linguistic:translation, stylistic:style_transfer
Literature

Poet Anna Akhmatova was born in Bolshoy Fontan near Odesa, however her further work was not connected with the city and its literary tradition. Odesa has produced many writers, including Isaac Babel, whose series of short stories, Odessa Tales, are set in the city. Other Odesans are the duo Ilf and Petrov —authors of The Twelve Chairs, and Yuri Olesha, author of " The Three Fat Men ". Vera Inber, a poet and writer, as well as the poet and journalist Margarita Aliger, were both born in Odesa. The Italian writer, Slavist and anti-fascist dissident Leone Ginzburg was born in Odesa into a Jewish family, and then went to Italy where he grew up and lived. The Hebrew author and poet Haim Bialik established a publishing house and worked in the city from the 1890s to 1911.

One of the most prominent pre-war Soviet writers, Valentin Kataev, was born here and began his writing career as early as high school (gymnasia). Before moving to Moscow in 1922, he made quite a few acquaintances here, including Yury Olesha and Ilya Ilf (Ilf's co-author Petrov was in fact Kataev's brother, Petrov being his pen-name). Kataev became a benefactor for these young authors, who would become some of the most talented and popular Russian writers of this period. In 1955 Kataev became the first chief editor of the Youth (Russian: Юность, Yunost'), one of the leading literature magazines of the Ottepel of the 1950s and 1960s.

These authors and comedians played a great role in establishing the "Odesa myth" in the Soviet Union. Odesans were and are viewed in the ethnic stereotype as sharp-witted, street-wise and eternally optimistic. These qualities are reflected in the "Odesa dialect", which borrows chiefly from the characteristic speech of the Odesan Jews, and is enriched by a plethora of influences common for the port city.

The "Odesite speech" became a staple of the "Soviet Jew" depicted in a multitude of jokes and comedy acts, in which a Jewish adherent served as a wise and subtle dissenter and opportunist, always pursuing his own well-being, but unwittingly pointing out the flaws and absurdities of the Soviet regime. The Odesan Jew in the jokes always "came out clean" and was, in the end, a lovable character – unlike some of other jocular nation stereotypes such as The Chukcha, The Ukrainian, The Estonian or The American.