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WORK TITLE: Odessa, Odessa
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 11/6/1933
WEBSITE: http://barbaraartsonauthor.com/
CITY: San Francisco
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born November 6, 1933; daughter of Dorothy Berlin.
EDUCATION:B.A., M.A., Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Psychoanalyst, writer, and novelist. Retired.
WRITINGS
Contributor of film and book reviews to professional journals. Author of a blog.
SIDELIGHTS
A retired psychoanalyst, Barbara Artson earned her doctorate in psychology and also earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English literature. As a graduate student, Artson taught Shakespeare. Similar to the characters of Dora in Artson’s debut novel Odessa, Odessa, Artson’s mother was an immigrant who worked in a New York garment factory, where she stiched elastic to the waistbands of women’s bloomers. Artson’s mother left her homeland at the age of 10. Artson has noted that the character is only loosely based on her mother because her mother did not really talk much about the vicious persecution that she faced as a young jewish girl in Russia.
Odessa, Odessa follows several generations of Russians as two sons take divergent paths after leaving Russia to escape anti-Semitism. In an article for the Tikkun Online, Artson called Odessa, Odessa “a novel loosely based on my family’s history,” adding in the same article: “The characters in my historical novel represent the lucky ones—those fortunate and resilient enough to scrape together the resources to make the voyage across the Atlantic and to reach the safe New York Harbor, with Lady Liberty holding up her beacon of hope and freedom. And to succeed.”
In Odessa, Odessa Mendel and Shimshon Kolopsky are brothers who come from a long line of rabbis and cantors in a shtetle in western Russia close to the Black Sea. Shtetle was the given to small town in Central and Eastern Europe with large Jewish populations. In the novel, Mendel is married to Henya and leads a god-fearing life, following the Jewish tradition. In the novel’s opening chapter, Henya is at an advanced age when she finds out she is pregnant.
After her daughter is born, fears arise in the household concerning deaf Marya’s safety, as well as for the safety of the couple’s six other children. Then a pogrom, that is, a massacre of an ethnic group, in this case Jews, comes through Odessa. Neighbors are murdered and women rapped by marauding Cossacks. Mendel barely escapes with his life, although he is badly beaten.
Meanwhile Shimshon is a revolutionary, and the brothers’ father has disowned him. In contrast to Mendel, Shimshon is an atheist who repeatedly asks his brother why God allows such terrible things to happen. Eventually the brothers and family flee Russia to escape the dangers of the raging anti-Semitism that is growing more and more virulent. Shimsohn, who later becomes Samson in America, keeps a diary that is eventually discovered by Mendel’s granddaughter.
The discovery of the journal leads to a deeper understanding of the Kolopsky’s trials and tribulations in Russia, as well as the lives of subsequent generations. All is revealed during a family reunion in Tel Aviv. The diary and the reunion promise to reunite two branches of the family that split when Mendel and Shimshon went their separate ways, one to Israel and the other to America.
Much of the book revolves around the life of Maryusa Freida, when she is a grown woman. Marysa is the deaf daughter of Mendel and Marya. The character is loosely based on Artson’s aunt. “Odessa, Odessa highlights both the challenges and triumphs confronting Maryusa, and affirms and celebrates her human resilience and humanity,” wrote Artson on her blog found via her website. Artson went on to note: “Books are the artistic lens that portrays all that is possible in the human world.”
“Century-spanning books are notorious for perplexing readers,” noted a Kirkus Reviews contributor, who went on to commend Artson for including a list of the characters and their identities prior to the novel’s start and for “an informative addendum.” The Kirkus Reviews contributor also remarked: “Readers should understand more of their world at the end of this engrossing novel than they did when they began it.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2018, review of Odessa, Odessa.
ONLINE
Barbara Artson website, http://barbaraartsonauthor.com (July 8, 2018).
She Writes Press website, https://shewritespress.com/ (July 8, 2018), brief author profile.
Tikkun Online, https://www.tikkun.org/ (March 7, 2018), Barbara Artson, “Not on My Watch: A Response to Hate.”
Bio
Barbara Artson
Barbara Artson is a retired psychoanalyst who calls San Francisco her home. She regularly contributes essays and reviews of films and books to professional journals. In addition to a Ph.D. in psychology she holds both B.A. and M.A. degrees in English Literature, and taught Shakespeare as a graduate student while also completing the unfinished Dickens novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, years before the musical production on Broadway.
Dorothy Berlin, Barbara Artson's mother as as a young girl in New York.
Like Dora in the novel, Artson’s own mother worked in a New York garment factory, stitching elastic to the waistbands of women’s bloomers.
This photo of her was taken in the early 1920s when she was 19. By the end of that decade she was raising her own family, building a new life in America.
Barbara Artson is a retired psychoanalyst who calls San Francisco her home. She regularly contributes essays and reviews of films and books to professional journals. In addition to a PhD in psychology, she holds BA and MA degrees in English literature, and taught Shakespeare as a graduate student while also completing the unfinished Dickens novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, years before the musical production on Broadway. Like Dora in Odessa, Odessa, Artson’s mother stitched elastic to the waistbands of women’s bloomers. Visit her at www.barbaraartsonauthor.com.
about ODESSA, ODESSA
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 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.
Not on My Watch: A Response to Hate
by Barbara Artson
March 7, 2018
Since writing my three-generational novel, ODESSA, ODESSA (She Writes Press, September 11, 2018)—a novel loosely based on my family’s history–which tells the story of a religious Jewish family living in Odessa at the turn of the century, forced to abandon all they know and hold dear—country, culture, language, and often, close family members—I am more painfully aware of other individuals and groups facing comparable situations. The characters in my historical novel represent the lucky ones—those fortunate and resilient enough to scrape together the resources to make the voyage across the Atlantic and to reach the safe New York Harbor, with Lady Liberty holding up her beacon of hope and freedom. And to succeed! Six million other Jews (and gays, and Romas, and Communists and Righteous Christians) were not so fortunate.
It is with sadness that I follow the ongoing plight of the Rohingya people, the latest targets of political and ethnic violence, who Amnesty International calls “one of the most persecuted minorities in the world.”[1]
I view the faces of starving children, held by their helpless mothers and living in conditions no human beings should endure. I behold a photograph of ten men chained together, obliged to watch while others dig their shallow graves, and then to await the fire of their executioners’ guns. They are the outcasts, like the Jews in Russia, the African and original Americans in the United States, the Palestinians in Israel, the Dalits (untouchables) in India, the Tutsis in Rwanda, the “colored” and blacks in South Africa, and the beleaguered Syrian residents.
The Rohingya are a Muslim minority forced to leave their homes in the predominantly Buddhist Myanmar (Burma), whose government claims they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, and therefore they deprive them of their rights as citizens. After being systematically raped, murdered, and burned out of their villages,[2] a million of these men, women, and children remain homeless, stateless, destitute, and dying of cholera, diphtheria, and starvation in displacement camps in neighboring Bangladesh. Aung San Suu Kyi, the 1991 Novel Peace Prize winner, has turned a deaf ear to their predicament. And the authorities quibble about whether this satisfies the definition of a genocide!
Once again, in our time, we confront a war waged against immigrants and refugees; once again, we confront combat against those fleeing injustice and prejudice from the homelands they have populated for centuries; once again we see atrocities committed against those who love and believe differently, against those who look different. I recall the words of Pastor Niemoller, who, in 1933, wrote while a prisoner in a German concentration camp:
First, they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.[3]
As an author, writing fiction, with my mighty “pen in hand,” I have the power to turn a coward into a hero, to bring insight to the uninformed, to protect the life of someone in danger, to keep a child from dying. Or not. But as an ordinary citizen, and psychoanalyst, I struggle with how to emotionally withstand the daily shootings, the wars, the devastation and displacement of strangers that I witness daily on my television screen. How do we deal with these events that threaten our sense of what it means to be human? How do we cope with our sense of helplessness? What can we do as concerned citizens to fulfill the promise made to those “poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free?” Aren’t we all immigrants?
For now, I can only offer the symbolic image of standing on the courageous shoulders of our immigrant parents and grandparents and shouting: Not on my watch!
Elegy for My Aunt and Other Exceptional Individuals
In the opening chapter of my forthcoming novel, Odessa, Odessa, a child is born prematurely to Henya, “a woman who no longer bleeds.” By the end of the chapter, she realizes that her infant daughter is deaf. Nine chapters later, I write about this child as Maryusa Freida, when she is a grown woman. She is very loosely based on my aunt.
Like Maryusa, my aunt was born with a serious hearing defect that affected her ability to speak clearly, and she suffered the indignity of a diagnosis of retardation. Deprived of schooling, occupational therapy, or technology available for those with hearing-related disabilities, my aunt held a job—humble though it was—and lived independently until the day of her death. In my novel, sufficient funds to pay for Maryusa’s funeral are found stashed away in her drawer—so it was with my aunt. Retarded indeed! I consider both Maryusa and my aunt, unsung heroes.
And then there is Jacob, another unsung hero. Diagnosed with autism at an early age, my 25-year-old grandson displays great audacity, courage, and determination in constructing a meaningful and significant life for himself. He participates in a basketball league, for many years has enjoyed horseback riding, and attends a course at the community college while also taking several online courses. He has lunch with friends and attends movies with his twin sister. In spite of struggles and setbacks, he is building a beautiful life. Like his namesake in the Bible, Jacob struggles, triumphs, and grows into a stronger, more self-confident person.
In writing literature, it is vital to include the full range of insights and perspectives of people with all human needs and abilities. Min Jin Lee, in her award-winning novel Pachinko, portrays a character born with a cleft palate and a twisted foot who lives with nobility and self-respect, sans self-pity. She writes: “Hoonie was not a nimble talker, and some made the mistake of thinking that because he could not speak quickly there was something wrong with his mind, but that was not true.” She could be talking of Maryusa, my aunt and Jacob.
Odessa, Odessa highlights both the challenges and triumphs confronting Maryusa, and affirms and celebrates her human resilience and humanity. Books are the artistic lens that portrays all that is possible in the human world. We need art to give us insight and to help understand and celebrate one another, especially in this troubled era of political and social upheaval around the world. In the words of Rollo May, “Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.”
Artson , Barbara: ODESSA, ODESSA
Kirkus Reviews. (Mar. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Artson , Barbara ODESSA, ODESSA She Writes Press (Indie Fiction) $None 9, 11 ISBN: 978-1-63152-443-1
A debut novel spins the multigenerational saga of one family's journey from a shtetl in the Eastern European pale to the streets of 20th-century New York.
Rebbe Mendel Kolopsky and his wife, Henya, work hard and fear God, but their life is a hard one. As the tale opens, Henya discovers she's pregnant at a relatively advanced age. Months later, she fears for the lives of her new daughter, Marya, born deaf, and her six other children. The family's troubles escalate rapidly when another pogrom sweeps through Odessa--hordes of Cossacks murder and rape many of Mendel and Henya's neighbors (Artson effectively describes "the screams of women, the menace of barking dogs"). Mendel is beaten within an inch of his life. As the family finally resolves to brave the journey to America, and to attempt a new life in a strange land, readers also learn the story of Mendel's brother Shimshon (later, in the U.S., Samson). Disowned by his father, Shimshon is a revolutionary who asks Mendel: "Where was your God each time the Cossacks came to call?" Years later, Mendel's granddaughter discovers Samson's journal, and readers are given an even fuller picture of a single family's captivating multigenerational tale, from Odessa to Brighton Beach ("A nice place to live, enough food, no Cossacks knocking down the door") to a family reunion in Tel Aviv, where Henya's daughter learns the extent of another people's oppression. Century-spanning books are notorious for perplexing readers; Artson has taken wise steps to forestall such confusion with a long list of character names and identities preceding the text and an informative addendum. Even so, keeping track of who's thinking what can be tricky when the point of view shifts from one paragraph to the next. That said, the vivid events and rich details of the intricate story are compelling and important--immigrants like the Kolopskys helped make America into the land readers recognize today (Israel, too). Readers should understand more of their world at the end of this engrossing novel than they did when they began it.
A complex but rewarding epic of family ties, fading memories, and immigrants who--through hard work and luck--better the lives of their progeny.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Artson , Barbara: ODESSA, ODESSA." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530650599/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ef85b5bb. Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530650599