Farewell, Mama Odessa

Farewell, Mama Odessa
Author: Emil Draitser
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2020-01-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0810141094

Set in the summer of 1979 at the height of the movement to free Soviet Jewry, Farewell, Mama Odessa is an autobiographical novel whose intertwined storylines follow a variety of people—dissidents, victims of ethnic discrimination, and black marketeers among them—as they bid farewell to their beloved hometown of Odessa, Ukraine, and make their way to the West. At the book’s center is Boris, a young writer thwarted by state censorship and antisemitism. With an Angora kitten for his companion and together with other émigrés, he puts the old country in his rear-view mirror and sets out on a journey that will take him to Bratislava, Vienna, Rome, and New York on his way to Los Angeles. Will Boris be able to rekindle his creative passion and inspiration in the West? Will other Jewish émigrés fit into the new society, so much different than the one they left behind? With humor and compassion, Farewell, Mama Odessa describes the émigrés’ attempts at adjustment to the free world.

Laughing All the Way to Freedom

Laughing All the Way to Freedom
Author: Emil Draitser
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2024-01-16
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1476650659

A sequel to the author's autobiographical trilogy--Shush! Growing up Jewish under Stalin, In the Jaws of the Crocodile, and Farewell, Mama Odessa--this book is part memoir and part cultural study about the challenges of immigration and American accculturation. With self-deprecating humor, the author, a former Soviet satirist who was punished for trespassing the boundaries of public criticism, recollects his growing pains as he overcame his indoctrinated upbringing in a totalitarian society to embrace America's defining values.

City of Rogues and Schnorrers

City of Rogues and Schnorrers
Author: Jarrod Tanny
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2011-11-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253001382

“Outstanding . . . A delightfully written work of serious scholarship.” —Jewish Book World Old Odessa, on the Black Sea, gained notoriety as a legendary city of Jewish gangsters and swindlers, a frontier boomtown mythologized for the adventurers, criminals, and merrymakers who flocked there to seek easy wealth and lead lives of debauchery and excess. Odessa is also famed for the brand of Jewish humor brought there in the nineteenth century from the shtetls of Eastern Europe and that flourished throughout Soviet times. From a broad historical perspective, Jarrod Tanny examines the hybrid Judeo-Russian culture that emerged in Odessa in the nineteenth century and persisted through the Soviet era and beyond. The book shows how the art of eminent Soviet-era figures such as Isaac Babel, Il’ia Ilf, Evgenii Petrov, and Leonid Utesov grew out of the Odessa Russian-Jewish culture into which they were born and which shaped their lives. “Traces the emergence, development, and persistence of the myth of Odessa as both Garden of Eden and Gomorrah . . . A joy to read.” —Robert Weinberg, Swarthmore College

Old Jewish Folk Music

Old Jewish Folk Music
Author: Mark Slobin
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 600
Release: 2016-11-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1512807516

The original publications of the 1930s are scarcely to be found. The posthumous 1962 volume in the Soviet Union was limited to a tiny edition. Yet the work of the man who has been called "the foremost authority on Jewish folk music before the Holocaust," Moshe Beregovski, survives and is now available for the first time to the English-speaking world. As a member of the Jewish community as well as an ethnomusicologist in prewar Russia, Beregovski had not only the inspiration to preserve the spirit and vitality of the music that filled the lives of his people but also the professional training to document his findings to exacting standards. The first section of SIobin's book contains translations of some of Beregovski's responses to Jewish folk music in its living context during the 1930s. He raises important questions about ethnicity in his essay on interaction between Ukrainian and Jewish musical influences. His work on klezmer music. the music of the Jewish folk instrumental bands, is the most authoritative on the subject and includes his complete guide to fieldworkers in folk music. In another essay Beregovski analyzes an unmistakable trademark of Jewish folk music, the "altered Dorian" scale, and its symbolism in Eastern European Jewish culture. The second section constitutes Beregovski's anthologies of hundreds of folk songs with full Yiddish and English song texts. Each song is carefully notated exactly as it was sung and is accompanied by Beregovski's notes on origins and variants. Beregovski's essays and transcriptions form a pat and a symbol of what was lost in the mass destruction of Eastern European Jewish culture in this century. They form a cultural record of deep significance not only for the Jewish people, but also for folklorists and scholars as evidence of a distinctive music culture that interacted with—and influenced—the folk musics of Eastern Europe.

King of Odessa

King of Odessa
Author: Robert A. Rosenstone
Publisher:
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2003
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

Imaging of Isaac Babel's final trip to his hometown.

Old Jewish Folk Music

Old Jewish Folk Music
Author: Moiseĭ Beregovskiĭ
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection
Total Pages: 608
Release: 1982
Genre: Music
ISBN:

Here presented for the first time in English are Moshe Beregovski's surviving essays, plus his anthologies containing hundreds of folk songs with full Yiddish and English texts.

Cosmopolitan Spaces in Odesa

Cosmopolitan Spaces in Odesa
Author: Mirja Lecke
Publisher: Academic Studies PRess
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2023-07-25
Genre: History
ISBN:

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.