Odessa, Odessa follows the families of two sons from a proud lineage of rabbis and cantors in a shtetl near Odessa in western Russia.It begins as Henya, wife of Rabbi Mendel Kolopsky, considers an unexpected pregnancy and the hardships ahead for the children she already has. Soon after the child is born, Cossacks ransack the Kolopskys’ home, severely beating Mendel. In the aftermath, he tells … aftermath, he tells Henya that, contrary to his brother Shimshon’s belief that socialism is their ticket to escaping the region’s brutal anti-Semitic pogroms, he still believes America holds the answer. Henya, meanwhile, understands that any future will be perilous: she now knows their baby daughter, who has slept through this night of melee, is surely deaf.
So begins a beautifully told story that unfolds over decades of the 20th century—a story in which two families, joined in tradition and parted during persecution, will remain bound by their fateful decision to leave Odessa.
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Typical Jewish immigration saga. But liked the generational aspects. Was worth reading to the last generation as they investigate the family genealogy
Diaspora Layers
In her debut novel, Odessa, Odessa, psychoanalyst and Shakespeare scholar Barbara Artson creates the complex world of a Jewish family’s journeys across time, space, and conflicting ideologies. Prepare to abandon all preconceived notions as you follow the Kolopsky family and the destinies of three brothers born in the 1860’s, Shimson, Moishe, and Mendel. You will witness, almost in person, scenes you might never expect: making tea in a samovar (on the Sabbath); the wretched smells, sights, and sounds of steerage; a family member’s responses to the squalid UNRWA camp in Jerusalem.
The story focuses on the descendants of the pious Rabbi Mendel and their varying degrees of assimilation in the US, while always hovering in the deep background is the forbidden history of the banished Bundist brother Shimson. The females of the book, carefully spotlighted, live out widely varied levels of relationships to their surroundings, their mates, their siblings, their children, their history, and their destiny. But the family’s ancestral home, Odessa, the starting point from which the Kolopskys must depart or be killed, in a pogrom, by starvation, or in the Holocaust, is an illusion. It is in “Russia” but no one in the family speaks Russian. It is just as illusionary as the myth of America, the “goldene medina” or as Palestine, “a land without people.”
The use of the present tense lends immediacy, though the narrator waxes briefly omniscient, almost lecturing one of the family, Saul, about the history of the New Jersey area in which he is about to settle, in 1939. But it is our own history, our family story, that we learn can now be revealed. In Odessa,Odessa, technology, unknown to the family’s patriarchs, becomes a tool for reconciliation, for promise, even for redemption.
Always interesting to read about the journey from repressive society such as Odessa to the world of opportunity.
Often, in multi-generational historical novels, I “get lost”, trying to follow the threads of the story. This one was great! I felt as if I personally got to know some of the characters, so closely was I “involved” with the flow of the story of immigrants, facing cultural challenges, and finally making a new life for their family!
A real insight into Jewish immigrants from Russia at the time of the overthrow of the czar. From the discrimination in Russia to America and the hard life they endured to be assimilated.
Loved it!!! A very truthful story. Realistic characters. Historically correct.
No character development. Went too fast without much depth
I started the book interested in the history but then it was just unrelenting misery not well written.
dry
Interesting book.
“A wonderful tale of a Russian Jewish family’s immigration and assimilation into American culture. Artson seamlessly weaves various story lines of the Kolopsky family back and forth in time to create a rich tapestry of historical detail and authentic dialogue that leaves the reader craving more.”
Barbara Artson’s historical novel, Odessa, Odessa is an unsparing but loving tribute to the experiences of Jews who lived in, died in, survived and ultimately left the early 20th century shtetls of Ukraine. Part history lesson, part family saga, Odessa traces the Kolopsky family with their old world rabbinic heritage, through the pogroms in Imperial Russia, with competing demands of family loyalty and religious strictures, into their experiences as immigrants in the U.S. and in Palestine. The far-reaching effects of persecution and dislocation and the costs of resilience play out in the novel across three generations and three continents. Artson focuses on the Kolopsky women as they struggle to maintain family bonds and find their own places, even as accelerating change and the complications of assimilation threaten or derail those efforts. This well researched novel brings alive a century of time from the world of Jews in a small village in eastern Europe, to the teeming streets of Brooklyn, to the bedroom communities of New Jersey and finally to modern day Israel. Odessa, Odessa is a moving testimony to the complicated legacy of trauma born of genocidal persecution, skillfully told through the interweaving lives of a very human, relatable family.