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Odessa By Charles King Norton

 

The free-spirited port of Odessa, now uneasily located in Ukraine, was Russia's Black Sea window on the south – and a haven for exotic styles of life and art.

Founded in 1794, it fast developed a cosmopolitan identity in which outsiders – migrants, thinkers, entrepreneurs, above all Jews – could flourish. Spanning the schooldays of Trotsky and the "Little Odessa" now implanted in Brooklyn, King's history of the multicultural city captures the "everyday difficulty of being diverse" in all its excitement and danger.

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