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NOTES Introduction 1. Paustovskii, The Story of a Life, 39–40. 2. The most important works in English on Odessa’s history and culture include Herlihy, Odessa; Sylvester, Tales of Old Odessa; Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa; Weinberg, The Revolution of  in Odessa; and Richardson, Kaleidoscopic Odessa. In Tales of Old Odessa, Sylvester explores the shaping of Odessa’s image through the popular press in the early twentieth century. Although she devotes significant attention to criminality, her primary objective is to trace the construction of a middle-class identity in the public sphere, with Jewishness and humor playing a secondary role in her analysis. Moreover, Sylvester does not cover the Soviet era. The only academic work to approach Odessa from the perspective of its myth as a Jewish city of sin is an essay by Rothstein, “How It Was Sung in Odessa,” 781–801. 3. Anthropologists and folklorists have often sought to distinguish the “myth” from the “legend” and from the “folktale.” Many scholars have argued that myths deal with gods, monsters, and supernatural events, often before the beginning of time. Legends and folktales , conversely, take place within time and usually involve human beings. See the essays by Bascom and Rogerson as well as Dundes’s introduction in Sacred Narrative. Other scholars, however, suggest that such distinctions do not always work and advocate a more expansive definition of myth. Robert Segal points out that every academic discipline holds multiple theories of myth and mythology. See Segal, Myth. The distinction between “myth,” “legend ,” and “folktale” is not always obvious, and, accordingly, I use the terms interchangeably in the chapters that follow. 4. Bo Strath, “Introduction,” in Strath, Myth and Memory in the Construction of Community, 37. 5. Benedict Anderson’s term “imagined community” is thus applicable in such instances, even though he limits the use of the concept to the study of nations. All communities that are trans-local (i.e., whose members can never know each and every other member ) are imagined in the sense that Anderson employs the term. See Anderson, Imagined Communities. 6. Strauss, Images of the American, 8. 7. Sharpe and Wallock, “From ‘Great Town’ to ‘Nonplace Urban Realm,’” 9. 8. Peter Preston and Paul Simpson-Housley, “Introduction,” in Preston and SimpsonHousley , Writing the City, 2. 9. Sharpe and Wallock, “‘From ‘Great Town’ to ‘Nonplace Urban Realm,’” 6. 10. On biblical cities, see Ellul, The Meaning of the City. 11. Schneider, Babylon Is Everywhere, 14. 12. Rev. 17:5, 14:8. All biblical quotations are taken from the King James edition. 13. Isa. 13:19. 14. For examples of San Francisco’s depiction as a city of sin, see Evans, A la California; Asbury, The Barbary Coast; and Mungo, San Francisco Confidential.  n NOTES TO PAGES – 15. For some examples of Shanghai’s depiction as a city of sin, see Dong, Shanghai; Pan, Old Shanghai; and Baker, Shanghai. 16. For examples of the depiction of New Orleans as a city of sin, see Rose, Storyville, New Orleans; Asbury, The French Quarter; and Flake, New Orleans. 17. There is, of course, a vast body of literature on the frontier in American history, particularly on the role the frontier has played in shaping the social, economic, and cultural character of the United States. Scholars, however, have generally neglected the process of urbanization on the frontier, focusing instead on what David Hamer has called “the cult of the cowboy,” the conquest of the wilderness and the settlement of the open land. See Hamer, New Towns in the New World. See also Wade, The Urban Frontier. 18. On the foreign penetration of Shanghai and the establishment of the international concessions, see Martin, The Shanghai Green Gang, 5. 19. The relationship between seaports and the perception of crime can be seen in Willet, The Naked City. Willet’s book includes six chapters dedicated to six different cities . Five of them are seaports: Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Miami, and New Orleans. 20. David Hamer argues that urban boosters, including city governments, steamship lines, and railroad companies, offered prospective settlers “abstractions . . . which had little to do with the reality of the place to which migrants were being invited but referred to universally shared perceptions of the New World—as utopia, as Arcadia, as El Dorado. For what many migrants wished to go to was not so much a specific geographical location as an ideal concept of ‘a better world.’” See Hamer, New Towns in the New World, 10. 21. Long, The Great...

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