In a corner of the third Jewish cemetery in Odessa, among the overgrowth and tombs that no one visits anymore, there is a monument that the present has recovered from oblivion. It is an amphitheater made up of large stone blocks and black granite columns. There are steles with 305 names in Hebrew. They are the identified victims of the 1905 pogrom against the city’s Jews. That episode of ethnic persecution also triggered the creation of the Jewish self-defense groups of Odessa, the largest armed organization of the Jewish people on Ukrainian soil. More than a century later, the members...