About the book: 2004 / "Near the Black Sea" - half-document, half-fiction. In this book, Odessa Jews are the entire community and an individual family, their fate and war, prosperity and decline, fear, laughter, bitterness and hope... The book was born from the desire to pay tribute to those who rescued the Jews during the deadly period of occupation. Over the years of work, the topic has expanded, the narrative has spread out from the need to peer into the face of Odessa and the faces of Odessa residents. The book became plump. And its main goal remains the original: to gratefully remember everyone who saved or helped to save, whose names surfaced when I was turning over the evidence of those days. To all of them, both crowned and bypassed by official recognition, to whom neither a tree, nor a medal, nor even the slightest benefit - for them this is a quiet book, a homemade monument, everyone whose name we did not bother to hear in the deafness of the past decades, and everyone, who is named on these pages.