Odessa Time, Odessa Space: Rethinking Cultural Space in a Cosmopolitan City

Seventy years of communist rule repressed a complex history of Odessa’s multiple cultural spaces and a trilingual cultural system that operated among its Jews. This essay shows the multiethnicity of Odessa’s cultural history and raises issues of determining the ethnicity of cultural spaces, issues that have been obscured by a mythologized narrative. The ‘Odessa myth’ tends to define Odessa culture as exclusively Russian or as Hebrew, but history tells a more complex story.