PREFACE

In the opening of Unorthodox Kin: Portuguese Marranos and the Global Search for Belonging, author Naomi Leite reminds us that anthropologists, like everyone else, live in a temporal flow: our findings from the field reflect what has already passed and is becoming history.¹ And so it is, if not more so, with this ethnography. It covers the two decades after Ukraine’s independence, a crucial period of the longer and ever-evolving trajectory of post-Soviet Jewish life and Ukrainian Jewish history.

Many of the events collected here reflect the fieldwork I did in Odesa between 2005 and 2007. These events should be read as helping us better understand the dramatic changes that followed the 2013–14 Maidan protests (including the deadly fire in Odesa), the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine in the Donbas region since 2014, and the full-fledged invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces in February 2022, a tragedy that is ongoing as I complete this book. No one knows how or when the war will end—or what the outcome will be for the country’s Jewish population—but the ways they experience the war and understand themselves might be anticipated in the pages here.

As a result of Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine, more than half of Odesa’s Jewish population has fled to become refugees in neighboring countries. Although some Jewish Odesans have returned, others remain on the move, and the city’s Jewish communities have been greatly reduced, with some ceasing to exist all together. Rabbi Shlomo Baksht of the Litvak congregation closed the doors of his synagogue and evacuated most of his congregants to Romania. Yulia Gris of the Progressive Jewish congregation facilitated the move of her community to Poland and Germany, where she resides to this day. In the first weeks of the war, Rabbi Avraham Wolf of the Chabad congregation evacuated part of his congregants to Germany, including most students and children from the orphanage, while he himself remained in Odesa to serve those who could not or would not leave. He and his wife continued to travel back and forth between their various groups of congregants for the duration of a year, until the majority of the group returned to Odesa. Some Jews chose destinations with the help of their religious leaders, others followed family and friends, and many went where they could find any support or assistance. To this day, Odesa’s Jewry is spread among Ukraine, the neighboring European states, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, and Israel. Again, as in Soviet times, Odesa has only one synagogue in operation, and it provides a home to all remaining Jews in the city.

The Israeli Cultural Centre and the Jewish Agency have closed their facilities. The Jewish Distribution Committee (JDC or the Joint, as it is known in Ukraine and the Former Soviet Union [FSU]), which operated remotely for the first six months of the war, reopened in September 2022. Three of the women leading Migdal, a Jewish community center, and the head of Mazl Tov, the Jewish early development center, stayed in Odesa. Along with staff who remained, they aided many in evacuation and also assisted the families with children who have not left as well as the refugees flooding into the city from affected areas nearby. Together, these women organized weekly lunches at the city’s sole remaining kosher restaurant—both to help the business and to support the remaining Jews by connecting them with a community.

Many young Jewish men volunteered to serve in the Ukrainian forces and the territorial defense of their city, while others launched volunteer initiatives to deliver meals, groceries, medicine, and other essential goods to residents, soldiers, and the increasing number of refugees. The war has fractured the previous forms of Jewish life in the city, but it has not eliminated the sense of community for those who remain there. Jews, like others, are learning to live in their “new normal,” with daily sirens and the very real fear of invasion. Jewish holidays have been celebrated throughout the war to mark the Jewish calendar, and Purim, Passover, and Rosh Hashanah services organized by the Chabad congregation have brought Jews of all walks of life together in great numbers. Many of the city schools reopened in September 2022, including the Chabad Jewish schools, with approximately one-fifth of the prewar student body currently enrolled. With the help of electric generators and bomb shelters, where many lessons take place during air raids, many schools in Odesa have managed to stay open. Day by day, Odesa, now painted in blue and yellow throughout, feels more alive than in the earlier months of the war. But, although the cafés, restaurants, beauty salons, and some shops have reopened, there are constant reminders that war is here: the absence of many familiar faces, the influx of refugees, the presence of the military on half-empty, curfew-regulated streets, the sandbags and antitank equipment on those same streets, the roaring sirens throughout the day, destroyed buildings, and the loss of life.

In the first month of the war, I spoke with one elderly Ukrainian Jewish refugee in Berlin who, seeing great irony that he was taking refuge from Russian soldiers in Germany, told me he feared that Jewish life in Odesa and the rest of the country would never be the same. Everything that had been painstakingly built in the thirty years of post-Soviet life would either be physically destroyed in areas directly hit in the war or would vanish as so many Jews fled the country. Some members of the younger generation seemed to nurture the hope of an eventual return to their communities, but almost all had no clear sense of their future.² The Jews who remained in Odesa were more optimistic about the resilience of the Jewish people, often citing biblical and historical stories of Jewish survival and triumph. Rabbis also noted that the internal displacement of Jews meant new communities were being formed in places that previously did not have Jewish life. Families and lives have been fragmented on physical, social, economic, mental, and psychological levels as people face the loss of any form of life as they had come to know it.³ But Jews in Odesa and those across modern borders have also become united in their support for Ukraine and vocal about their solidarity with the larger Ukrainian society. Ukrainian Jewry indeed stands a real chance of becoming an important part of Ukraine’s civil society in a way that was not certain prior to the war. Putin has done more to unite Ukrainians of all backgrounds, Jews included, than any Ukrainian leader.

This book comes to life at a time when the topics of Jewish-Ukrainian relations, Ukrainians’ connection to the Russian world, and the role and dynamics of Ukrainian nationalism are all highly politicized. Publishing an ethnography of a place that has since become defined by the starkly different reality of war brings the risk that my words might be used for different ends from those I intended. The book presents a cultural moment two decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, before Ukrainian relations with Russia deteriorated, and before Russia launched a war in Ukraine to pull it into a greater Russia under the pretext of “liberating,” “disarming,” and “denazifying” its neighboring state. I want to be, and must be, true to the stories entrusted to me by my interlocutors and friends during that particular time. It was, again, a period embedded in the longer trajectory of post-Soviet reforms and developments in Ukraine, and the events of that time are important and relevant for understanding this complex present.

Like other researchers who write about dramatically changed environments, such as anthropologist Tone Bringa, who described a mixed Muslim/Catholic village in central Bosnia before and after the 1990s Balkan War, I have had to deploy both present and past tense as I work to capture the processes of continuity and change.⁴ As we know, identities are never stable, static, or bounded; they are always evolving, adapting, and transforming in the midst of daily life. In the early years of my fieldwork, I looked to Odesa as a case study of Russian-speaking Jewry in a post-Soviet urban city that was historically famed for being Jewish. Although I was carrying out research in modern-day Ukraine due to Odesa’s specificity as a city, I hadn’t considered myself a scholar of Ukraine. I myself had left the Soviet Union as a child of nine and was raised in a secular Jewish environment, but I often wondered what remained of the world we left behind when my family moved to the United States. This book grew out of my desire to understand Soviet Jewish history more deeply and to learn about developments that followed the dissolution of the USSR. I chose Odesa as my field site because I was interested in the process of religious, specifically Jewish, revival that took place after the end of the Soviet regime, generated largely by international organizations in a place that had a long history of evolving Jewish identities and traditions. I wanted to comprehend the variety of views, competing ideas, and practices of Judaism and Jewishness that evolved and to explore how Jews were reacting to the new models of Jewish life and expression as well as how the city’s character was being transformed as a result of those reactions.

At that time, most of my interlocutors did not identify themselves as Ukrainian Jews. If anything, they saw themselves as Jews living in Ukraine and as part of the larger ex-Soviet Jewish population connected by the Russian language and by Russian-speaking Jewish initiatives across the globe. This was the case for many ex-Soviet Jews who grew up in the Soviet Union, especially those who had emigrated before the collapse of the USSR or shortly after: they regarded themselves as “Soviet” or “Russian” based on the fact that they grew up in the Soviet Union or with Soviet values, primarily spoke Russian, and identified with Russian culture.

More recently, both Ukrainians and Jews have been described as marginalized subjects whose cultures were repressed in certain periods of the Soviet regime. Odesa, however, is a Russian-speaking city in Ukraine with historical links to the Russian Empire. And it is also a place where Ukrainian identification is undoubtedly ascendant. Everyone I know in Odesa is supporting Ukraine in the war, even if they are divided on how to express their loyalty. Most disapproved of gestures like trying to erase Pushkin from Odesa’s history because he was a Russian writer, but others understood and even supported efforts to de-Russify the city. The more rockets fell on the city, the more the desire to part from all things Russian grew. At the end of December 2022, the statue of Catherine II, the city’s founder, was removed from its prominent place overlooking the Black Sea. One woman told me that although she was pained by these transformations, she understood others who saw these monuments as memories of a traumatic past, comparing their feelings to a rape victim who is left with physical reminders of their aggressor.

My hope is that this book can help readers understand the tension between the city’s historically rooted identification with Russia and the rise of a Ukrainian identity. It is true that as I struggle to bring this work to a close, I ask myself how I can write about Odesa at a time when a devastating ongoing war threatens unforeseeable effects. Are my conclusions valid, given today’s unfolding reality? How can I speak about the notions of cosmopolitanism and tolerance when we stand witness to the bombings of civilians by the country that historically birthed Odesa? I am pained by this reality, but I am also confident that a picture of Odesa captured a decade and a half before the country it is part of was invaded can reveal the stakes of identity formation for the city and its Jewish population.

A sign that hangs in my office, a gift from a dear friend as a goodbye token during my 2014 visit, reads, “It’s nice here but I love Odessa.” That sign stands as a reminder, not only of my own love for Odesa but also of the unconditional love held by Odesans around the world for their native city. I hope that the people whose voices are heard in the pages that follow, as they relay the stories of their own lives, families, communities, and homes (real and mythical), will feel that my description represents their reality, even if some do not agree with my interpretations and analysis.

There have been many ends of “Old Odessa,” but the city and its people provide numerous historical lessons on how different people can live and thrive together. More importantly, it shows many examples of how they can heal in the aftermath of conflict.⁵ My wish is that this book will provide guidance for understanding a crucial period in the city’s history and offer ideas that can help bring about peace in the future.