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AdessOOdessa - Story AdessOOdessa is a voyage through music and words, into the bowels of Odessa, Pearl of the Black Sea, which the Soviet Jewish writer Isaak Babel in his Odessa Stories, called the "disgusting city". A voyage through Babel's pages, interrupted by a collection of jokes and anecdotes about the Jews and their little vices, which Ovadia narrates with comic verve. A musical and literary itinerary across the history of a city, from Tsarism to Stalinism, in which we hear Yiddish songs, some passionate popular music and the rythmic waltzes of Shostakovich. |
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AdessOOdessa - Author's notes "Odessa is a port city in which very different people and cultures have mixed, inhabited by criminals and mythic characters, low life kings and fatal, lost women... The recital leads us in the discovery of the many aspects of this city which could be defined as the Naples of the Black Sea.Alternating tavern songs, fragments of Babel's writings, compositions by Shostakovich and pieces of pure jazz, the audience is led through darkened streets and pains of love, in a narration where Yiddish humor merges with low life songs, revealing the hidden and magic side of a culture not so different from our own." Moni Ovadia |
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AdessOOdessa - Text fragments Odessa Odessa is a disgusting city. Everyone knows that. Instead of saying "there's a great difference", in Odessa they say "there are two great differences" and "tit and tat". However, I believe a great deal of good can be said about this extraordinary city of the Russian Empire. Just think – it's a city in which life is easy, where you live in the light of the sun. Half its population is made up of Jews and the Jews are a people who've learned a couple of very simple things and stuck them in their heads: you must marry, so as to not to remain alone; you must love so as to live eternally; accumulate wealth so as to have one's own house and give the wife an astrakan coat; love one's children because loving them is wonderful and also necessary.The poor Jews of Odessa are oppressed by the governors and their edicts, but it is not easy to send them away from where they are, because they've been there from time immemorial. But no one will send them away and the city will learn a lot from them. With their efforts, they have contributed a great deal to the atmosphere of lightness and splendor which permeates Odessa. In Odessa, there is a Jewish ghetto which is very poor, overpopulated and troubled.: there is a very self-satisfied bourgeoisie and a city Duma. And, not far from the vast sea, the factory chimney stacks are smoking and Karl Marx goes about doing his usual work. In Odessa, the Spring evenings are sweet and heart-rending, the acacias send out their pungent perfume and over the dark sea the moon spreads her smooth, magic light. In Odessa there is a port, and in the port are the steamers which arrive from Newcastle, Cardiff, Marseilles and Port Said; there are blacks, Englishmen, French and Americans. Odessa has known periods of splendor, now it lives a moment of decadence, a poetic, impotent and, in some ways, resigned decadence. «Odessa, - the reader will say, finally, - is a city like all the others, it is you who are excessively partial to it». That may be so, I may partial to it, perhaps deliberately, but, parole d'honneur, in this city there is something: THE SUN. Remember the splendorous and enlivening sun of Gogol, the man from the Ucraine? This description of the sun exists, but it's just an episode. The first to have spoken of the sun in a Russian book, and to have done so with enthusiasm and passion,was Gorky. But, because he spoke of it with enthusiasm and passion, Gorky's sun was not yet a truthful sun. Gorky is a pioneer, the most powerful of our time. But Gorky is not the singer of the sun, he is the herald of truth: if there is one thing worth singing about, you must know that it is the sun. From "Odessa" by Isaak Babel' – edited by Costantino di Paola – Ed. Marsilio |
