Odesa’s wonderful literary museum was damaged this week in one of Russia’s terrible attacks on the city.  The UL has over 200 titles published in Odesa, whose linguistic span alone demonstrates the deep historical and cultural importance of a city which used to hold a special place in the heart of Russians too.  Ukrainian and Russian are the main languages represented, but this post looks at one example each in Hebrew and Yiddish, both published when the city had one of the highest Jewish populations in the world.

▲ Sefer Ḥuḳot ha-ṭevaʻ ; ʾo, Rʾeshit limudim mi-toldot ha-shamayim weha-ʾareṣ (Book of the laws of nature, or, First teachings about the history of heaven and earth) is an 1892 Hebrew compilation about astronomy donated to the UL in 1980.  The black-based illustrations used to demonstrate the movement and relationship of celestial bodies are quite beautiful.

▲ Nur nikhṭ̣ Yudish : ʾa ʾinṭ̣ʻerissʾanṭ̣ʻes ḳulṭur-bild fin’s Yudishʻen lʻebin ʾin Gʾalitsyʻen (probably 1899; acquired in 1986).

We lack the title page for this 34-page Yiddish book, and the title and first full page present the title in rather different ways.  Accessing the book at one remove, with the help of a colleague (thank you, Eleanor!) taking photos of books I had selected from the catalogue, I am not entirely sure of its full contents but it is either a single story or multiple stories by the writer N.N. Samueli (d. 1921).  You can read about Samueli (or Samuely) from the 2000 article by the late Kenneth H. Ober, ‘Nathan Samuely: A Forgotten Writer in a Neglected Genre’ (the genre being ghetto stories) – the article is online here.

When writing blog posts about older books, I often do significant upgrade work to their catalogue records.  With these, the task is not so straightforward.  While I studied Hebrew at university, that’s over 20 years ago, and familiarity with the language here is far more important than for many others: while the Library of Congress provides careful romanisation guidelines, Hebrew texts standardly lack most written vowels, which means that the cataloguer must be able to be certain what the vowels would be if they were provided.  In that respect, Yiddish is easier since the vowels are provided, but knowledge is still required – the first letter of the alphabet (א) can be either an a or an o…  I have made updates where I have eventually felt confident to do so, but look forward to discussing the Samueli one in particular with better-placed colleagues soon.

Odesa is an incredible city with a fascinating multicultural and multilingual history and present, and we have a great many books about it.  Do have a look at the various subject headings for Odesa in the catalogue (note that we use the Ukrainian spelling, while many books will feature the Russian spelling of Odessa, earlier the international standard too).  Unfortunately many ebooks lack standard Library of Congress subject headings, so a keyword search is always worth running too, which is how I found, for example, the late Patricia Herlihy’s Odessa recollected : the port and the people.

When the awful Russian invasion is over and tourists can visit a peaceful and fully restored sovereign Ukraine, do put Odesa and its literary museum on your visiting list.  I wandered round the museum for hours, staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the books and journals on display.  Hopefully the reckless, needless damage inflicted by the Russian forces can be reversed quickly.

Mel Bach