Odessa

Odessa is a waypoint in the wartime advance of the 79th Division and, in an earlier glimpse of civilian life, a market connected to Boris Ansky’s family business. Though it is not developed as a setting in its own right, the city links the military narrative of invasion with the everyday routes of commerce across the region.

Odessa in the Military Advance

During the German-Soviet War, Hans Reiter serves in the 79th Division, a light infantry unit attached to the 11th German Army. After crossing the Dniester, the division reaches the outskirts of Odessa, then continues its advance while Romanian forces halt. The route is described through successive river crossings and combat, with the division moving through Bessarabia and Ukraine as burned villages, granaries, and woods mark the army’s passage. Odessa consequently appears not as the scene of a discrete episode but as one point in a larger military itinerary.

A Regional Market

Odessa also belongs to the civilian geography of Kostekino in the account of Boris Ansky’s childhood. His father, Abraham Ansky, made a living buying shirts wholesale in Dnepropetrovsk and sometimes in Odessa, then reselling them in neighboring villages. The reference places the city within a practical trading circuit that supported the family, distinct in scale and purpose from the later movement of armies through the region.

Narrative Significance

The two mentions give Odessa different functions without joining them into a single story: it is both a destination on a military route and one source of goods in a village merchant’s livelihood. Their juxtaposition broadens the novel’s geography from intimate domestic and commercial life to the passage of armed forces across the same region. Odessa remains a briefly named location, but these separate references make it part of the connective landscape through which war, work, and movement are traced.