6

“Jewish Is a Mode of Transportation”

Between Home, Homeland, and Diaspora

In the breakup of the Soviet Union, Israeli and American Jews helped facilitate one of the largest waves of Jewish emigration since nearly two million Jews of the Russian Empire fled political and social persecution, pogroms, and economic instability.¹ Human rights activists who had tried to pry open the cracks in Soviet restrictions had been motivated by the idea of helping Jews escape communist repression and state-sponsored antisemitism—a frame that, as the previous chapter demonstrated, came to define Jewish life in the FSU.²

But as we’ve seen in earlier chapters, the reality of Jewish life in the Soviet era and its immediate aftermath wasn’t all that narrow in scope. Naturally, not everyone took up the opportunity to emigrate, and those in what was called the “stay-back” population baffled many of the activists who had long worked to free Jews from their supposed confinement behind the Iron Curtain. As one Russian scholar of Jewish studies, Mikhail Chlenov, recounted about his efforts to explain the real problems faced by Jews in the FSU during this time of unprecedented emigration: “An American colleague . . . said to me: ‘Look, we don’t have space in our mentality for the image you presented. We see only two scenarios: either they’re hitting you on the head, or you’re packing your belongings to go to Israel.’ Such is the stereotypical image, but as with every stereotype, it’s far removed from reality.”³

Odesa’s Jewish population certainly confounds the stereotype. While a large proportion of the city’s Jewish population emigrated, some chose to stay in Odesa, and of those who emigrated at some point, some returned while others continued to travel between various cities that hold points of attachment for them (familial, cultural, social, or otherwise). Given these patterns, the central questions pursued in this chapter are as follows: What is the nature of this attachment to Odesa? What is the concept of “home” for those who left and for those who have since returned? Is the idea of the “homeland” for returnees still tied to Israel? And do the Jews of Odesa see themselves as part of a diaspora in ways that conform to traditional definitions of the term?

To begin, emigration—whether under Soviet rule or in the post-Soviet period—had definite consequences for the Jewish population that remained in Odesa.⁴ It influenced how they defined their relationship to Israel and how they perceived the United States, Germany, and other destinations where many of their compatriots and family members had settled. To be Jewish in Odesa, in other words, was about much more than being in Odesa. Indeed, emigration had long been a variable of Jewish identity in the region—quite apart from the ways it was defined by the limitations imposed by Soviet policies and the push for emigration that came after the fall of the USSR. Though Odesan Jews have forged more intense attachments to the Israeli state in recent decades, the sociopolitical context influenced by patterns of Jewish emigration and communities abroad must be understood as multigenerational. Ideas of a distant “Jewish homeland” and an allegiance to a country of origin play out across myriad personal and family choices, ranging from pragmatic necessities—entrepreneurial, educational, and romantic—to the harder-to-define sense of feeling “at home.” To grasp these distinctions of “home” and “homeland,” we must pass the case of Odesan Jews and their patterns of migration through our understanding of the diaspora.

Jewish Emigration: The Historical Picture

The Odesa region witnessed many significant episodes of Jewish emigration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The pogroms in 1821, 1849, 1859, 1871, 1881, and 1905 drove Jews from Odesa and the rest of the Russian Empire (see chapter 2). From the 1880s onward, Zvi Gitelman writes, “no group of Jews has migrated as often, in as great numbers, and with such important consequences as the Jews of Russia and the FSU.”⁵ Between 1881 and 1912, an estimated 1,889,000 Jews moved abroad.⁶ This immense outflow is usually portrayed as a flight from escalating social and political persecution.⁷ Another line of scholarship has shown that large-scale Jewish emigration began a decade before the May Laws of 1882 (and the pogroms that followed). In this telling, Jews were escaping economic deprivation and population expansion.⁸ In the early twentieth century, the upheavals surrounding the Bolshevik Revolution and both world wars also caused vast numbers of people to relocate.

During the early phases of Soviet rule, Jews made their way out of the country typically to join relatives abroad in what was referred to as “chain migration.”⁹ As emigration from the USSR became highly constrained, if not entirely eliminated, the shape and scale of Jewish emigration that did occur was molded by both external and internal factors. External factors included those surrounding Soviet-US relations, Soviet policies in and around the Middle East, and the increasing involvement of nongovernmental and human rights organizations. Internal factors included Soviet state ideology, local manpower requirements, and Soviet ethnic policies.¹⁰ Such pressures were never monocausal. For instance, although the USSR didn’t want emigration to undermine the world’s image of the “happy Soviet citizen,” such curbs on emigration also helped mitigate the country’s labor deficits.¹¹

For individuals who may have been tempted to emigrate, the obstacles were likewise multiple. Soviet policies ensured that would-be emigrants faced an “all or nothing” decision: the stated desire to leave the country and live elsewhere came with profound material and social costs, whatever the outcome. Emigrants were forced to renounce their citizenship, surrender passports, and resign from their workplaces.¹² Family members might pay the same price. I learned that in one family, after the son applied for an exit visa to Israel, the father was demoted from his high-placed position in the KGB. Indeed, many of my interlocutors spoke of being pressured to resign from their jobs. Peers and colleagues could interpret applying for an exit visa as an act of betrayal, and those who did so risked a permanent loss in status.¹³ But the nature and orientation of one’s work played an important role in how people reacted to another’s plans to emigrate. Recall Nina, the artist in her early seventies: she told me that many of her colleagues were Jews who had openly contemplated leaving the USSR—“No one treated you negatively if you told them you would soon be living abroad. We all understood.”

In the late Soviet period, political authorities did yield to international pressure by relaxing the quotas on Jewish exit visas. Jewish emigration during the Soviet era peaked in two periods: the 1970s and between the late 1980s and early 1990s. According to demographer Mark Tolts, nearly 300,000 Jews emigrated from the USSR in the first wave, compared to approximately 1,641,000 in the second wave, who left the FSU between 1989 and 2017.¹⁴ The Jewish migrants of the early 1970s came mostly from peripheral areas where Jews were less assimilated, notably the Baltic States, western Ukraine, Moldova, western Belarus, and Georgia.¹⁵ Some 164,000 Soviet Jews went to Israel in the early 1970s.¹⁶ In the late 1970s, when most of the unassimilated Jews wanting to leave the USSR had either succeeded or been refused exit visas, the character of Soviet Jewish emigration changed.¹⁷

Until the mid-1970s, most of those who left the USSR went to Israel, but by the second half of the 1970s, “half of the total number of emigrants changed their destinations, mostly for the USA.”¹⁸ That change was significant, since Jews who left the Soviet Union for Israel were granted exit visas only on grounds of “family reunification” or “repatriation,” whereas Jews going to the United States and other Western countries were treated as “refugees” by virtue of overcoming Soviet restrictions.¹⁹

Those in this wave of Jewish emigration were also less likely to be inspired by Zionist ideology. They had more pragmatic reasons for leaving. They were driven not by aspirations of a “return” to the “homeland” but by the hope for a better life outside the USSR. So, while they may have left the country on Israeli exit visas, they were “dropping out” en route and heading for the United States or other Western countries.²⁰ Gitelman documents that after 1976, nearly 85 percent of Soviet Jews arriving in the United States were from Russia or Ukraine, and about 90 percent of those were from Moscow, Leningrad, Kyiv, or Odesa. As he concludes, most acculturated Jews were choosing America, not Israel, as their destination.²¹ Many settled in Brighton Beach, a part of Brooklyn, New York, that became known as Little Odessa.²² Smaller groups of Odesans moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, some to Chicago and Boston, and others chose areas with less concentrated populations of immigrants.

“Perestroika Migrants” and the Post-Soviet Period

The economic and political crisis that culminated in the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 also generated the mass emigration that took place at this time.²³ In 1989, a total of 85,089 Soviet Jews were allowed to emigrate, compared to 22,403 recorded in the previous year.²⁴ In 1990, a record 205,000 Jews left the USSR (some estimates indicate nearly 230,000); almost 200,000 departed the following year.²⁵ These are referred to as the “perestroika migrants.”

Many of the 1990s emigrants ascribed their flight to rumors of pogroms and uncertainty about the future. In this rendition of events, it’s as if entire communities were seized with utter panic, and herd instincts (stadnoe chustvo) took over: “Everybody had left, and so we left too.”²⁶ Sergey, a secular Jew born in 1955, described the times and events in a more measured way. “People were leaving because they finally could leave,” he said, “not necessarily because they wanted to. They weren’t sure if the opportunity would come again, so they wanted to go while the door was open.” Given the historical vagaries of Soviet emigration policy, it wasn’t unreasonable to expect exit visa regulations to change suddenly. Thus, as Sergey pointed out, many Jews took the chance when it became available, quickly saying their farewells to friends and neighbors. In total, between 1970 and 1997, an estimated 422,000 Jews emigrated from Ukraine.²⁷

This wave of emigrants was further shaped by a change in US immigration laws in October 1989 that reduced immigration from the Soviet Union to a quota of forty to fifty thousand refugees a year.²⁸ Again, Israel became the primary destination for emigrating Jews, including a large number of Odesans. The United States remained the second-ranked receiving country until September 11, 2001, when US immigration policy was greatly curbed yet again. Surveys indicate that many Jews leaving the FSU in the 1990s were indeed choosing Israel not because it was their preferred country of settlement but because it had opened its doors more widely to ex-Soviet migrants.²⁹ Odesan Jews immigrating to Israel settled mainly in Netanya, Haifa, and Ashdod, attracted by those cities’ proximity to the sea and large Russian-speaking populations. Many chose their destinations because of family connections or the advice of friends. No small number of early arrivals traveled from Odesa to Israel on a ferry that arrived in Haifa, and they settled in the very place where they had disembarked.

Another option emerged for Soviet Jews during this period: in 1991, Germany opened up to ex-Soviet Jews (and ethnic Germans from the USSR). As literary scholars Misha Belensky and Joshua Skolnik note, “The idea that a number of ex-Soviet Jewish emigrants, now pressured by new U.S. immigration regulations to choose Israel as their destination, would instead opt to go to Germany, of all places, clearly affronted Israel’s self-conception as a natural home for Jewish refugees.”³⁰ Nonetheless, tens of thousands opted for a life in Europe rather than the Middle East.³¹ Hoping to accelerate adaptation, German state officials spread incoming ex-Soviet Jews throughout the country so as to avoid an unassimilated “Russian ghetto.” From 2002 to 2004, “more emigrants went to Germany than to Israel.”³² But in 2005, Germany’s policy became more restrictive, and Israel once again became the primary destination for ex-Soviet Jews. In all, between 1989 and 2017, an estimated 328,000 ex-Soviet Jews and their relatives moved to the United States, while 229,000 settled in Germany. “Jewish is no longer a nationality,” many ex-Soviet Jews joked. “Now it’s a mode of transportation.”

Perspectives on Emigration

Aside from some who were elderly, most of the Jewish Odesans I met had at some point seriously entertained the idea of emigration. Some had taken steps toward it, such as exploratory travel, family discussions, researching information, learning a new language, and even going so far as to acquire refugee or returnee status—all without ever actually leaving. Often, their decision to stay was fraught with personal, familial, professional, economic, and social demands or obligations, which they weighed against the prospects of living abroad. A Brezhnev-era joke about migration seemed perpetually relevant in Jewish circles: “Among the Jews there are the brave and the very brave; the brave leave and the very brave stay.”³³ On a number of occasions, however, stay-back Jews expressed much sympathy for their compatriots abroad: those Jews, having chosen to emigrate, were torn from their dusha (soul), so to speak.³⁴ When they left Odesa, the city of their family history and roots, they left the worldview and social relations they had known at home and as home.

For Odesans wanting to emigrate, the United States remained the first choice for most. Germany held appeal for its extensive social benefits, membership in the European Union, and proximity to Ukraine, which was reassuring to many who were considering starting life anew. But Israel was the easiest option. Legal channels for acquiring exit visas were available, and they would find a large Russian-speaking population (estimated at over one million) in their new country, with an extensive infrastructure of Russian-language institutions. Certainly, this was an important consideration for the elderly. On the other hand, the fear of living with Israel’s continuous warfare, the difficulty of finding employment, an aversion to the climate, and a distaste for being isolated among other Russian speakers were among the many negative factors raised by my interlocutors.

Irina, who was in her midthirties and employed by an international Jewish organization in Odesa when we met, described her family’s decision-making process this way: “My parents were seriously contemplating immigrating to the United States after my aunt and uncle left [Odessa] in the early 1990s. But my grandfather became ill, and we couldn’t leave him on his own, so we stayed. When his health finally improved, some time had already passed, and we felt there was no longer a real need to leave, as things in Odessa had improved.” Irina’s statement echoed many other stories of those who may have considered leaving their city (notably during the 1990s) only to change their minds due to the improving social and economic situation.

Gosha, an IT specialist in his late twenties at the time of our meeting, told a similar story about his family. His father, a lawyer by training, was denied an exit visa in the 1970s (that is, he was a refusenik). As a consequence of his application, he’d been fired from his job. When emigration became more feasible in the early 1990s, Gosha’s father considered moving his family to the United States, where they had relatives. But around this time he found a desirable job with a law firm. “We already had the refugee status to move to the US, but my parents decided that starting all over in another place would be too difficult, so we decided to stay,” Gosha explained. He didn’t regret his family’s decision, but he thought that living abroad might still be an option for him in the future—but on his own terms, as a highly trained professional rather than as an ex-Soviet Jewish refugee.

Other Odesans of Gosha’s age shared his desire to one day work overseas. But ex-Soviet Jews of his parents’ generation and social class said they were staying in Odesa to protect the comfortable lives they’d built, thanks to their educational achievement and established careers. Emigration, they feared, would mean learning a new language, few employment options, and general downward social mobility. Emma, a woman in her early sixties, told me she’d never felt the need to emigrate: she had a respectable, interesting job at Odesa University; her family owned an apartment and a dacha; and their income met their needs. No doubt, Odesans of Emma’s stage in life would agree with her sense of starting over in a new place: “I will be nobody there.”

Emma was never registered as a Jew in her official documents and didn’t directly face discriminatory Soviet policies, but others did. Many very accomplished individuals acknowledged that they’d experienced antisemitism in the Soviet era, typically in the form of quotas for Jews in universities and most workplaces. As many of them pointed out, this was the everyday reality that had made them strive for assimilation or work harder to achieve their goals, but it hadn’t swayed them to emigrate. Mila, who was in her mid-sixties when we spoke, told me she’d been denied admission to Odesa University seven times and was accepted only on her eighth try. Still, she proudly described herself as “Jewish” in all her documents and set her goals high. Being Jewish, as she recalled, made it much harder to achieve her aspirations but not impossible. In her view, the facts that Jews today held prominent positions in Odesa, the city’s mayor in 2006 was a Jew, and Jews no longer faced quotas and were free to walk the streets in religious dress were all positive aspects of contemporary reality. Mila was glad that Jews no longer felt they had to hide their Jewishness and that some even proudly flaunted it. She confirmed what we’ve seen here in previous chapters: many in the non-Jewish majority of Odesans believed that Jews enjoyed privileged status because they were eligible for better social services and emigration. She gave examples of non-Jewish Odesans who forged a false Jewish ethnicity to access services or married a Jew in order to leave the country. “Everyone wants to be Jewish now,” she concluded.

Indeed, most of my interlocutors were able to stay in Odesa because of their somewhat privileged social status. Other Jews, perhaps those less established and members of the working class, weighed the emigration option differently. The prospect of making a decent living elsewhere or a loss of employment in Odesa was major motivation for seeking a life abroad.

Deciding to Leave

In chapter 2, we met Elena and her husband, Konstantin. They were among the few Odesans I encountered during my fieldwork who were in the process of immigrating to Israel. We’d been introduced by a mutual friend who knew of my research on return migration from Israel and hoped that I could explain to the couple why some former emigrants were returning to Odesa. Elena and Konstantin didn’t need any briefing on the hardships of Israeli life, however. They had traveled there five times, and regular phone calls, letters, and emails with Elena’s family in Beer Sheva kept them well informed about the life of Russian-speaking migrants in Israel. Still, I visited them regularly and looked forward to their invitations for meals, tea, and conversation.

As the months passed, Elena kept changing their departure date. She didn’t want to leave Odesa before the summer, her favorite time of year, but then she didn’t want to leave in the fall, which she also loved. Imagining her future life in Israel, she often comforted herself by comparing Odesa with Netanya, the coastal city where they expected to settle—after all, both were on the sea. Beyond such mental remedies for her already palpable nostalgia, Elena and her husband found a practical way to maintain their links to Odesa: they would hold on to their apartment, to make sure “the door remains open.” They began seeing their move to Israel as just another trip abroad, albeit one for a whole year. “I’m not taking my books this time,” Konstantin told me. “We’ll leave them here in the apartment with our furniture, and when we’re back next year, we’ll decide what to do with it all.” In this vision of emigration, there was a reassuring sense that this departure would be followed by the next.

Whatever their sentimental reasons for retaining the apartment, Konstantin confidently pointed out that owning property in Odesa was highly profitable—the rental income would pay for frequent trips home and even the possibility of a splendid summer vacation. “Some people own up to eight apartments in Odesa now,” he said, “and they don’t even live here.” When November came, the couple finally found tenants for their apartment—fittingly, a family returning from Israel. At last, they booked their tickets to Tel Aviv, which were paid for by the local branch of the Jewish Agency for Israel (Sokhnut). Instead of a big farewell party, they just had a few close friends come for dinner. When people left in the early 1990s, it had been, seemingly, for forever. In 2006, when Elena and Konstantin departed, it seemed less permanent and less emotionally taxing, both for them and for their friends and family.

Yet despite the tentative nature of Elena and Konstantin’s emigration discourse and behavior, other details spoke of something final. Shortly before they left, Elena made a trip to Kherson, her mother’s city of birth, to visit her mother’s grave. “I wanted to say my goodbyes properly,” she told me. “I know I’m planning to come back, but you never know what can happen.” Concerned about her own health and Israel’s security issues, Elena could see that leaving Odesa might be a more absolute choice than she’d recognized. When I asked why she was going, I sensed that she found it hard to answer. “You know, we’re not getting younger. Konstantin is seventy-one now. Who will take care of us if something happens to us here? We don’t have medical insurance, and all the good doctors have already [gone abroad]. We can’t be a burden on our children, and we don’t want to be alone.”³⁵ Reflecting her very positive outlook on life, Elena also described the move to Israel as a new opportunity and a chance to see the world. “Sometimes it’s good to change things in life. It lets you meet new people, see new things, and test yourself as a person.”

Spending this time with Elena and Konstantin before their departure gave me many insights into the present-day concerns of Odesans, both Jewish and non-Jewish, about leaving their homes, and their thoughts about the meaning of living abroad. At the same time, their departure plans showed me some of the tactics used by Odesans to secure their socioeconomic links with their departure city while residing elsewhere. Elena and Konstantin didn’t seem to feel rushed or pressured by their circumstances, though their age and necessary care had entered the calculations. Unlike those undergoing the “one-way ticket” emigration of the Soviet era, they exemplified migrants who were able to test their status abroad while maintaining their position at home in Odesa.

I found similar economic activity among a number of other migrants who could afford to emigrate without selling their property and who owned property that could profitably be rented out. Having tenants at their places in Odesa, or even in their dachas in the country, meant annual trips home to, at the very least, collect the rent and check on their homes. Two of my friends lived in an apartment owned by Odesans residing in Germany. Under their agreement, my friends had to vacate the premises for a month every summer when the owners returned on vacation. Some of the Odesans and other ex-Soviet immigrants I met abroad, who’d left before the privatization of the early 1990s, expressed regret at having gone too soon: they’d missed this opportunity to remain connected to their cities, and to enjoy the financial benefits reaped by later migrants who’d come to own their homes.

In their dispersed family and transnational kin networks, Elena and Konstantin resembled many of the Jewish Odesans I met. Everyone had a relative or friend abroad—in many cases, in more than one location. Odesa’s Jewish diaspora had come to span many countries and continents; by the late 1990s, it was larger than the number of Odesan Jews at home. Although Elena and Konstantin’s story captured a certain age group and social class of Odesans, and specifically concerned migration to Israel, their case can nonetheless help us understand Jewish emigration as a challenge as much as an opportunity and a complex process when carried out by present-day Odesans.³⁶

Visions of Israel

As a result of the last wave of Jewish emigration in the late 1980s and 1990s, Israel is now home to the largest number of ex-Soviet Jews outside the FSU. Almost as many Odesan Jews live there as in Odesa.³⁷ Many of my interlocutors had family members or friends who had moved to Israel in the 1990s and 2000s, or earlier. Most of these migrants had decided to remain in Israel, but others used Israel as a stepping stone for emigration to Canada, Australia, the United States, or elsewhere.³⁸ A few had returned to Odesa. I wanted to know how “stay-back” Odesans, who’d never left Ukraine, forged their ideas about Israel; I also wanted to know what returnees, mainly from Israel, thought about their relationship with Israel and with Odesa.

Middle-aged and elderly Odesan Jews who’d never moved abroad did not view Israel through a Zionist lens. Instead, they perceived it first and foremost through the filter of family and friends who had lived there. These interpersonal networks revealed what it was like to become a Russian-speaking Israeli in terms that reflected the daily rigors of social and economic life. Those who could afford it often chose to test their visions of that life by visiting kin. Personal attachments and practical considerations seemed to outweigh any ideological connections Jews might feel to their “homeland.”

Mila, mentioned earlier in this chapter, lived in Odesa with her mother. Her only son, Mendy, had emigrated to Israel in 1997 and still lived there. Originally, Mila had thought that Mendy would return to Odesa. The thought of joining him in Israel had crossed her mind a number of times, she said, but “I feel much more at home in Odessa, where I was born and raised.” Elaborating on her sense of identity, Mila said, “If someone asked me if I was part of the Russian narod [people] I would say yes, because I was raised in Russian culture and literature and I know it [Russian culture] much better than I know Jewish culture.³⁹ I know Israeli history, major holidays . . . but it’s not the same thing.”

Still, Israel was a familiar place. She connected it primarily with her son but also with her job at the Israeli Cultural Center. Before taking that job, she said she’d known little about Israel beyond the fact that it “existed.” Even though Israeli life had become a regular topic of conversation at their house, it lacked the “nostalgic pull of a physical home.”⁴⁰ That feeling was reserved for the city where they had grown up. “Odessa is a special place,” Mila explained. “It’s small, it’s familiar, it’s homey, it’s mine. You can’t compare it to other cities in Ukraine.”

Mila’s mother, in her late seventies, kept Israel in her peripheral vision only because her grandson lived there. She told me that at her age, she couldn’t imagine leaving Odesa. Her husband and other family members were buried in Odesa’s Jewish cemetery, to which she felt a personal responsibility. Both Mila and her mother relied on the fact that it was easier for Mendy to visit them, and they eagerly awaited his every return.

I met Mendy on one of his visits. Like many of his generation, he had been introduced to the idea of living in Israel through the Jewish Agency for Israel (Sokhnut) summer camp. This orientation was reinforced by his association with Beitar, where Zionist ideology was actively promoted. “This was something I only understood later,” he said. “No one directly told you that you had to go to Israel, but everything pointed in that direction.” He explained that his emigration to Israel at age eighteen was a natural move in identifying himself as a Jew, part of his search for a more meaningful Jewish life. While Mendy no longer stated his reasons for living in Israel in terms of the Zionist myth of return, he had other reasons for keeping Israel as his home, including work, friendships, and independence.

Given the nature of immigration to Israel, where a great many migrants were young people involved in religious or secular Zionist organizations who left their former homes on their own initiative, the scenario of leaving parents and grandparents behind in Odesa wasn’t uncommon. In these circumstances, emigrants’ families were often just as concerned with events in Israel as with Ukrainian news. Fear of terrorism loomed large and became all the more extreme when children or grandchildren were serving in the Israeli army or when conflicts arose.

A number of parents shared the image of Israel as a war zone where terrorism touches lives on a daily basis. These parents felt that their children had made a mistake in emigrating there. The same fear also led many parents to object to their children participating in Jewish organizations in Odesa, as they were concerned that it would persuade their children to move to Israel. In one extreme case, the parents of Roma forbade discussing any Jewish affairs at home, out of fear that their son might want to make aliyah.

Religious Jews who didn’t wish their children to be brought up and educated according to what they saw as the excessively secular norms of Israeli society also kept the Zionist organizations at arm’s length. Maya felt that Israel lacked the appropriate discipline, schooling, and personal relations that her son could experience in Odesa. Now that Odesa had all the institutions and conditions needed for living an observant Jewish life, staying was a comfortable option for many religious Jews.

Even Jewish youth who weren’t participating in the Jewish Agency for Israel (Sokhnut) summer camp or Beitar’s activities had personal networks with peers and family in Israel, just as their parents and grandparents did. Twenty-year-old Svetlana, whose sister lived in Tel Aviv, often spoke of her numerous visits to Israel and the hardships she witnessed in her sister’s life. This direct contact with daily life there had left her with mixed feelings about living in Israel herself. Along with her parents, she often followed the television and radio news about Israel and expressed concern for her sister’s well-being.

For those youth who did identify with Israel through institutional affiliations, the discourse was much different—more informational, more direct, and containing a more elaborate architecture of association and allure. In addition to what was taught at the secular institutions, Israel’s biblical and contemporary history were part of the curriculum at religious Jewish schools, and the idea and place of messianic and ancient Israel were reinforced in daily prayer. The Litvak Orthodox movement sent many students to yeshivas and other religious institutions that offered programs of intense Jewish education in which the idea of aliyah is prominent. Another mode of contact with Israel was offered by the Israeli religious families who served as educators and spiritual leaders for many of Odesa’s youth in the Jewish schools.

These institutions, whether secular, religious, or Zionist, invoked Israel not just as a place to live but as the place that represented Jewish people as a whole. However, that changed when youth traveled to Israel on study-abroad programs. These schemes, offered specifically to young people, were designed to promote aliyah. The short trips had become increasingly popular among Odesa’s Jewish youth, who took the opportunity to visit Israel and to sample its social and political life without committing to immigration.⁴¹ Among the most popular programs was Taglit, which many of my friends attended. A thirteen-day trip to take in Israel’s most appealing destinations in the company of other young people left many young Odesan Jews with fond memories of “their” country and the wish to return. Recalling her own Taglit experience, nineteen-year-old Karina said, “When I landed at Ben Gurion [airport], it felt like I was coming home after some twenty years of being away. . . . You learn so much about it [Israel], you read all those books, you teach others about it, and when you finally get there it’s such an overwhelming feeling of being in a familiar place. It’s your imaginary castle built especially for you, where you feel like a princess. I couldn’t wait to tell everyone about it.” Pictures, music, necklaces with the Star of David, T-shirts with symbols of the Israeli army or Israeli flag, and tales of Taglit experiences were part of the shared discourse and material culture that linked past participants and motivated others to go. At the same time, many of Odesa’s Jewish youth described having to defend their views on Israel to friends and family on their return. Karina’s parents didn’t understand how she could relate so closely to a country she’d visited only once; her friends half-jokingly accused her of having been “brainwashed.”

For Karina, it took another, lengthier trip to Israel before she could make her decision about aliyah. “Israel is something special,” she told me. “You can’t compare it to other countries. But life [in Israel] isn’t anything like it’s described in the books.” Karina recognized the distinction between tourism and emigration, as did many others who first experienced Israel as visitors. She ultimately based her decision on her longer stay in the country and the stories of the less prosperous migrants she knew. In general, I found that participants in extended Israeli programs expressed more diverse views on Israel—feelings of attachment, yes, but also displacement, and sometimes utter disappointment.⁴²

Karina gave various reasons for her decision to stay, including her status as a nonhalakhic Jew and a Russian speaker, and the knowledge that other family members wouldn’t consider immigrating to Israel themselves. In her family, she was the only one who favored Judaism over Russian Orthodoxy and held Israel close to her heart. (Her stepfather, a practicing Christian, was influential in the lives of Karina’s mother and brother, who saw themselves as being “far from all things Jewish.”) Moreover, Karina had a film career that was too important to her to sacrifice by emigrating. On the other hand, Karina’s generation was the last in her family who would qualify for the Right of Return, and this meant that she bore the responsibility to secure a Jewish future for her future children and a connection with what she described as her “Jewish homeland.” Like others who’d only recently learned of their Jewish links through Israeli-based organizations but who lacked the maternal link recognized by Israel’s religious authorities, Karina also knew the limitations of her Jewish inheritance.

For other young people I met, the mere possibility of moving to Israel made them consider a different, independent mode of living. The Taglit trips fed into this. Discussing the opportunities for herself and her boyfriend, Daria said, “Misha and I are thinking of going to Israel. Through the Jewish Agency for Israel (Sokhnut) we can move there for free. Misha’s grandparents live there, and they might help him find a job and let us stay with them. I’d like to go on Taglit just to see it; I’ve never been.” Daria’s family was similar to Karina’s, and she knew that she’d probably be the only one in her immediate family to live in Israel—and that her family would disapprove. Israel thus functioned as the backdrop for a vision in which she and Misha could start a life of their own, away from their parents’ supervision. But even though the couple spent much time foreseeing their new life, they never made concrete plans to leave.

In any one person’s decision to live in Israel, a number of divergent motives were at work. But during my fieldwork I met very few people who were finally persuaded enough to relocate. Statistics from the Israeli Consulate support this, showing a large drop in exit visas: in 1999, 4,041 visas were granted to residents of the Odesa region, but by 2006, the number barely exceeded 300.⁴³ However attached Odesan Jews may have felt to some idea of Israel, such sentiments didn’t ultimately convince them to emigrate. The decision was no longer “now or never,” as it had been in the years after the Soviet breakup, and thus many young people felt comfortable knowing they could hold on to the mere possibility. “I feel that Israel will always be there,” Igor said on his return from a six-month study-abroad program. “No one’s taking away my right to repatriate. But for now, I don’t want to be there.”

Returnees, Transmigrants, and Long-Term Visitors in Odesa

To explore the subject of home and belonging, I reached out to returnees—those who had tasted life in Israel and then chosen to leave it. During our interviews, meetings, and interactions, I was keen to find out how their time abroad had shaped their relationships with Israel, Ukraine, Odesa, and Jewish Odesa and whether it had changed their relationships with local Jews and others upon their return. I also sought to explore how, after their return, they viewed the new political and social order that affected both Jewish and non-Jewish circles in Odesa.

The return migration of ex-Soviet Jews from Israel has received much attention from politicians, scholars of Russian-speaking Jewish affairs, and journalists around the globe.⁴⁴ A 2004 report from the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia stated that “for the first time in history, more Russian Jews now migrate to Russia from Israel than the other way around.”⁴⁵ In a 2007 survey of 4,214 Russian-speaking Jewish respondents, most of whom (90 percent) resided in Israel, 81 percent said they’d considered leaving the country.⁴⁶

Taking a broader view, we know that of the nearly one million Jews who arrived in Israel after 1989, some 12 percent had left the country by the end of 2017. Roughly half of those who departed kept moving, heading next to the United States, Canada, or western Europe, while the other half went back to the FSU.⁴⁷ The true depth of Jewish repatriation to the FSU is unclear. Official statistics of the Russian and Ukrainian governments show 17,438 registered returnees to the Russian Federation and 14,955 returnees to Ukraine from 1997 to 2009.⁴⁸ But many returnees don’t register with the local passport office; instead, they hold on to their Israeli passports.⁴⁹ This means that the unofficial tally of returnees is much higher. Moreover, many returnees travel frequently to Israel and therefore are automatically excluded from the statistics of out-migrants calculated by the Israeli state.

Israeli sociologists insisted that many of these returnees were not “failed cases of aliyah”—that is, individuals who were unable to adapt to the Israeli way of life—but rather individuals who, although young, well-educated, and capable, had skills that couldn’t be accommodated in Israel’s limited labor market and who had therefore reached a “glass ceiling.”⁵⁰ Israeli state officials expressed concern about a possible “brain drain” to Russia, but specialists in Russian Jewish migration insist that, due to the nearly identical characteristics of emigrants from Russia to Israel and immigrants to Russia from Israel, these recent developments “do not cause a ‘brain drain’ in either place.”⁵¹ Regardless of the root cause, the outflow of Russian-speaking Jews, along with other groups of Israelis who choose to live outside Israel, can be seen as undermining the “Zionist assertion that Israel is the best place for Jews to live.”⁵²

Some journalists and their readers expressed surprise that Russian-speaking Jews would return to the FSU.⁵³ That surprise stemmed from the old narratives of Soviet repression that still prevailed.⁵⁴ In response, political scientist Evgeny Satanovsky has warned Western audiences not to read too much into this trend and to look beyond the Soviet days of repression: “There is no Iron Curtain any more, and that’s what the phenomenon is . . . nobody is surprised when an American Jew goes to Nepal for a work contract and then returns to visit his aunt in New Jersey. . . . All these are simply signs that Russia is a normal country now.”⁵⁵

At the same time, new stereotypes were propagated in the media, asserting that returnees “galvanize Jewish community life” and “revive Jewish culture.”⁵⁶ Those who have experienced life in Israel are thus perceived as active and knowledgeable Jews with something to teach stay-back Jews about Judaism and Jewish community.

Among the returnees I met were people who’d simply never managed to find their way in Israel. Facing economic, social, or personal constraints, they had decided to return to Odesa. Many of them were young Jews who’d set off on their own and found it difficult to survive without family support. In other instances, elderly Odesans in Israel found themselves too dependent on others for communication and everyday tasks. Some middle-aged migrants struggled to earn a living. There were also cases of well-to-do migrants who’d had no trouble acclimatizing but were lured back to Odesa by business opportunities. These “opportunity seekers” often traveled back and forth, dividing their time among multiple destinations with split business and family commitments, thus constituting a group I call transmigrants.

Education and community service opportunities also attracted both returnees and other Israelis to Odesa.⁵⁷ I met returnees, transmigrants, and long-term visitors who weren’t all originally from the city.⁵⁸ In some circumstances, returnees who grew up in other cities in the Soviet Union were drawn to Odesa by personal or professional connections. Although most ex-Soviet Jewish returnees chose to move to major cities in Russia and Ukraine, due to their economic growth, the Russian-speaking Israelis I met chose Odesa for a number of reasons. For some, it was the place they had left and longed to return to; others relied on the support of their local families and friends. In many cases, property ownership played a major role.

For many new arrivals, Odesa was both a familiar and a foreign place. A number of returnees from Israel said it reminded them of Tel Aviv and other coastal Israeli cities. Odesa’s port atmosphere gave some returnees a sense of being part of the world and connected to their travel experiences. Returnees felt that its small, cozy feel, as well as its airy openness and grandeur, made it unique. “I love the fact that I’m able to see an opera or theater performance here, and I also love the market, where people speak to me as if they know me,” one returnee shared.

Narratives of Returnees

Nina and her son Kostya were among the first returnees from Israel I met in Odesa. At that time, they didn’t know of any others who’d returned.⁵⁹ Nina had left Odesa in 1989 and returned in 2000; her son came back a year later. She told me about their initial departure for Israel: “Many of my students left and were persuading me to go. You had to know what Odessa was like in those years [the 1990s]. . . . It was very difficult to live here. There were no streetlights, darkness everywhere, extremely high prices, and nothing, absolutely nothing, in the grocery stores. People spoke of pogroms. Only later did I understand that it was just rumors. Unfortunately, I was one of those people who couldn’t withstand social pressure.”⁶⁰

Nina left her apartment to her elder son, resigned from her job, and departed from her beloved city, believing she would never return. She didn’t see her move to Israel as “going home.” Quite the contrary: she spoke of her “difficult decision” to depart from what she loved and knew. But at the same time, she was comforted by the idea that she was going to a place where no one would ever call her zhidovka—and in that sense, to a place where she would be made to feel at home.

Back in Odesa, Nina reflected on her time in Israel with mixed emotions. At first, she was amazed at the generosity of the Israeli immigration and relocation personnel, who were dealing with an overwhelming number of ex-Soviet Jews. But she soon grew disillusioned with life in Israel.⁶¹ “In Odessa, Israeli emissaries promised that I’d have no problem finding employment upon arrival. But no one told me that at my age [fifty-five], I was already considered retired. It was clear that they only wanted the young.” For the first eleven months, Nina was given space in an art studio, and she and other immigrant artists made objects to sell at fairs. Eventually, all the artists were asked to leave, and she started teaching ceramics on her own initiative to a group of elderly, blind Israelis.

Nina struggled financially during the eleven years she spent in Israel. She and her son changed jobs, apartments, and cities in her efforts to make ends meet. She also suffered from the Israeli climate, especially the summers. And yet, she spoke of Israel as a “holy place” where she could feel history, see breathtaking landscapes, and take in the presence of God. In Israel, Nina started attending religious services, not in a synagogue but in a Russian Orthodox Church, which she described as being “culturally closer” to her. She recalled meeting a number of other Jews during services who were vykresty (baptized Jews).⁶²

Though Nina had formed some attachment to Israel, in the end it wasn’t enough to make her stay. Her great nostalgia for Odesa and Odesans strongly influenced her decision to return. She was one of the few returnees I met who, on coming home, opted to exchange an Israeli passport for a Ukrainian one. This allowed her to receive a pension and acquire a propiska.⁶³ When I asked Nina how others in the city had reacted to her return, she had little to say. “I don’t tell many people about it,” she said. “I don’t want to brag about living abroad.” Her shyness about her Jewish identity seemed bound up with a concern about having lived a life that others could not. One evening she told me about a painful incident when a neighbor called her a zhidovka. Nina insisted that the woman was simply envious. “She knew that I used to live in Israel. . . . I wish I’d never told her, because I could tell it aggravated her to know I had the chance to do something she can’t.” Nina was also convinced that no true Odesit would fling such an antisemitic slur; the neighbor’s provincial behavior suggested she was a new arrival.

Kostya, Nina’s son, hadn’t met any negative reactions as a returnee. Rather, he said, “The people I told about Israel were always curious to know more.” Soon after arriving in Israel, he’d been admitted to one of Tel Aviv’s leading art institutes. He attended for several months but left because he couldn’t afford to study without an income. Within a year of his arrival, he was drafted into the Israeli army. But after more than a decade in Israel, he hadn’t managed to earn a degree or gain fluency in the Hebrew language, which greatly limited his employment opportunities. He turned to intermittent manual labor. Despite these struggles, Kostya considered his time in Israel to be extremely meaningful. Four years after returning to Odesa, he still saw Israel as his homeland (rodina).

Kostya had held on to his Israeli passport, and he often spoke of eventually going “home” to Israel—to his mother’s apparent irritation. His long absence from Odesa meant that he felt little connection to the city where he was born and partially raised. Had he managed to find permanent employment back in Odesa, or to forge meaningful friendships there, he might have felt more rooted.⁶⁴ In the year before we met, Kostya had become more observant of Jewish religious laws and had started attending the synagogue regularly. Neither had been part of his life in Israel, but back in Odesa, he found that he wanted to combat “assimilation.” Defining himself as an Israeli, he was also starting to define himself as an iudei. In some cases, returnees became religiously observant during their time in Israel, but for Kostya and some others I met, it took returning to Odesa, rather than moving to Israel, to develop the desire to be in an organized Jewish community. Kostya felt a sense of connection within Odesa’s religious organizations, where he could practice his basic Hebrew and discuss Israeli life.

Other returnees from Israel behaved similarly. Marat, a man in his midthirties at the time of our meeting, explained, “In Israel, I didn’t do anything Jewish; you don’t need to. But when I came back, I started doing little things with the Chabad congregation. Here I felt that it was nice to keep traditions.” He illustrated his participation in the religious congregation with an old joke: “Rabinovich goes to the synagogue to talk to God, and I go to talk to Rabinovich.” Speaking of Israel, Marat still referred to it as a homeland, though it hadn’t been his original choice for emigration and he acknowledged that immigrant life there was difficult. When he finally resettled in Odesa in 2004, he and another Israeli returnee started a construction company. Marat enjoyed working with pencil and paper rather than the manual labor he’d done in Israel. Though he was back home, more religiously observant, and with a sense of knowing his homeland, Marat kept his eye on the economy and his prospects. He wouldn’t return to Israel, he told me, but Canada or the United States, where his father lived, weren’t out of the question if Odesa’s economic situation became too difficult.

Homemaking and Jewish Organizations

The generational differences in affiliation to Jewish Odesa seen between Nina, Kostya, and Marat weren’t atypical among returnees. Older returnees tried to ease back into their former lives almost unnoticed and usually avoided official membership (except for the sake of pensions and other benefits). The behavior of middle-aged returnees was largely determined by the nature of their employment and by family circumstances. Some, seeking career benefits, used Jewish organizations to network, especially for new clients; others saw no advantage in frequenting Jewish gatherings. For families with children enrolled in Jewish schools, occasional Jewish activity was the norm, and this sometimes led to more extended involvement; others lacked the time or interest. Most younger returnees strived to practice their Hebrew and to take part in Jewish holiday celebrations; some found employment in Jewish organizations. A minority chose to remain on the periphery of Jewish activities.

Nastya, whom we met in the previous chapter, returned to Odesa after nine years in Tel Aviv. She told me she couldn’t relate to Jewish life in Odesa, given the public emphasis on religion—“too Jewish, narrow, and old-fashioned.” Now in her late twenties, she’d moved back in 2006 to be closer to family. Her first encounter with Israel had been on a study-abroad program; then and there, she’d decided to emigrate. At age fifteen, she had made aliyah. Before the move, Nastya had been very involved in the Jewish life of Odesa, participating in programs offered by the Jewish Agency for Israel (Sokhnut) and Migdal. But her passion for being an active Jew faded during her time in Israel. As she saw it, when one moves to Israel, acting out one’s Jewishness no longer seems important.

Returning to Odesa, Nastya hadn’t opted to rekindle her old connections with the city’s Jewish circles. She looked down on the Jewish Agency for Israel’s (Sokhnut’s) policy of “force-feeding Jews fairy tales” about their “home.” In fact, nothing about the religious world struck a chord with her present Jewish identification. Lynellyn Long and Ellen Oxfeld, writing of returnees in general, point out that “as the act of returning unfolds, the specific experiences often contrast with the returnee’s original dreams.”⁶⁵ Other examples indicate that some returnees “feel that their own interests are more cosmopolitan and transcend [those of] the local community,” which now appears “narrow.”⁶⁶ This seems to have been Nastya’s experience.

Moreover, Nastya spoke with some agitation about living with her parents. Having been independent, she wasn’t used to answering to anyone, let alone sharing a room, as she now did with her sister. (Other young returnees also found family dynamics strained. Regina, a returnee from Haifa, told me it was hard to live with her mother-in-law, with whom she was forced to share an apartment.) Lacking the organizational ties to create a social circle, Nastya struggled to find her way, though she did manage to register for several classes at the Engineering Institute of Odesa. Most of her peers who’d stayed in Odesa had graduated from college and were working, and many of her old girlfriends were married and starting families. By contrast, Nastya was single, had “lost two years to the army,” and despite her sustained efforts to work and study at the same time, she hadn’t completed college in Israel. In Odesa, at least, education was still free of charge, though it often involved informal payments, such as bribes.⁶⁷

Transmigrants

While some returnees intended their remigration to be permanent, others did not. This group of transnational migrants, or transmigrants, defined their relationship with Odesa as partial and intermittent.⁶⁸

Galina, who was in her forties when we spoke, saw herself as living in two countries: “I arrive in Ben Gurion—I am home. I arrive in Odessa—I am home. Although I travel extensively, I experience this feeling of home only in these two places.” Galina’s sentiments are embedded in familial ties: her eldest son lives in Israel; her daughter from her second marriage lives in Odesa.

Dima, his wife, Luba, and their two children came to Odesa, where Dima grew up, after living in Israel for ten years. They had decided to move to Odesa to develop their business selling Israeli-made food supplements and skincare products. Dima and Luba traveled regularly to and from Israel, as well as across Ukraine, both for work and family reasons. They missed the food, music, and natural beauty of Israel. The couple had retained their Israeli citizenship, but they secured Ukrainian resident visas to get permission to work. Although their primary identification was as Israelis, Odesa was a convenient business base in the region. Dima’s mother lived there and was available to mind their children, which made things easier. As Dima put it: “It’s easy for me to come back to Ukraine, as opposed to moving to Canada, which is where my wife and I originally wanted to go once we decided to expand our business. In Odesa I know everyone I need to know for any given situation, and I feel free. In Israel, starting your own business is difficult, especially as an immigrant.”

Other entrepreneurs I met had similar experiences of conducting business overseas. Vova, a returnee from Haifa, spoke of the troubles he faced. “You can’t trust anyone in Israel. I had a business with a Moroccan guy, and he cheated me out of all my money.” His motivation for coming to Odesa was straightforward, as were his plans for the future: “I am here to make money.” Two months into his stay, he was working hard to open a hummus restaurant. He had attended a number of Jewish functions in the city and had approached the Chabad rabbi to ask for help in his entrepreneurial efforts. According to Vova, the rabbi knew many local businessmen who might provide funding.

Vova was originally from Saint Petersburg; his wife, Nadya, was born in Odesa. The deciding factor between the two cities was that Odesa had an apartment available for their use. Also, they’d visited Odesa many times during the years they lived in Israel. Nadya was confident she’d find a job in one of the city’s Jewish organizations, where her Hebrew language skills would be in demand.

Like Nadya, many who considered returning from Israel made a number of preliminary visits to Odesa. Yulik, originally from the Ukrainian town of Dnipro and living in Israel, was making such an exploratory visit when I met him. Like Vova and Nadya, he was attracted to Ukraine for its business potential, in his case information technology. Though he’d been planning to relocate to Kyiv, Yulik began leaning toward a smaller city like Odesa or perhaps Dnipro, where the IT industry offered more opportunities and less job competition than the Ukrainian capital.

Yulik’s family in Ukraine had offered to help him get started if he provided financing. But on a visit to his hometown, he’d found that Dnipro didn’t feel like home. Having spent most of his life in Israel, he now felt like a foreigner back in Ukraine. He spoke Russian with a Hebrew accent, he didn’t speak Ukrainian, and his diet, dress, and mannerisms all marked him as someone from abroad. Still, Yulik had been curious about living in a place that he was both close to and distant from. Odesa was a new adventure—though it wasn’t a city he knew from his childhood, it was a familiar yet foreign place to be discovered.

This sentiment of encountering something known and unknown appears in the stories of many returnees. As anthropologist and migration scholar Anders Stefansson said of exiles, refugees, and emigrants who return to some place of origin, they find a home significantly changed, while they too have formed new habits and ways of thinking in the context of different resources and realities. Thus, homecoming often means not only the practical struggle of relocation but also “rupture, surprise, and perhaps disillusionment.”⁶⁹

A significant aspect of returnees’ reintegration to life in Odesa was their approach to organized Jewish life in the city. Some, like Nadya, were looking to Jewish organizations for employment; others, like Kostya and Marat, became active participants in Jewish life. Some, even those of different generations, chose to remain on the periphery like Nastya and Nina.

For those returnees who became active in the Jewish life of the city, experiences differed. Neither Dima nor his wife put any importance on their own religious observance or that of their family, but they still sent their children to one of the Jewish Orthodox schools. Dima explained that he and his family didn’t speak Ukrainian, now the language of instruction in most city public schools. At the Jewish school, their children could learn in Russian and still practice their Hebrew. Even so, Dima saw little in common between the ways he and his wife opted to raise their children as Jewish and the more religious approaches he found in Odesa on his return: “One of the teachers at Migdal complained to me that my children weren’t paying attention to her lectures on Jewish traditions. I explained that for Israelis, this is natural. In Israel, most of the Russians aren’t religious, and we don’t mix with them [the religious Jews]. It’s not a world I want [my children] to be in.”⁷⁰ Although Dima’s children had grown up in Israel knowing the Jewish calendar as a state-initiated agenda, he didn’t accept that Judaism must be a crucial part of their identity, even if he did opt to enroll them in a religious school.

Conclusion

The migration trends visible in contemporary Odesa reflect the post-Soviet reality in Ukraine and the FSU. The Jews of Odesa have developed a web of attachments to places that for most were once far off and prohibited. Those places now stand as family members’ homes, sites of new experiences and perspectives on religion, or locations of economic and material opportunity. Moreover, as migration moves in multiple directions, serving different roles for different generations, returning “home” becomes another stage of such movement—the arrival at a place that is understood and familiar but also changed and still changing.

As seen in this chapter, the experiences of Israeli Russian-speaking Jewish returnees in Odesa are especially helpful for understanding the limits and possibilities of what is meant by home, homeland, and diaspora. Their patterns of crossing international borders redraw the traditional model of Jews as a diasporic population connected to a distant homeland, the cradle of a people’s identity. These returnees illustrate the innumerable, complicated, conflicted, and conflicting definitions of home and homeland, exile and return, foreigner and belonging. Diaspora, the “dispersion of any people from their traditional homeland,” assumes a link between people and their “proper place.”⁷¹ Within diaspora studies, therefore, Jews serve as the “ideal type,” since they’re thought to embody the “classic ‘old diaspora’”—that is, the ancient dispersal from Babylon, which serves as the root of the generalized term.⁷²

Recent scholarship has challenged this connotation of diaspora-as-exile.⁷³ For instance, historian Daniel Boyarin and anthropologist Jonathan Boyarin have argued that “in a world grown thoroughly and inextricably interdependent,” we must recognize “that peoples and lands are not naturally and organically connected.”⁷⁴ Another version of this critique of assuming “a single center of a given community”—again, defined by a “natural bond” that people are said to have with their “native home”—stresses the notion of multiple homelands that exist for, and ultimately define, any one group of people.⁷⁵ No longer defined by places, “identities have become deterritorialized.”⁷⁶ But for many of the Odesan Jews in this chapter, place remains a powerful frame of belonging and identity even if “home is a mental construct, not only a physical place.”⁷⁷

In many accounts of Jewish life outside Israel, we can see how the supposed diaspora countries and various cities within those countries are perceived and experienced as homelands, and how Israel—while still regarded as a place of spiritual, religious, and communal importance—can nonetheless lose the privileged status of “home” or “homeland” and thus be open to criticism, both for its claims as “the homeland” and for its politics in the name of such status.⁷⁸

Russian-speaking Jews and other minority populations who faced difficulty adapting to Israeli society, where their cultural capital often wasn’t recognized, have been instrumental in transforming the idea of Israel as a Jewish home.⁷⁹ Israelis who choose to live outside Israel demonstrate another ambivalent relationship between Jews and Israel—an ambivalence that’s apparent in the literature on yerida (emigration from Israel).⁸⁰ Some returnees came back to Odesa expressing strong ties to Israeli culture. They retained their self-definition as Israeli through language, dress, music, food, worldview, and even, by way of their citizenship, the idea of an eventual return. But others can be seen as choosing their homes or other nearby locations because it was a familiar place, the site of professional activity and personal growth, as well as the place that gave them a sense of being rooted there. As for the transmigrants who shuttle between countries, it’s less about a sense of home than pragmatic business demands, the need to use particular products and services available in a certain place. For some like Galina, whose children live in Tel Aviv and in Odesa, home is both.

Israel is undoubtedly regarded as an important place on the Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking Jewish map, even for those who choose to leave it behind. It now has the largest Russian-speaking population outside the FSU, a growing Ukrainian-speaking community, and extensive economic, social, and political links with the global ex-Soviet population. Since the start of the Russian-Ukrainian war, language has become a sensitive and political topic. We are seeing a shift in belonging of some Ukrainian Jewish Israelis who are identifying more closely with Ukraine and the Ukrainian language. For many of the larger Jewish population in Odesa, including the returnees, the question of belonging in Odesa remains tied to the economic and social situations both at home and abroad—Israel offers a basis of comparison between the two places. To a large extent, the future for returnees will be dictated by the personal and professional opportunities that arise and by the economic and sociopolitical situation in the countries where they might settle. The ongoing war in the Donbas region and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have given rise to a new wave of aliyah and spurred the return of many Israeli citizens who’d been living in Ukraine.

Odesan Jewry is now part of the global Ukrainian Jewish population, spread across many continents and countries. They’re as much part of the Russian-speaking and, more recently, Ukrainian-speaking diaspora as they are part of the Israeli, Ukrainian, and Jewish diasporas, whose “cultural [we can even add religious], geographic, and national boundaries are blurred and in flux.”⁸¹ The overlapping worlds that define ex-Soviet Jewish returnees and transmigrants through the process of migration and remigration account for multiple understandings of home; ultimately, they transcend the working definitions in traditional diaspora discourse. Returnees, in effect, take up the role of being both transnational and Jewish, albeit in different ways.

The attitudes of Odesa’s returning Jewish population toward “homeland” and “diaspora” continue to evolve. Like other migrant populations, their identity as a “diasporic imagined community” is “constituted within the crucible of the materiality of everyday life.”⁸² As Stefansson points out, “After all, feelings of belonging do not rest on objective factors but are situated in the subjective realm.”⁸³ Some emigrants had initially approached Israel as a place of belonging and their “historical homeland,” but after suffering hardships in their new lives, they began to experience the place differently and saw themselves as living in the Russian-speaking diaspora. On the other hand, returnees coming back to a supposedly familiar place could also start seeing Odesa as more foreign, either because they were treated as foreigners there or because they encountered their unmet dreams in the place they’d once left behind.

Anthropologist Ruth Mandel writes about Turkish migrants in Germany who go back to Turkey on a permanent or temporary basis, saying that many “returnees suffer from disorientation” and are unable to “merge back into the Turkish mainstream” because they’re judged by others, and by themselves, as “Alamancilar” (that is, German-like).⁸⁴ Moreover, sometimes the notion of “home” or “homeland” may be applied to more than one destination or, due to disorientation, may even cease to exist. This is particularly true for returnees who shared the experience of living as members of a “Russian” diaspora in Israel and on their return viewed themselves, or were viewed by others, as “Israelis.” As James Clifford notes, “at different times in their history, societies may wax and wane in diasporism, depending on changing possibilities—obstacles, openings, antagonisms and connections—in their host countries and transnationally.”⁸⁵ Thus, “home” and “diaspora” were not ideologically driven constants associated with a center (life in Israel) and a periphery (life outside Israel). Rather, they should be conceptualized as variable locations, infused with memories and attachments that social actors inhabit and relate to through everyday experiences and life circumstances, which in turn shape their imagined reality and senses of attachment. But notions of home and belonging are not stable entities; they can shift in the context of sociopolitical transformations and, as we are currently observing, a war.

If home, as Stephan Feuchtwang defines it, is “a reference to a territory of belonging,” then ex-Soviet Jewish returnees have multiple and interconnecting homes that encompass their “cultural norms and individual fantasies” and bring together their diverse experiences as locals, migrants, repatriates, and returnees.⁸⁶ The examples of Odesan stay-back Jews and returnees discussed in this chapter enlarge and enrich the generalizations about diasporic traits by which Jews living outside Israel are classically represented. At the same time, they open new avenues for analyzing Jewish orientations and identities as embedded in culturally specific histories and locales.