“Odessa Recollected: The Port and the People,” by Patricia Herlihy, Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Brighton, Mass.: Academic Studies Press, 2018. 256 pp. ISBN: 978-1-61811-736-6 (hardcover) $42.
Odesa, a Black Sea port founded by Catherine the Great in 1794, shortly after the territory was wrested from the Ottoman Empire, became a boomtown on the southern fringe of the Russian Empire. Catherine and the early administrators of the city, such as the Duke de Richelieu, promoted settlement by Europeans in addition to the Greek, Italians and Jews who came on their own initiative to take advantage of economic opportunities in the robust grain trade with Europe. More ethnically diverse by far than St. Petersburg, Odesa became a remarkable independent-minded, large cosmopolitan city, attracting and producing noted writers, artists, musicians and scholars.
Imperial Russian tsars and Soviet leaders maintained an ambivalent attitude towards the maverick city, appreciating the fame and fortune it generated, but also leery of the activities of secret foreign national societies, pogromists, revolutionaries and simply the perceived lack of patriotism in the singular city so far away from the heart of Russia. With the withering of the lucrative grain trade by the time of the Soviet Union, Odesa became a neglected city, drained of its foreign flavor.
With the independence of Ukraine in 1991, hopes were raised that the architectural beauty and economic prospects of the city would be revived. Given the current hostilities in eastern Ukraine with the potential of the Odesa area becoming a possible land bridge to the Crimean peninsula, the fate of the former “Pearl of the Black Sea” hangs in suspension.
The present book brings together – indeed, re-collects – some of the most valuable and thought-provoking research on Odesa and its culture, community and economy published by Patricia Herlihy over several decades of her work. Scholars of Ukraine, Russia and the former Soviet Union will find in this book a helpful resource for their research and teaching.
A native San Franciscan, Dr. Herlihy graduated from the University of California, Berkeley and obtained her Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of “Odessa: A History 1794-1914” (Harvard University Press. 1987); “The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka and Politics in Late Imperial Russia” (Oxford University Press, 2002); and “Vodka: A Global History” (Reaktion Books, 2012). She is professor emerita from Brown University (2001) and Louise Wyant Professor Emerita, Emmanuel College (2009).
Currently she is adjunct professor at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, associate at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. Dr. Herlihy is a former co-master (with David Herlihy, who passed in 1991) of Mather House Harvard University (1976-1986). She has six children and six grandchildren.
For additional information, readers may visit the publisher’s website, www.academicstudiespress.com.