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Reviews of How Things Were Done in Odessa: Cultural and Intellectual Pursuits in a Soviet City

Friedberg, Maurice (1991). How Things Were Done in Odessa: Cultural and Intellectual Pursuits in a Soviet City. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. ISBN 0-8133-7987-3.

Patricia Herlihy Review

Russian Review, Vol. 52, No. 1. (Jan. 1993), p. 133.

Social Sciences. Contemporary Russia. And Other

Friedberg, Maurice. How Things Were Done in Odessa: Cultural and Intellectual Pursuits in a Soviet City. Boulder. CO: Westview Press. 1991. xii + 145 pp. $35.00.

This is intended to be a sociological study of Odessa in the 1970s based on interviews conducted with 102 emigres to the United States. From descriptions supplied by his informants, Friedberg reconstructs what kinds of entertainments were available in Odessa, the difficulties of gaining admission into various schools and universities, the complexities imposed by censorship, the lives of actors, journalists, musicians, teachers, lawyers, and doctors, as well as the general corruption prevailing in the city.

It is a bleak picture on the whole, as one might expect during the "period of stagnation," and one painted by people unhappy enough to leave their homeland. There is no little irony in Friedberg's selection as his own of the title of one of Isaak Babel's humorous stories about Odessa. Not only is the reporting skewed by consulting only the disaffected, but nearly all of the informants were Jewish. Twenty of the informants were supplied by the National Opinion Research Center. The remaining eighty-two resulted from referrals made by the respondents themselves. By Friedberg's count, there were ten thousand emigres from Odessa to the United States in the 1970s. About 40 percent of the 102 interviewed here were in the media or entertainment business, which must be a larger figure than for the population at large despite the cultural advantages offered by the city. The respondents furnished "several hours of unstructured Russian conversation" (p. xi), from three to ten years after their emigration, which is the stuff of this study.

There are ten photographs which help us visualize the city. The inclusion of a map would have been helpful as there is some confusion about the location of two of the libraries and of the Polish Catholic Church. Since Friedberg gives a historical sketch and mentions some of the prominent writers of Odessa, a bibliography and index would have been useful as well. For all of its methodological weaknesses, this study should be of interest to a wider audience than Odessaphiles. The picture is rich in detail. For example, we learn that magicians and musicians were sent out to entertain people in labor camps and leper colonies. In order to purchase desirable books or withdraw them from libraries, one was forced to buy or borrow "bundles" of dull political works with the desired books. This might remind scholars of the peasants who received their strips of good and bad farmland. We learn of samizdat lending libraries, and of other generous and brave ways that people helped each other. If we accept this work as a collective memoir by a disaffected subgroup of the population, and not as a sociological study of the city as a whole, or even of the total emigration, there is much insight into how badly things were done in Odessa. The texture of these grim years is captured within this slim volume: it is a memoir worth preserving.

Patricia Herlihy, Brown University

Robert Weinberg Review

Slavic Review, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Autumn, 1992), p. 633-634

How Things Were Done in Odessa: Cultural and Intellectual Pursuits in a Soviet City. By Maurite Friedberg. Boulder: West view Press, 1991. xii. 145 pp. Photographs. Hard Bound

This volume provides, a fascinating portrait of Soviet cultural and intellectual life in the 1970s. It is based on interviews, concluded by Maurice Friedberg. of some 100 émigré Odessans (mostly Jewish professionals) who participated in the Soviet Interview project directed by James Millar of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. The respondents, who have first-hand experience with Odessa cultural and educational organizations as a result of study and work, offer revealing glimpses of the highly politicized workings of such institutions as museums, libraries the mass media, public entertainment, schools and the arts.

The reminiscences and observations of Friedberg's respondents confirm what many of us already know from Soviet friends and acquaintances about the long arm of government censorship and Party control during the "years of stagnation." Their stories vividly illustrate the insidious nature of official anti-Semitism, the consequences of efforts to shape cultural life according to some overarching plan, the endemic shortages of much-needed medical supplies and equipment, and the rampant graft and corruption that characterized life during the Brezhnev years. The recollections underscore the tragicomic quality of life in Brezhnev's Soviet Union: comic because some of the incidents presented by Friedberg bolder on the absurd, yet at the same time tragic because a whole society suffered as a result of officious meddling bv incompetent, capricious ideological watchdogs.

How were things done in Odessa? Admissions officers routinely sold forged high school diplomas to unqualified students seeking entry into institutes of higher education. Another émigré recounted how nurses in one hospital manually sharpened needles dulled by overuse. More than one respondent told of book burnings at libraries in order to clear the stacks of books whose authors had fallen into disgrace. In one such purge at a trade union library, some 3,000 volumes were destroyed. One librarian recalled that the "process of book burning was so thorough and strict that upon discovering that some of the books to be burned were missing from the shelves ..., we actually purchased a number of them. You see. we did this because we were afraid that otherwise the inspector might think that we had concealed these books, and this was a serious offense. As I said, the extra books we had bought were burned together with the others." Another respondent recalled how the director of the Odessa Opera, who kept in reserve several dozen seals for Party dignitaries who might decide to attend a performance at the last moment, was ironically fired from his job because he kept these seats empty. His crime—"embezzling state property."

Despite its brevity How Things Were Done in Odessa tends to be repetitive in spots and is long on revealing anecdotes which enable the author to capture the full flavor of his respondents' observations. However, the book is short on analysis. Nonetheless, Maurice Friedberg has performed an admirable service to the profession by presenting the invaluable reminiscences of former Soviet citizens in a compelling and lucid fashion. The reader of this book will come away with a more nuanced understanding of the structural problems of Soviet culture and politics before the advent of glasnost and perestroika.

Robert Weinberg

Swarthmore College