The most searing image of the port city of Odessa on the Black Sea is no doubt Sergei Eisenstein's reconstruction of a bloody massacre on its famed "Potemkin Steps" in his epic silent film, Battleship Potemkin (1925). In many ways, that formidable staircase, reaching upward from the ocean's edge to the plateau on which the Russian seaport arose in the 19th century, is a perfect symbol of its dizzying history, evoking both the heights of its original promise and the depths of its horrific 20th-century downfalls—of which none was more brutal than the one meted out to its Jews.
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