. Jose Ribas an
Italian noble from Naples that was under the bourbons dynasty, also fought for
Russia and became an admiral in their navy, he translated for Jones and is
mentioned in a Lord Byron poem.
1795 the town called
Khadjibey is named Odessa after Odysseus, the main road De'ribas'ovskaya name
after Ribas. Founded 3 years after Washington, DC. As an organized city, with a
theater and public schools. He became the Mayor of Odessa . 1801Tsar Paul who
was unpopular died in a palace coup and regicide he was followed by Nicholas 1
who wanted to drag Russia into modernity. The Napoleonic wars resulted in a
demand for all Black Sea grains.
Armand duc de Richelieu
the grandson of Cardinal Richelieu who had been Louis XIII chief minister fled
the revolution eastwards and 1803 named administrator of Odessa by the Tsar.
1812 large scale plague
cholera, whereas in the Rhineland Jews were blamed for the infectious
outbreaks, egalitarian Odessa took steps to deal with this. Italian was
the lingua franca and street signs were put up in Russian and Italian a tradition
that lasted long after Richelieu who retired in 1814.
1823 Mikhail Vorontsov
as a child went to London as his father was the Russian ambassador there bought
up estates near Odessa and was appointed Governor of New Russia.
1814 Greek patriots set
up Philika Hetairia to rally for Greek independence from the Ottomans. Dozens
of secret societies could operate in Odessa freely.
1821 Moldova and
Wallachia sparked a Christian uprising against the Ottomans in Balkans wars.
1827 Russia joined in a
destroyed the Ottoman - German fleet in the Battle of Navarino.
1840s by this time the
city had over 100 schools and private schools and 5000 students, founded by
Greek , German , Jewish and Armenian communities.
1854 Crimean War Britain
and France against Russia.
Odessa was a magnet for
Jews from other parts of Eastern Europe and Russia. Till the Nazi's it never
had a Jewish Ghetto or distinct Jewish quarter but wealth rather than religion
and ethnicity determined your neighborhood. By the 1860 there were 17000 Jews
about a quarter of the population. 90% of the grain traders were Jewish.
From the Pale, Jewish migration to other parts of the Russian Empire was
prohibited. This Yiddish speaking community had no great Rabbis, learned
scholars or mythical preachers.
Mendel Mocher-Sforim1836
to 1917, born in Minsk and got to Odessa in 1881 part of the Haskalah. Because
of the Russian Government lax enforcement on residency restrictions also
resulted in Jewish enlightenment here not the Judaism of the Pale. Maskilim
made their way to Odessa especially from Brody, Galicia.
1772 Galicia became part
of Austria and Brody was a free city except from many taxes and in Odessa they
established private schools that taught also Russian math’s, geography
bookkeeping. The maskilim took control Jewish affairs and their shul brought
about new cantorial lithergies.
Between 1790 and 1830
there were 5 separate outbreaks of plague.
1847 France Liszt gave a
series of piano recitals and Nikolai Gogol had a premier of his new play
"The Inspector General" in Odessa.
1908 Ilya Mechnikov at
was a university of Odessa and he later shared with Paul Erlich the Nobel Prize
for Physiology and Medicine.
1860 Ratzvet The first
Russian- Jewish periodical in the whole Empire.
1880 2/3 of registered
merchant and traders were Jewish, 3/4 of public houses, 2/3 veterinarians and
pharmacists
1871 1881 pogrom’s
against the Jews at a time when the city’s population was exploding and more
peasants were moving into the city, laws with a retreat from the
liberalism. Resulting in emigration and utopian movements of Zionism and
Russian social democracy.
1903 Kishinev pogroms in Maldavia.
1935 Jabotinsky wrote
The Five in Odessa in Russian which was translated into Yiddish in the
1940s but only in 2005 to Hebrew. Which portrays this movement against
liberalism. In the Moldovanka neighborhood he organized a storeroom in a house
with revolvers, crowbars and kitchen knives for Jews to fight back next time.
The Russo Japanese war
meant that the grain markets in the Far East dried up. This caused a decline in
the importance of Odessa to the Empire and the world. However many
soldiers and sailor came through the city to take ship to the battle in Japan.
1905 Mutinous Battleship
Potemkin
Shalom Aleichem, the Jewish
Russian historian Simon Dubnov and Leon Pinsker all lived near each other.
Isaac Babel the writer's father had a warehouse in Moldavanka , Odessa
was brought up on Talmudic reasoning and later moved to St. Petersburg where
he worked for Maxim Gorky. It was only found out during Gorbechov's glasnost
that he was shot in a Stalin Gulag in 1940.
1890s The Odessa
Committee was set up to support Jewish settlers in Palestine. It helped to establish Rehoboth and Hedera and rehabilitate Mismar Hayarden,
It was run by Leon Pinsker. It had as many as 4000 members and supported Hoveve
Tzion and closed in1913.
1911 -1913 2 Balkan
Wars. Sergei Eisenstein was not from Odessa but is known for the Odessa steps
even though the real massacre did not take place there.
1921 After the
revolution Chaim Bialik was hounded by the authorities he was a great pioneer
of Hebrew poetry and came to Palestine.
1929 Trotsky who had
been at St Paul’s school Odessa left from the city for exile, having gone from
revolutionary prophet to disgraced enemy of Stalin.
1937 to 1941
19361 Odessans workers, intellectuals and government officials were
arrested and a third of them were shot in the Stalinist purges.
1941 The NKVD
headquarters in Odessa was blown up by Stalin's secret police this killed
General Ion Glogojano and the Romanian occupation forces there, this was
the area of Romanian, Transnista over 220000 Jews were killed by Romanians on
the way to the ghettoes and concentration camps set up in Soviet Russia. There
was no large scale removal of Jews from Romania itself but Bessarabia and
Transnistia this was something else. In this area the Romanian recruited police
amongst the local ethnic Germans.
Gheorghe Alexianu was
an obscure professor and Romania Nationalist and he was decorated by the
Papal Nuncio for his diligent management overseeing the deportations in this
new Romanian province. His job was to Romanize it.
As the Russians fled and those who knew what to expect of the Germans fled with them. Odessans were spread
as far afield as Uzbekistan. Even the trolley cars from Odessa were found to be
working in Romania.
1944 with the Soviets
pushing westwards the Romanian king Mihai overthrew Ion Antonescu and declared
Romania accession to the Allies. Where the Romanians withdrew from Odessa the
Germans took over.
Odessa was under
occupation for 907 days before the Soviet return, and the former
"fascist" enemy Romania became a socialist friend.
1947 the Soviet, installed the communists and king Mihai was forced to surrender his throne and
flee.
1950s synagogues that
reopened after the war were closed by the Soviets.
Leningrad held out
against the German siege for 2 and a half years, Sevastopol , 9 months
and Stalingrad eventually crushed the German army and these were
considered "hero cities"
Tashkent film Studios
became home of filmmakers and actors who evacuated.
1903 and 1905 As a result of the pogrom’s Jew emigrated to mostly the US and Brighton Beach was just developing and they went there instead of Delancy Street and the Lower East Side. Briton Beach theater which had vaudeville acts and specialized in Yiddish plays with Jacob Adler, Jenny Goldstein , David Kessler, composer Joseph Rumshinsky. After the holocaust further immigrants of Russian speaking Jews arrived and they are was called Little Odessa.
Wassily Kandinsky the
artist and Daniel Oistrakh the violinist were both raised in Odessa.
With the fall of the
Soviets the bust of Marx was substituted for the founder Catherine the
Great.
There were up to 70
thousand Jews in the Odessa region in 1989 most emigrated today perhaps 36
thousand left.
_____________________________________________________
Catherine the Great by Henri Troyat 1980 350p This book reads like a novel of a biography 1762 - 1796. Peter the Great who tried to force Russia to Europeanize never succeeded. It took the wife of one of his grandchildren to try again. Catherine was born German of a high class family and she was recruited to marry Peter. Elizabeth Tzarina of Russia was childless and chose her nephew Peter to be the Grand Duke. Peter was a child who never grew up, he never bothered to learn Russian while his wife did. She got to know the powerful politicians and portrayed herself as a devout. Orthodox church goer. Her Children were not fathered by Peter as he was sterile, she had different partners and the help of official to hide a pregnancy that Peter would know was not his. The children were taken away from her by Elizabeth so she hardly knew them, till later. When Elizabeth died Peter created havoc by becoming allies of Prussia disrespecting the church till Catherine's friends staged a coup and the army recognized her as the power holder. During a few years in power she already conquered territory from the Turks taking Crimea, Moldavia Walachia, what became Belarus as well as a large part of Poland. . The Russian Empire reached it biggest during her time. She brought an English doctor to inoculate her against small pox and the rest of the court agreed to inoculations. She built the Hermitage as part of the Winter Palace and bought up collection of art from Europe. She was a patron of the arts and supported leading writers in France including Didoret and Voltaire and bought their libraries to bring to the Hermitage Library. When in 1790s Austria and Prussia were putting down the French rebels Catherine took her share of Poland and it is from those days that Jews were under Russia in the Pale, ----------------------------------
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