“2” in “Jewish Odesa” | Open Indiana

The story of older Soviet-era Jews has most often been told from the perspective of the Jewish activists, dissidents, and refuseniks who garnered attention in the West. This chapter, in contrast, focuses on Odesa’s oldest generation so as to better trace the multiple changes in familial practices, senses of identity, and social orientations from the prerevolutionary time to today. To this end, it presents the lives and family histories of four elderly individuals—Olga, Viktor, Elena, and Nina—as they remember their pasts and their family histories and make sense of the present they were witnessing in Odesa. Such articulations of memory come with their challenges.¹ Still, oral histories have been instructive for understanding life in societies where public expression and personal opinion were suppressed—and, in particular, for accessing “Soviet subjectivity,” “post-Soviet subjectivity,” and “selfhood.”²

Anthropologists studying the everyday life of societies have used oral histories to produce “thick descriptions” of ordinary experiences as well as major events such as the Holocaust “from below.”³ Using the “oral memoirs” method defined by oral historian David Dunaway, which involves having the subject tell his or her story as the author adds explanations and footnotes, I approach the life histories presented herein as faithful representations of Soviet experiences that, taken together, portray part of the structure and workings of society.⁴ Similar to other scholars using oral history, I see value in letting people speak for themselves, as we try to understand the more nuanced, sensitive, layered, and contradictory historical experiences.⁵

I used the “flexible interview approach” outlined by oral historian Alessandro Portelli and embedded in Grounded Theory, where questions arise dialectically from the answers in what Portelli calls “thick dialogue.”⁶ Whenever it was possible, I recorded the stories and transcribed them afterward, but at times, I had to jot down notes by hand. However, there were also moments during unrecorded interviews when I wanted to be fully present for my interviewee, paying attention to their words, body language, velocity of speech, and the silences in the room, so I just listened. I later wrote up these conversations from memory, verifying any gaps on my next visit. Because different environments allow for different levels of intimacy, I conducted interviews at the interviewees’ homes, but I also included informal conversations that arose while walking on the street, tending to daily errands, going to the market, and talking around the kitchen table. At these times, my interlocutors felt more comfortable sharing details of their stories that would have been obstructed by a recording device and the formality of an interview.

My goal in seeking out my interlocutors’ narratives was to understand the events, stories, and people that shaped their Jewish identity as they were being raised in Soviet Odesa. I wondered how they related to the socialist state apparatus, values, and conditions of everyday life in that specific urban context and how they judged post-Soviet transitions on both a sociopolitical and an economic level—specifically, the process of a Jewish and religious revival in contemporary Ukraine. The narratives that follow are indeed infused with the social dynamics that emerge from old courtyards and houses, family graves and state documents, and even climate and soil—the textures of everyday life in the city through which their Jewishness, with varying intensities, passed privately through generations or openly across borders. In this way, they offer a deeper understanding of Jewish life in the Soviet Union, providing counterpoints to what some scholars have called a “negative Jewish identity” determined by state-sanctioned discrimination and antisemitism.⁷ The stories, similar to the interviews of shtetl survivors in Vinnytsya collected by historian Jeffrey Veidlinger and his research team, help us to “move away from stereotypes and generalities in order to understand in greater detail the specifics of daily life and social interactions in specific locales.”⁸

Olga, Viktor, Elena, and Nina regarded themselves as secular members of the Russian-speaking intelligentsia, educated and raised in the “Soviet house of culture.”⁹ In this way, they sound similar to the Russian-speaking Jews interviewed by sociologists Edna Lomsky-Feder and Tamar Rapoport in Israel, for whom the intersection of language, sensibility, and social status was central to their self-identity as Jews from the former Soviet Union.¹⁰ They are individuals, but they were also members of a collective; thus, when their stories are triangulated with other stories and other sources, we build a more in-depth picture of that Jewish intelligentsia. The stories in this chapter focus neither on those who defied the Soviet system and wanted to leave nor on those who felt completely assimilated, and indeed, scholars have criticized such images of the Soviet Jew as a “dissident intellectual” and of an “assimilated Soviet Jewish intelligentsia.”¹¹ Rather, my interviewees thought of themselves as Jews, always, taking different paths to the reality of a Soviet framework.

I am not suggesting that their stories represented Odesa’s intelligentsia as a whole or the elderly Jewish population holistically. As we know from the previous chapter, not all Jews were members of the intelligentsia. Steven Zipperstein notes that Jewish intellectuals were only marginally shaping the city’s Jewish story in the early nineteenth century, but in Soviet Odesa, Jews did represent a high percentage of the city’s white-collar workers and cultural elite.¹² I focused on this group for several reasons. First, it has been well documented that Jews in the Soviet Union made up a large percentage of the Russian-speaking intelligentsia, and although we know that Odesa’s Jewry represented different strata of society, many of the elderly Jews I met self-identified as intelligentsia. Second, concentrating on this particular group of Soviet-born Jewry helps the reader understand where skepticism and critique of religiosity comes from and highlights a Jewish identity linked to the Russian literary and cultural world. Similar to the elderly Jewish woman Vera Chmeleva, the protagonist of the Regina Maryanovska-Davidzon film Forgotten Fall, the Odesan Jews who shared their oral histories also reveal a post-Soviet reality of a generation whose ideals have lost their importance. They too are forgotten by the state and are skeptical of political, economic, and religious reforms.

I was introduced to my oldest informants in 2006 by my friend Margarita, an energetic octogenarian philosophy professor. She insisted that I meet her dear friends as soon as possible because they were members of a now-dwindling social stratum, the type of Jewish Odesans I wouldn’t just “meet on the street.” Margarita felt that the days of that “Odessan Jewish intelligentsia” were numbered due to emigration, post-Soviet changes in the city, and the birth of what she called a “new type of Jew” in Odesa. When I questioned her on what made new Jews “new,” besides their age, she replied that her older Jewish friends didn’t feel the need to prove they were Jewish or to shout it out. The new Jews, she told me, had something to prove, and many who had only recently discovered their Jewish descent didn’t have their family history to fall back on. Margarita believed that Viktor and Olga, a married couple with intricate family histories, could give me a more nuanced understanding of Jewish belonging in the Soviet era and tensions apparent in the relationship between old and new Jews in the city.

Viktor Feldman and Olga Notkina

When I met them, Viktor was eighty-nine and Olga, eighty-two. I spent more than a year getting to know them. Occasionally I would accompany Olga on her daily errands, but I usually went to their apartment, which they called “the birdhouse” (golubiatnik). It lacked the substantial wooden doors and neatly tiled hallways of others in their building and had no Jewish paraphernalia, whether mezuzah, menorah, or scripture.¹³ Rather, a stack of Russian-language city newspapers was piled by the front door for disposal. A tiny kitchen connected the bedroom and bathroom. The bathroom had no door, just a curtain. In the bedroom, books spilled from dilapidated wooden shelves that leaned against faded wallpaper.

I sometimes felt that Olga and Viktor needed rescuing from these dire living conditions—a feeling that was undone by our long, intimate conversations, which revealed their sense of pride in where they were and how they lived. I often cried after our interviews as I reflected on the strength of their character and ideals and on the powerful sense of the past evoked by their stories. Viktor was slender, with a full head of gray hair and thick black glasses that always seemed to slope toward the right side of his face. Olga was small and fragile, with shining pale-blue eyes, and always neatly dressed. She passed away in March 2007, shortly after I left Odesa, and Victor died a year after that.

At the time of our talks, Viktor was housebound, only able to maneuver through their tiny space with the help of a cane. Olga, however, managed to attend at least two cultural events a month, mostly book signings and meetings with authors organized by the Odesa Literature Museum. For her, these outings were part of maintaining the routine of “seeing and being seen,” and keeping Viktor up to date on city affairs. For the last ten years of her life, at times with Viktor’s assistance, Olga also volunteered at Gmilus Hesed, the welfare center for elderly Jews, giving lectures on the history of her native city.

Both Olga and Viktor were historians, by education and disposition. They met at the library of Odesa University, where they worked for more than fifty years as specialists in various collections. Both had published extensively in Russian, and in 2006 they released their last book, Together with Them [Vmeste s nimi]—a work about their colleagues at the library, whose memory they were intent on keeping alive. They were proud to be able to tap into their knowledge of literature and history, to “turn on their brains” in conversations with members of the city’s intelligentsia who came calling with questions about Odesa’s past. As we sat at their small kitchen table, they would punctuate their narratives with references to books written by friends, pulling volumes off the shelves to contest each other’s claims about the city’s various “golden eras.” “We’re standing on the edge of a cliff,” Olga told me, “and as soon as we’re unable to answer a single question, we are gone.”

When Olga and Viktor spoke of Ukraine’s growing nationalism and the processes of Ukrainization that could be observed across the country, they believed these trends lacked momentum in Odesa. Distrusting the politicians, they blamed them for being corrupt and following their own agendas rather than the voice of the people. Likewise, they distrusted the city’s Jewish religious leaders, saying that the rabbis who had come in to establish major synagogues were trying to turn Odesa Orthodox in its practice of Judaism. For Viktor and Olga, and some others of their generation, Odesa was never Ukrainian or Orthodox. Where some saw a post-Soviet revival of a repressed or lost Judaism, they saw a contemporary struggle for power.

Olga always allowed Viktor to start our discussions, waiting to speak until she thought he needed to be corrected or until I directed a question specifically to her. She wasn’t prone to open up about personal matters unprompted.¹⁴ Because Viktor was difficult to interrupt and Olga respected his role as the “voice of the family,” his life story dominates their narrative.

A fourth-generation Odesit, Viktor was born in 1917, the year of the Bolshevik Revolution. He was raised in what he described as a “very Jewish house” next to the Jewish Burial Society, though with neighbors of different ethnicities. His paternal great-grandfather, Shimon, was a blacksmith by trade; carrying nothing but “a small sack and a pair of boots over his shoulder,” he had arrived from a village near the current border with Belarus. Viktor’s father, also named Shimon, was an optician by training. He worked for a pharmaceutical company, UROTAT, distributing medicine and medical supplies throughout southern Russia. Viktor’s mother, Rahel Gendler, was a physician whose family had moved to Odesa from the Bryansk region of central Ukraine in the early 1900s. Partially educated in Switzerland, Rahel spoke fluent German. In 1911, shortly after she met Shimon, he was arrested and imprisoned for participating in an unauthorized meeting of social democrats. Following a trial, he was sentenced to a two-year deportation to the coast of the White Sea. Rahel sought to accompany him and wrote to the governor of Odesa to request permission to marry Shimon on the prison premises. It was granted, and there in the presence of a rabbi, the two were married in a Jewish religious ceremony.

Shimon and Rahel spent their first two years of married life in the Vologodskaia region, where Rahel launched her career in medicine. She worked as a doctor and continued to do so after their return to Odesa in 1913.¹⁵ In one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, Moldovanka, she served as doctor for the needy (vrach dlia bednykh), attending to those who couldn’t afford private care. Viktor described his parents as “revolutionaries in support of liberating reforms in their country.” At home and in their professional lives, they always spoke Russian. Viktor said, “I could understand Yiddish because of my grandfather, but I never spoke it. My exposure to Hebrew was also minimal, as I never attended a kheder [religious school for boys], and it wasn’t a language of conversation in my circles of friends.”

Shimon died suddenly in 1922, and Viktor was partly raised by his paternal grandmother. “Grandma [babka] Feldman” was an observant religious woman from what Viktor described as “a good family.” As Viktor recalled, “Catching me in the courtyard, she used to drag me into the synagogue, which I tried to avoid at all costs.” His paternal grandfather, Pavel, was a shopkeeper (magazinchik) involved in the production, delivery, and sale of grain. He was, Viktor said, a religious Jew (iudei in Russian) but one who lived a “tailored” observant life: “My grandmother used to scream at him, ‘You are not a Jew, you are a goy,’ as he would heat up a little piece of pig fat [salo, a traditional Ukrainian delicacy] and dip his bread into the melted greasy puddle.¹⁶ He would shout back even louder, ‘I am a working man and I need to eat. God would not get mad at me for a little piece of pig fat.’” According to Viktor, his grandfather was far from exceptional among the Jews in Odesa, who, he claimed, regularly transgressed Jewish dietary laws (kashrut). The culturally diverse and delicious food sold at Odesa’s famous Privoz market often lured Jews to eat nonkosher items. Pavel frequently attended the synagogue, but as Viktor remembered, he treated it as a gathering place for discussing social affairs rather than a holy house of worship. “He used to call the workers at the synagogue ‘God’s thieves’ [Got Ganoven in Yiddish] because, in his eyes, they didn’t work for their bread.”

Viktor didn’t remember his parents observing kashrut, Shabbat, or daily prayer (although his father, like his grandfather, had a reserved seat at the synagogue) and said that they did not wear the traditional Jewish attire that was common among his grandparents’ generation. While Viktor acknowledged that his parents did not build their lives around the canons of religion, he made it clear that they kept to some traditions, perhaps mostly to please their elders. However, the rituals that remained were, for the family, hollowed of their religious content. Recalling Passover celebrations at his house in the early 1930s, Victor explained: “While my grandmother was alive, we always celebrated Pesach. For her, my mother would clear the house of any yeast products, buy unleavened bread [matzo], and cook her favorite Jewish dishes for our ritual festival meal [seder]. My grandmother would invite the whole family and ask my uncle to say the blessing over the wine as she sat graciously looking over our table. After her death, I don’t remember celebrating anything.” As Elissa Bemporad points out, by the second half of the 1930s, the social networks and family ties in Soviet Jewish families were expanding as Jewish identity moved from a religious one to an “ethnic” element in the larger Soviet project.¹⁷ With this shift, Jewish religious rituals increasingly moved into the domestic sphere, where they cross-fertilized with a host of adjacent beliefs and practices.¹⁸

Viktor spoke of his secular education at a Russian-speaking gymnasium in Odesa. The year he started school, he said, Soviet national policy had begun to focus on raising ethnic awareness among the country’s minorities, and a secular Yiddish education was supported and encouraged. The Soviet Union was the only country in the world with a state-sponsored system of Yiddish language schools, here designed to become an effective alternative to traditional religious-based education and to raise a generation of devoted Soviet citizens.¹⁹ Throughout Ukraine in the 1930s, more than ninety-five thousand children were studying in more than eight hundred Yiddish schools (many in Vinnytsya province).²⁰ Odesa was an outlier. In the mid-1920s, 77 percent of its Jewish high school students, like Viktor, attended Russian schools.²¹

Viktor remembered that a city representative once came to their house and asked his mother why her son wasn’t attending the local Jewish school. She answered, “I see no future in him applying himself in Yiddish. He lives in Russia, and I want him to be educated in Russian.” This was common, as many Jewish parents wanted their children to avoid the stigma of speaking Yiddish-accented Russian.²² Historian and Yiddish scholar Anna Shternshis also notes that “Jewish parents often preferred Russian schools because they felt that such an education would give children more opportunities in the future.”²³

The key point, Viktor emphasized, was that “education was always a necessity in my family, but religious subjects were viewed as backward and not in any way progressive.” In his days, he explained, only Jews from small shtetls (mestechkovye) still wanted their children educated in a kheder.²⁴ “Jews in my circle of friends strived to receive education in one of the city’s gymnasiums and apply their knowledge in universities, military academies, and music conservatories. . . . This was the case for Odessa.”

Viktor’s mother was fascinated with scientific theory and regarded religion as “simply silly.” As Viktor described her, “She was of a different generation [from her parents], interested in Pavlov and the theory of relativity. . . . Even if they sometimes did it in a primitive manner, they [people of his mother’s generation] tried to explain everything around them. . . . Darwin and Pasteur were more like gods to them than anyone else.” Like his mother, Viktor had interests and affiliations that went far beyond a traditional Jewish life—or rather, his Jewish life had come to include new aspects of identification with the growing Russian-speaking intelligentsia. He studied many secular disciplines at school.

In the early 1930s, Viktor majored in history at Odesa University and joined the Communist youth league, the Komsomol, regarding it as a great honor at the time. “From an early school age, I was told that there is no God, and all religious leaders were crooks,” he said. In the second or third year of his university studies, the faculty board of the history department decided that future Soviet educators had to be preachers of atheism. Shaking his head to show his distress over that long-ago pronouncement, Viktor recalled: “They sent us a young man who started giving lectures on the harmful nature of religion. At first we listened, but we were already historians, so when we realized that to him, Pontius Pilate and Rameses were, if not relatives [of each other], close friends, we just stopped paying attention. And then I started thinking, Exactly what is it that I don’t believe in?” Viktor’s curiosity drove him to commit a “terrible crime” for which, he pointed out, he could have been expelled from the Komsomol: “I found a Bible, some evangelical literature, a Koran in Russian translation, and a Jewish encyclopedia. . . . I spent close to a month familiarizing myself with so-called evil. I must say that I did not become religious. . . . I was left with the impression that these were collections of stories—some better, some worse—about cosmology and human morals . . . told by different people around the world, none of which I found close to my nature or explanatory of the world as I envisioned it at the time.”

Viktor made it very clear that while his own immediate environment was secular, the city’s Jewry as a whole had not simply abandoned religion. Speaking of his college years, he recalled that some religious rituals remained in place despite the atheist reforms: “I remember when, in the early 1930s, they started closing all the synagogues and churches in the city, and no one protested . . . yet at the same time, everyone insisted that the deceased would still be buried in their separate [Christian, Jewish, Armenian, Tatar, Karaite] cemeteries and according to their [respective] traditions. This was the practice all the way until the war.”

At age twenty-four, Viktor was drafted into the army for what is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War, leaving behind his young wife, a Jewish woman named Valentina, and their newborn son, Senya, who were evacuated to Azerbaijan. His experience of the Nazi invasion was entwined with stories of life in the Soviet Army. He recalled the horror of losing close friends and also recalled, with great pride, Soviet victory. Though antisemitic Soviet propaganda after the war portrayed Jews as cowards, Viktor stressed that many officers serving in the war were Jewish, including his two first cousins, who earned medals.²⁵ When Viktor spoke of the war, he dwelled on the astonishing number of Soviet casualties and their leaders’ lack of concern for human lives. “In the Soviet Union,” said Viktor, “homeland [Rodina] was spelled with a capital R, but person [chelovek] was spelled with a small letter ch.”

Because of impaired eyesight, Viktor was demobilized after a year of service and reunited with his family. In 1945, following the Soviet liberation of Ukraine and the death of his wife, Valentina, Viktor and Senya returned to Odesa. Viktor managed to get a work placement at the private collection of Mikhail Voronzov, located at the public library of Odesa University. At that time, employment was needed to receive coupons for bread, so this job saved his life in many ways. It was through this position that he met Olga, who would become his second wife, and it was there that Viktor began his long career as a historian.

In all our discussions, Viktor never acknowledged that antisemitism affected his own self-identification as a Jew. But he did recognize the role the Soviet regime played in driving anti-Jewish propaganda and in persecuting those whose passports revealed their Jewish identity:²⁶

When I was a little boy, there were some elements of antisemitism around. . . . At times there were fights between boys on that exact subject, but it didn’t play a central role in my life. It wasn’t until the Soviet regime actively supported antisemitic policies that we really experienced what that word meant. It wasn’t systematic; rather, it was hidden behind the façade of the Soviet “friendship of nations” [druzhba narodov]. At first, we were all equals, and then in the late 1930s, and even more so after the war, it became impossible for a Jew to be admitted to any prestigious educational institution, because they all had quotas. You had to really prove yourself.

As he saw it, though, Odesa was more liberal and tolerant than other cities in the Soviet Union: “The city always had a rather large percentage of Jews who were visible in every layer of society. . . . They lived and worked among other nationalities, speaking one language [Russian]. My courtyard, for instance, was phenomenally international: one of the boys, Pavel Gau, was German, another boy was Greek, Borya Hadjim was a Karaite, and there were others. This living situation was very typical of Odessa, which never had a segregated Jewish quarter.” Discussing antisemitism at the political level, Viktor described Stalin not as an antisemite but as a politician who used antisemitism:

Similar to Lenin, [Stalin] was a man without principle, acting in his own interest and following one rule: divide and rule. . . . And during that time in history [the late 1930s], he realized, while keeping his finger on the pulse of the nation, that there was some turmoil in the country, and someone had to be blamed . . . so it was in his interest to find the guilty. . . . Hence he blamed the Jews, the intelligentsia, cosmopolitans, and other “know-it-alls.” . . . Believe me, Jews were not the only ones who suffered from his brutality.

For Viktor, the Soviet treatment of Jews was contradictory: one day bringing them into the Soviet project, the next excluding them as other. Jews, said Viktor, were persecuted not necessarily because they were Jews, but because they belonged to a wider group of people whose loyalties, in the Soviet leaders’ view, were questionable—and this at a time when scapegoats were politically expedient. But Viktor was always careful to distinguish the atmosphere of the Soviet Union in general from his experiences growing up in somewhat more liberal Odesa.

Viktor never spoke about the Holocaust, even by using other terms to describe the more than 100,000 Jews who perished in the city during the Romanian invasion in 1941. That may have been because Jewish losses were not differentiated from Soviet casualties by the Soviet regime, and “because a half century of Soviet propaganda emphasized the city’s defenders and downplayed its foreign occupiers and local collaborators.”²⁷ Olga’s recollections of antisemitism were sharper than Viktor’s. She described being evacuated with her mother to a small town in northern Kavkaz during the wartime occupation of Odesa. “Some of these rural people were driven by fear and wouldn’t open their doors to Jews,” she said. “Others, driven by ignorance, regarded Jews as barbarians.” She described a conversation with the woman who owned the house where Olga and her mother lodged: “There were hardly any Jews there. We were living with a woman who asked me one day, ‘Jews, Jews, who are these Jews that people keep talking about? Have you ever seen one?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I have. They’re just ordinary people. . . . For instance, if someone asked you who you are, what would you say?’ ‘A Russian,’ she answered. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘they would just say “a Jew.”’ ‘Thank you for your clear explanation,’ she said. ‘I thought they were some kind of half-animal, half-human creature [poluzveri].’”²⁸ Olga pointed out that Odesa’s general population, long exposed to Jews and Jewish practices, was far less susceptible to propaganda that relied on ignorance and mythology.

A third generation Odesitka, Olga was born in 1923 and raised in an atheist Russian Jewish family. Her father, Yehuda Notkin, worked as an engineer, and her mother, Polina Dreisden, taught literature in a city school. Both were supporters of the Bolshevik Revolution and of the Soviet regime that followed. Although Olga’s grandparents’ generation was religiously observant, her parents, like Viktor’s, didn’t follow Jewish religious law (halakha). “They were open about their Jewishness,” said Olga, “but I don’t remember them practicing religion.” After graduating from a Russian-speaking girls’ gymnasium, Olga too enrolled in the history department at Odesa University, where she studied until the beginning of the war.

Much of Olga’s story echoed the themes of Viktor’s. Her parents regarded their secular orientation and Russian education as a new benchmark of social acceptance and achievement, and contrasted that orientation with the family’s earlier religious practices and beliefs. This same mix of values was passed on to Olga at an early age; like Viktor, she grew up surrounded by the Russian language and what she saw as its rich literature. At the same time, being a Jew was a proud fact for Olga’s parents, something she also internalized as a child. Following in her parents’ footsteps, she connected her Jewishness with communist beliefs. She also joined the Komsomol during her school years, finding like-minded friends and, later, colleagues. Olga’s passion for history and books was probably one of the reasons she and Viktor came to share their lives. They had no children together, but Olga treated Senya as part of their family.

For Viktor and Olga, leaving Odesa was never an option, even as they spoke of the city’s state of decline. They saw how the process of Ukrainization was altering their city, which they regarded as rooted in Russian history and culture, with a cosmopolitan outlook. They were suspicious of the city’s Jewish religious organizations. They adamantly rejected the claim of contemporary Jewish activists who said they were restoring the lost and destroyed Jewish life of Odesa. They felt that the rabbis (a term they used loosely to speak of religiously dressed Hasidic men) were pushing the Jewish population toward a new religious identity and connecting them to a set of new values: attending services at the synagogue, making donations to a specific congregation, observing Jewish laws of kashrut, choosing a Jewish spouse, educating children in religious schools, and disaffiliating themselves from Soviet secular holidays.

Viktor and Olga defended the view that Odesa’s Jews voluntarily gave up religious values, even when I raised the fact that Soviet propaganda and fear of persecution played a role. Jews in Odesa were much closer to Russian culture, Viktor and Olga insisted, in “the language they spoke, the books they read, the theater they attended, the food they ate, the clothes they wore, and, on the whole, their philosophy of life or mentality [mentalitet].” At the same time, neither would argue that by adopting Russian culture, they or other Jews in the city had thereby ceased to be Jews or had become purely Russian. Rather, they identified themselves as Russian and Jewish. These categories, although legally exclusive of one another in the Soviet Union, were combined in their self-identification as Soviet Jews and specifically as part of the social class that was Russian-speaking intelligentsia.²⁹ In this group, they included “highly educated and cultured professionals such as teachers, professors, artists, doctors, engineers, architects, and other white-collar professionals.” This ideal of belonging to the intelligentsia is central to the construction of the ethnic identity of Russian Jews, say sociologists Tamar Rapoport and Edna Lomsky-Feder, a “prism through which Jews consider and evaluate both themselves and others.”³⁰

Indeed, when I met Senya, a scientist then in his midsixties, at Viktor and Olga’s apartment, he defined himself as Jewish by the standards of education, worldview, and career, which aligned him with other members of the intelligentsia. Senya didn’t seem to object to the development of new Jewish institutions throughout Odesa as much as his father and Olga did, and he was openly curious about religious holidays like Chanukah and Simhat Torah, mentioning the elaborate celebrations he saw on the streets of Odesa. His immediate family all lived in Odesa, but some of his distant relatives had moved to the United States. One day, he said, this might be an option for himself or his children, depending on the state of affairs in Ukraine.

Many of my interlocutors also classified members of the intelligentsia as “cosmopolitan”—that is, people whose circle of friends included many different nationalities, not just Jews. In such circles, they contended, relationships were based on personal interests rather than loyalty to a specific religious or national group. Viktor and Olga believed that the new Jewish religious leaders were undermining this Odesan accomplishment by speaking and acting against assimilation. They questioned the motivations of younger Jews who had recently taken on a religious identity.

Friendships formed in Soviet times, Viktor and Olga explained, carried particular moral weight because they were valued for their own sake—not, as today, driven by economic motives.³¹ “We were friends because we enjoyed each other’s company. Now it’s much more about what someone can do for you or what you can do for them. Why do you think people really belong to those Jewish organizations?” When I asked about their affiliation with Gmilus Hesed, the center for elderly Jews, they said it served as a social platform for discussing and commemorating Odesa’s history. They distinguished participants like themselves, who were seeking communication and dialogue with other Odesans, from those who used Jewish networks to receive economic benefits.

Viktor and Olga described the assimilation and Russification that had taken place earlier in Odesa as a “natural process of cultural development [razvitie]” and viewed those who adopted these practices as culturally developed [razvitymi]. Rather than seeing the Jews of their generation as subjects suppressed by the Soviet regime, Viktor and Olga asserted that they voluntarily and enthusiastically accepted Russification and assimilation, viewing them as a way “forward” that would reap greater opportunities in education, professionalism, and self-development. They acknowledged the role of state authorities in perpetuating Russification and assimilation but viewed this fact as secondary to the self-chosen path of most of the Jewish population in Odesa—a city whose distinct history played a significant role in the speed and absorption of Russian language and culture among both its Jewish and non-Jewish populations.

While Odesa’s particularities created a distinctive cultural setting that was conducive to assimilation, my informants viewed Russian culture as, on the whole, much “richer” than Jewish culture or “local” (Ukrainian) literature and, thus, more attractive to the greater part of the population.³² As Olga put it: “Of course, we realized that Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were three heads taller [much more talented] than Sholem Aleichem [the Ukrainian Yiddish writer best known for his tales of Jewish village life, which inspired the musical Fiddler on the Roof]. . . . In my fifty years of working at the library, no one came to reread Sholem Aleichem or [Nobel Prize winner and Ukrainian] Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don. But they did come to reread Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and War and Peace.”

For that generation, and indeed until quite recently, the world of Russian literature was more readily available than Jewish or Ukrainian writings. It was actively popularized during various periods of Soviet rule as the state promoted Russian language and literature as part of its “civilizing” and “modernizing” projects from the 1930s, sowing suspicion about much of the Jewish, Ukrainian, and other national literatures before banning them altogether.³³ Viktor and Olga agreed that this happened but insisted that Jews (and others in the intelligentsia) preferred works by Russian authors in any case. “People always say Odessa was a very Jewish city, but it was a Russian Jewish city,” Viktor declared, putting an emphasis on the connections Jews had to Russian language and literature. He braided together the two seemingly disparate developments of Jewish nationalism and assimilation by stressing the role of the Russian language, not only among his circle of the intelligentsia but also among active Jewish nationalists prior to the Bolshevik repression on Zionist activity.

Although Odessa served as a center of Zionism, it was also a center of Haskalah [the Jewish “enlightenment”], and assimilation followed on all fronts. These processes weren’t mutually exclusive. . . . I remember there was a family in my courtyard, we called them palestinofily [lovers of Palestine]. Their daughter Nusia used to drag us to different Zionist clubs she organized around the city. . . . They were very active in support of the Jewish homeland, but at home they still spoke Russian. [And] Vladimir Jabotinsky, . . . one of the leading figures in Zionism, not just in Odessa but a Jewish activist known to the world, . . . [wrote] his novel The Five, which describes his life in Odessa, . . . in Russian, not Hebrew or Yiddish.

As Viktor explained, Odesan Jews of his generation lived in a Russified environment, and thus, the Russian language and Russian culture came naturally into their lives. “Prior to the revolution, all Jewish boys of course went to a heder and were taught Hebrew, but the same families went to Russian theaters, cursed in Russian, and drank vodka in Russian style.” Viktor emphasized that, like the city’s other minorities, Jews simply adapted to their environment, learning Russian for the purposes of employment, education, and communication with the larger society. “It’s not that we became Russian because we spoke and read Russian. Rather, we became Russian Jews, and with time Russian culture became dominant in circles of the intelligentsia, absorbing everything else. Among my friends, Yiddish was simply considered a dialect.”

Viktor’s perspective on Jewish acculturation shed some light on our discussion of Odesa’s present-day Jewish “religious revival,” which Viktor didn’t view as progressive. Members of their grandparents’ generation had defined themselves, and were identified by others, as members of the Jewish faith, but the elements of religion fostered by that generation were fading. The next generation growing up in czarist Russia—that of Olga’s and Viktor’s parents—was, as Viktor put it, a “different generation”; they looked away from a traditional Jewish world toward the greater Russian-speaking and, later, Soviet society. Jewish identification, as Viktor and Olga inherited, observed, and came to define it, was inextricably linked with the Russian-speaking intelligentsia, with being Odesan, and with their past affiliations with the Soviet political movement.³⁴

More than the other elderly Jews I met, Viktor and Olga aligned themselves with the values of the Soviet state, although they certainly recognized the shortcomings of Soviet leaders and the atrocities committed. Olga said, “During my entire life, I never changed my name on any of my documents, as many other Jews did to avoid discrimination. At the same time, I never handed in my Communist membership card after the USSR collapsed, as many rushed to do. This is all part of my life, and as they say, ‘You can’t take words out of a song, for it will lose its rhythm.’ This is my story, and I am extremely proud of every part of it.”

Elena Martyanova

As Olga indicated, many Jews presented themselves as something other than Jewish in the Soviet system, seeking to avoid both state and social antisemitism. This was the case for Elena Martyanova, who was sixty-five when I met her in 2006. Petite and elegant, she often wore simple yet tasteful attire and had light golden hair. She seemed much younger than her age. She was born and raised in a secular working-class Jewish family in Kherson, a small city in southeastern Ukraine. In 1961, at the age of twenty, she moved to Odesa to attend its Pedagogical Institute (where she majored in linguistics) and fell in love with the “warm climate, atmosphere, and people.” She also fell in love with Konstantin, who was nine years older and from a Russian and Polish family. They were married in a civil ceremony in 1971 and had two children, Dmitry and Ilya. The family lived in a fifth-floor, two-room walk-up allocated to them by the Soviet cooperative.

Like others of their generation, Elena and Konstantin pursued careers that were chosen early. Fluent in French and proficient in English and Italian, Elena had spent most of her professional life as an interpreter for Intourist, the Soviet travel agency.³⁵ Thus, unlike many Soviet Jews, she had traveled extensively through Europe and parts of North Africa. In the last two years before retirement, she taught social science at the Medical Institute of Odesa, not far from the Political Technical Institute where Konstantin taught political science and sociology for more than thirty years. While Konstantin had been a member of the Communist Party, which he considered unavoidable for anyone wanting a career in academia, Elena never joined. She understood Konstantin’s pragmatism but regarded the party’s “pretty slogans” as “lies” (vran’e).³⁶

Their younger son, Ilya, moved to the United States and earned a PhD in biology at Dartmouth College. Dmitry, now an Israeli citizen, settled in Moscow with his Russian wife, Sveta, but regularly traveled to Tel Aviv. A successful businessman, Dmitry was supporting the entire family. When I met them, Elena and Konstantin lived in a spacious four-room apartment across from one of the city’s main parks. It was a property far more expensive than what their combined state pension of 800 grivnas per month (about US$160) would have afforded them, but Dmitry had purchased it for them. The cost of living in Odesa had gone up since independence, and they felt the difference. “I don’t know how people manage today on just their minimal pension; look at the prices for everything!” Konstantin exclaimed. “You have to have your own business [delo], or good children to support you.” Elena elegantly added, “It all depends on your appetites”—and she observed that many people’s appetites had changed significantly.³⁷

As we walked through the apartment, they showed me pictures of their sons displayed behind the glass doors of tall, neat bookshelves. Konstantin’s small decorative Russian Orthodox icons of Jesus leaned against hardbound volumes of Russian and translated classics. Ceramic plates showed the names of cities they’d visited—Jerusalem, Rome, Madrid. A Jewish calendar in the kitchen, courtesy of the synagogue, displayed the month of Nissan, year 5765 (2004–2005). When she saw my eyes land on the calendar’s image of Shabbat candles, Elena said, “It was a gift,” as if needing to justify ownership of this Jewish object. Like Viktor and Olga, they kept no other Jewish paraphernalia, but their connections to Israel were evident in the family pictures and other souvenirs around the house.

Behind her charm and indelible smile, Elena spoke of her childhood as “dark and difficult.” She was born in Starinobrad, Tajikistan, during her family’s wartime evacuation. Her mother, Eva Ninburg, was born in 1922 in Nikolaev (Mykolaiv), a small town northeast of Odesa, and was the youngest of twelve children. Elena’s grandparents had provided the family with a prosperous and joyful life before the 1917 revolution, when they lost their land and house. While some extended family immigrated to the United States, Elena’s grandparents and their children remained in what later became the Soviet Union. Life was difficult. All but three of Eva’s sisters died of hunger, as did Elena’s grandfather. The young Eva was placed in an orphanage because her mother couldn’t provide for her; there she at least got one meal a day and basic care. Some years later, Eva returned to her family, but the fragmentation of her mother’s family, and the fact that Eva had been sequestered in an orphanage, left her cut off from Jewish family traditions and other elements of Jewish life. Elena didn’t know whether her grandparents had ever been religious. “My mom never talked about it,” she said, “but she herself was an atheist.”

Elena’s mother had completed only ten years of school before the war started, and that was her only formal education. As Elena recalled, “She was a very smart woman. She didn’t have a proper education, but she was wise and well read. That gave her understanding, understanding of life [ponimanie, ponimanie o zhizni].” After her studies in Nikolaev (Mykolaiv), Eva met Elena’s father, Mendel (Mikhail), a young engineer of Jewish descent. They married in a civil ceremony and had their first daughter, Lilia, in 1940. Elena was born a year later. Like most men in the town, Mikhail was drafted into the Soviet army in 1941 to fight against the Romanian-German invasion. He was demobilized after receiving a serious head wound, which left him paralyzed for the rest of his life. Elena regretted never learning much about him: “I get so mad at myself for never taking the time to ask about his life. Back then it didn’t seem that interesting. But also, I have to say, I was very afraid of him. He was a sick man. He had mania presledovaniia [persecution mania] . . . and then when he ended up in a mental institution, the subject was taboo—my mother never talked about it. She never talked about their experiences during the war, either. It was all too bitter for her to revisit. She passed over these subjects in silence [Eta tema obhodilas’ molchaniem].”

After the war, the family moved to Kherson, near Nikolaev (Mykolaiv), where Eva found a job as a typist at a military base. She supported two daughters and an invalid husband on meager earnings and the housing that came with the job: a single small room on the base. But after a couple of years, Eva was accused of being an enemy of the state (vrag naroda) and fired because she was a Jew. Then a town commissar took pity and gave them shelter in a tiny 150-square-foot room in his basement: “It was a horrifying room, where I lived until I was sixteen years old and where my mother and sister lived for many years after I left. . . . The ceiling was so low you could touch it simply by raising your hand. . . . Our bathroom, our potatoes, coal, and firewood, our bed . . . and my paralyzed father . . . all in this cramped space. . . . Although back then, we were grateful even for that.”

The Russian commissar who took them in was, according to Elena, “a very good man.” But despite his respect for her mother, he couldn’t help her keep her post. “It wasn’t up to him,” Elena explained. “Everything was decided higher up [by state politicians].” To Elena, her mother’s unfortunate fate was nothing out of the ordinary: “It was [in the early 1950s] a time of repression, the Doctors’ Plot, and so on. Jews were being laid off everywhere.” As Viktor and Olga continually stressed, Jews in Odesa had different experiences from Jews elsewhere in the USSR, and indeed, the hardships Elena’s family experienced in Nikolaev (Mykolaiv) were more typical. As a result of her treatment, Eva’s political views turned “anti-Soviet,” and she saw the state as a “false illusion of human equality.” Elena’s son Ilya wrote of his grandmother: “a very skeptical person by nature, who couldn’t afford to rely on any self-evident truth in the form of higher authority—be it God or the Communist Party.”

During the war, Elena’s father used forged documents to change his nationality of record from Jewish to Ukrainian, a risky but common practice. With a birth certificate that included a Jewish mother and Ukrainian father, Elena chose the latter as her official nationality when she obtained her passport at age sixteen. “My whole life I passed as a Ukrainian. I don’t know how my father managed to pull this off. My mother never told me. But it helped me get into the university in Odessa on the first try and get a placement with Intourist—at the time, a highly competitive organization where I doubt I could ever have worked as a Jew.” Elena recognized that the decision to register her as Ukrainian was based on making her life “easier and safer” than that of her parents. “I think my mother wanted to protect me from everything she had to deal with in her life. I felt that she almost wanted to save me from the suffering she’d seen. I know it was done with the best intentions.”

Elena graduated top of her class with a degree in French and entered her chosen career, and thus it could be said that she fulfilled her family’s hopes that she would find full acceptance in society. That acceptance, however, was never without the shadow of her family history: “I still knew I was Jewish, despite what my passport said. I felt this [Ia eto chuvstvovala]. When I was younger no one called me a Jew, but I was always waiting for it to happen. I remember once, at a summer camp, I was sitting next to a friend who had an ‘obviously’ Jewish face [vyrazhennoe evreiskoe litso] when a drunken man stumbled up to our group, pointed at my friend, and started screaming, ‘Zhidovka, you dirty zhidovka [kike, you dirty kike].’ I just sat there in silence, but his words wounded me deeply.”³⁸ While Elena, like Viktor and Olga, came to regard herself as cultured (kul’turnyi) and part of the Russian-speaking intelligentsia, and understood her Ukrainian identity as an assigned identification (propisannaia lichnost’), her Jewishness remained fluid. It played various roles in different periods of her life as circumstances changed.

During Elena’s primary school education, her Jewishness wasn’t an issue, as Jews constituted a majority in her class; in university there were occasional antisemitic slurs; and later, whenever she was among friends and coworkers where few were Jewish, she didn’t speak about her family’s roots. Possessing the status of Ukrainian nationality freed Elena from official anti-Jewish discrimination, and her sensitivity to antisemitism impacted how she allowed herself to be seen and accepted. As another elderly woman once told me, in Soviet times “Jewish” was a synonym for being different, as in: “You don’t drink? What are you—Jewish?”³⁹

When talking to people in Jewish organizations, I heard what they said about people with histories like Elena’s: some elderly Jews disdained and mistrusted newly proclaimed Jews who had previously passed as Russian or Ukrainian. Others, however, were less judgmental, understanding that people had their own reasons for choosing to live as a non-Jew in Soviet times and as a Jew today. In our conversations, Elena was adamant that religious belief played no part in her upbringing. “Both my parents were atheists. My mother used to ask me, ‘How could anyone believe in God after what happened to the Jews during the war?’”

When Elena and I discussed the renovation of religious buildings that was then going on in Odesa, she recalled an occasion when she was walking with her mother and sister past an old church that was being restored. “We girls wanted to peek inside, but our mother simply refused to join us. She waited outside.” Elena went on to explain, “She didn’t believe in religion or religious institutions, not even enough to set foot in one of its man-made manifestations.” Her grandson Ilya wrote to me: “My grandmother was vehemently opposed to religion (not only Judaism but religion in general) because she had to cope with the not-so-bright reality around her and could not waste her time on fairy tales and utopian beliefs.” At the end of her days, before her body surrendered to a long battle with cancer, Eva asked to be cremated and interred in Kherson, where she’d lived most of her life before joining Elena in Odesa.⁴⁰ Elena and her sister carried out this wish after Eva passed away in 1993.

In her late sixties, retired and living in an independent Ukraine, Elena openly and freely discussed her Jewishness. Elena’s two maternal aunts had shared many stories about her Jewish ancestors, since they had grown up in a family environment that her mother, born too late, hadn’t shared. Elena regarded her aunts’ stories as “fairy tales” that allowed her to imagine a different reality from her everyday life. Moreover, in her own stories about a purportedly irreligious family, she discovered what Galina Zelenina calls “subconscious observance”—rituals saved and passed down in Soviet families without being regarded as markers of religiosity.⁴¹ “On Pesach,” Elena told me, “I remember my mother making the most delicious matzo. She also baked what she called Haman’s Ears [triangular ‘ear-shaped’ pastries traditionally made for the holiday of Purim].”⁴² Eva was using her mother’s recipes for these, though she did not then pass them down to Elena. Perhaps, Elena speculated, this was simply because she was the younger daughter and cooking had always been her sister’s responsibility.

In another conversation, as we were walking past the Jewish community center, Migdal, Elena said, “I remember the time my mother took us to see the Yiddish theater that came on tour to Kherson. I was young and couldn’t understand much. It was all so foreign to me: women with covered heads speaking those funny words [in Yiddish]. My mother explained that it was a performance of a Jewish wedding.” Then later, at her kitchen table, Elena told me she considered herself Jewish, but “I’m interested in Jewishness as a culture [Ia interesuius’ evreistvom kak kul’tura].” She paused, then added, “I don’t believe in God [v boga ia ne veriu].” Planning to immigrate to Israel, she was taking Hebrew lessons at one of the Orthodox synagogues and at Migdal, but for her this was quite separate from religious belief, which she kept at arm’s length. On this topic she told me that throughout her teaching career she’d encountered students from religious backgrounds who questioned her atheist position. One student asked her, “Elena Michaelovna, do you not believe in God?” When Elena said no, he asked, “Well, who do you believe in, then?” “I looked at him,” Elena recounted, “and said, ‘I believe in you. I believe in humans [Ia veriu v tebia. Ia veriu v cheloveka].’”

In Elena’s opinion, many religious people do good things because they’re afraid God will punish them if they don’t. “I try to do good deeds [dobro] because I’m a human being [chelovek], because I’m a cultured human being [ku’lturnyi chelovek], a well-mannered human being [vospitannyi]. And I believe that as a human being I have to act with dignity [dostoino], try to help others, grow as a person, and not cause harm to others. This is how I was raised, and how I was always taught to behave, without a religious presence in my life. Religion doesn’t make you a better person, as religious leaders like to suggest; they have it all backward.” She pointed out the many religious conflicts being waged around the world and went on to tell me of religious people who put on a front of being good humans but, in reality, “only want good things for their own people.” Elena had little contact with Odesa’s Jewish organizations and, based on insights from the Hebrew classes she was then taking, she was skeptical of the Jewish “born-again” believers and members of other faiths, questioning the motives for their newfound religious affiliation. Her skepticism was less politicized than that of Olga and Viktor and linked more to her own humanistic view and upbringing. But Elena and others in her generation had trouble understanding how someone becomes a believer “overnight” and disputed the assumption that being religious gives you better values and makes you a better person.

Elena and Konstantin tried to teach their sons the importance of being good people first and Jewish, Ukrainian, or Russian second. Registered as Russian in their passports, the boys learned of their Jewish roots only at school age, and each then explored the subject in his own way. Elena told me that one day when Dmitry was seven, he came home from school and, laughing, asked her, “Mom, do you know what OEE means? It means ostorozhno edet evrei [be careful, Jew behind the wheel],” he said with a stretched grin. Furious, Elena asked, “What’s so funny? Is it the ‘be careful’ part that’s making you laugh?” “No,” he replied. “The ‘behind the wheel’ part?” “No,” came his answer. “Was it the word ‘Jew’?” Dmitry lowered his head. Calmly, Elena then said, “Why is the word ‘Jew’ funny to you? It’s just a natsional’nost’, like Russian, Ukrainian, or English. Are those funny to you as well?” “No,” he answered. She asked him, “Do you want to see a Jew?” She pointed a finger at his small round face. “You are a Jew, I am a Jew, your aunts and your cousins are Jews.” “But why am I a Jew?” Dmitry asked, puzzled. “Because I am a Jew,” Elena answered. She concluded the story by describing how, when that seven-year-old boy grew up, he was the first in her family to apply for Israeli citizenship and to move to Israel.

Of course, it must be added that like many others who left the former Soviet bloc after its collapse, Dmitry’s emigration had not been due to a Zionist or religious calling or to the urge to relocate to a historic homeland; nor was it indicative of a heightened Jewish identity on his part. Rather, as his mother said, “He was going na bum [with no expectations] to try life in another country and, I think, to secure another citizenship and country of residence in case running a business in Russia became too difficult.”

Elena told me that her younger son, Ilya, grew very passionate about his Jewish roots. “I tell him everything I remember,” she said. Living in the United States, Ilya has become a member of Hillel, the international Jewish youth organization. Both Elena and Konstantin approved of this, although they seemed to regard it mostly as a strong network of friends who support their son and other international students during their study abroad. On the whole, Elena felt that her sons’ respective places of residence further enriched their Jewish orientation—which she welcomed, as a secular cultural Jewish ideology that she herself shared.

And indeed, Elena and Konstantin ended up moving to Israel as well. Elena’s exposure to Odesa’s organized Jewish life consisted of her weekly Hebrew classes. She thoroughly enjoyed learning languages and believed that the free Hebrew lessons would help her settle in as one of the olim hadashim (newly arrived immigrants) in Israel. Konstantin had opted not to learn Hebrew, preferring to rely on his wife’s linguistic talents. Elena visited Odesa’s Israeli Cultural Center, where their family documents were under review for emigration, sometimes to attend scheduled appointments and sometimes for the free lectures on various topics of Israeli life.⁴³ She expressed a certain degree of discomfort at being in religious Jewish establishments, because of the contrast between her atheist beliefs and their “Orthodox and stuffy atmosphere.” Even so, she regarded the simple presence of these establishments as a positive step in post-Soviet society. She often asked me how I viewed the religious congregations in the city; she was curious about the rituals and traditions practiced on religious holidays and on Shabbat but too shy and uncomfortable to join in the events organized around the city. During her Hebrew lessons, she occasionally picked up and read Jewish newspapers, but she never subscribed to them.

Besides her son, a number of Elena’s family members—her sister, two cousins and their extended kin—had also immigrated to Israel. This brought Elena closer to an Israeli-centered Jewish identity and exposed her to the Israeli life that would become her own. When I asked Elena why she and Konstantin hadn’t emigrated sooner, she answered, “We had good jobs and a good life here. We saw no reason to leave.” She explained that her family members had left Kherson and Nikolaev (Mykolaiv) mostly for economic reasons, with hopes of a better life for their children. “Kherson [where her mother had lived] was just a dead city. You’d walk down the streets and there was nobody and nothing. In Nikolaev [the city her sister’s family left] at the time, shipbuilding had collapsed, causing more people to be unemployed than employed. My sister . . . saw no prospects for her children, having herself lost her accounting job at a state factory.” Elena’s comments were consistent with other research that reveals mostly economic motivations for the post-Soviet wave of migration.⁴⁴

Elena often expressed her great admiration and love for Odesa and her sense of comfort there. “I became a true Odesitka,” she’d say. “We’ll have a hard time leaving—we have such wonderful friends here, and everything is familiar and dear to us [rodnoye nam]. Odessa is our home.” Nevertheless, when I saw Elena in Netanya, Israel, in the spring of 2009, she had adjusted to her new life. She was enjoying her new freedom to travel as an Israeli citizen, and she shared her feeling of liberation in living openly as a Jew—something that had seemed more difficult in Odesa, even in the post-Soviet environment. Israel offered a new beginning, where having a Jewish orientation no longer cast a shadow from the past.

Nina Malahova

Nina Malahova’s life also involved emigration. Unlike Elena, she had left Odesa for Israel in the 1990s with her youngest son but returned after many years. Like the others, Nina strongly identified with being an Odesan. I first telephoned Nina to pass on a greeting from our mutual friend, the anthropologist Tanya Richardson, and Nina suggested we meet during one of her weekend outings with the Odesa Walking Group.⁴⁵

Every Saturday for years, Nina and about twenty other Odesans had attended free walking tours of “Old Odessa” led by Valerii Netrebsky, a middle-aged man who was half Russian and half Jewish. His audience was mostly middle-aged or older, natives and members of the intelligentsia, and fairly knowledgeable about the city’s history. They gathered to walk through Odesa’s historical sites, listening, learning, and commenting on Netrebsky’s guided tour. These walks had become part of my regular routine, too, and I was able to build relationships beyond the walks with some members of the group. Although they were open to answering my questions during the walks, most preferred to keep their distance. Nina, however, welcomed me immediately. Friends often described Nina as “poetic,” due to her romanticized outlook on life—not to mention her actual love of poetry. She was tall and medium-framed, with yellowish hazel eyes and light brown wavy hair, which she wore short, parted, and tucked behind her ears. Her voice was already soft, but she muted it further by always covering her mouth when she spoke, as if afraid that someone might overhear her conversation. An artist by education and profession, Nina sewed her own dresses, knitted her own berets, and decorated almost every square inch of her apartment with her own stained glass, ceramics, and the watercolors she’d painted during her first years at the Odesa Art Academy. Over the course of a year, from 2006 to 2007, I conducted numerous interviews at Nina’s home, joined her on routine trips to the market, visited her family graves with her, and engaged in many informal conversations during our walks through the city.

Nina’s apartment was on the ground floor and consisted of a single main room and a narrow corridor leading to a small kitchen and bathroom. It was part of a kommunalka (communal apartment) that had been split into four small units, each sold separately. The lack of space wasn’t an issue for Nina, but she feared the dark and found the place gloomy and depressing. Nor did she like that she could hear every word of her neighbor’s conversations through the paper-thin walls—and so, she assumed, could the neighbor hear hers. Whenever I visited, she’d immediately turn on the radio or her old television set to mask the sound of our voices. When we met, Nina had lived in the apartment for close to six years, and during the time I knew her, she was always trying to sell it.

Nina was born Rosalina Leihter in Odesa, in June 1934. A fourth-generation Odesitka of Jewish descent, she grew up in an upper-middle-class family whose status in the city declined gradually during the Soviet period, and more drastically with the Nazi occupation. When I met her, she was a retired art teacher and artist; occasionally, she showed her work in exhibitions around the city but never offered it for sale. “I don’t have the facilities to create something new, and this is all I have to show for my years of work,” she told me, pointing to a display of ceramic plates decorated with colorful nature images.

Nina was living on a small monthly pension of 400 grivnas (about US$80), supplemented by slightly larger sums paid periodically by the German government as compensation for being a ghetto survivor. She was often concerned for her health and worried about being alone if her children permanently left Odesa. “In Israel they really take care of the elderly,” she said, “but here no one does anything.” And yet, despite her appreciation for life in Israel, she had no regrets about her decision to return to Odesa. “This is where I feel at home. My whole family is here [buried at the Third Jewish Cemetery], and my whole life is here.”

One wall of her living room, which also served as her bedroom, was hung with a collection of black-and-white photographs of her family that she often referred to when telling me stories. Next to the family pictures was a faded sepia photograph of her old house, and above that a small wooden icon of Jesus, draped with a beige plastic rosary. Nina, as I later learned, was a congregant of Odesa’s Evangelical church. She didn’t present her religiously Christian and ethnically Jewish orientation as a major contrast, though she was aware that others might think otherwise.⁴⁶ All these pieces of Nina’s life found their order and connection in the stories she told me throughout our friendship.

Nina’s mother was born Tauba Komar in 1905 to a middle-class Odesan Jewish family. Her ancestors migrated to Odesa in the mid-nineteenth century. Tauba’s father had a well-paying job in the textile industry, and her mother, Rosalina, stayed home with the children. Of the nine children she bore, only six survived to adolescence: Tauba, her two sisters, and three brothers. The children received their primary and secondary secular education in Odesa. Tauba attended the state gymnasium where, along with the standard subjects, she mastered many foreign languages and developed a passion for classical music and piano. Upon graduation, she enrolled in Odesa’s nursing school, where she finished the course with high honors and began a career in medicine. In the early 1920s, Tauba met Osip Leihter, and married him in 1924 in a civil ceremony conducted in the Odesa City Hall. Four years later, they had their first daughter, Frida (later known as Galina). Rosalina—much later known as Nina—arrived six years after that.

Osip was born in Odesa, one of five boys of Jewish parents, Yakov and Frida Leihter. He was a craftsman by education. Following his father’s death, Osip and his brother Iogan were responsible for the family’s metal workshop. After the Russian Revolution, when the state confiscated private property, Osip and Iogan managed to hold onto the shop by hiding its operations. Meanwhile, they took jobs as manual laborers at a German-owned factory called Gena, where another brother, Ruvin, had started working as a first-class engineer after completing his education in Munich. In the late 1930s, the eldest Leihter brother, Sasha, immigrated to the United States and was never heard from again. Lev, the youngest, worked as a teacher. After he married a non-Jewish woman and converted to Evangelical Christianity, Lev was ostracized by his father and, to a lesser degree, by the rest of the family, according to the stories Nina heard.

Among Nina’s parents’ generation, intermarriage occurred on both sides of the family, albeit not without straining family relations. Nina recalled that her grandparents didn’t approve, viewing those who “married out” as “abandoning their traditions.” Neither Tauba nor Osip was especially religious in their Jewish identification. Although Nina believed that her father was most likely educated in a kheder, she didn’t recall any religious practice in his daily routine. “They were all circumcised, I know that. And [Nina’s uncle] Iogan was religious—or so it seemed to me back then. He always dressed in black and walked around with a prayer book. But my father didn’t believe in God. . . . My mother never even spoke about religion because she wasn’t religious herself—and also because it was prohibited.” Prior to the revolution, the Leihter family had owned two houses on Primorskaya Street, near the sea in one of Odesa’s most prestigious neighborhoods. One of these properties was confiscated by the Soviet regime; the other was taken over by neighbors and vandalized during the Nazi occupation. When I was interviewing her, Nina was still paying visits to her old house, though it was a mere concrete skeleton. She told me she liked seeing the trees her father and grandfather had planted, the yard where she remembered celebrating her birthday, and especially the scent of the seaside air, which infused her memories of the playground of her early years.

Nina’s family didn’t join the flood of Odesa’s evacuees in 1941. Osip and Tauba refused to believe the Germans would invade their city. Her uncle Ruvin, who had lived in Germany more than four years, would say, “It’s all a conspiracy against the leaders of civilization,” meaning the Germans. Nina’s parents were reluctant to abandon their property and Osip’s workshop. “We didn’t know what would happen to our house and all our things once we left. We had so many valuables,” said Nina, listing their book collection, their white piano, bicycles, workshop machinery, and so on. Similarly, many Jewish families had a hard time abandoning a home and property; they made the choice to remain in the city instead of evacuating.⁴⁷ Nina’s family stayed in Odesa but went into hiding.

When the Nazis invaded Odessa, we had nowhere to run. Ships leaving the port were overcrowded with people, screaming children, crying mothers. . . . I remember watching one ship go up in flames as the Romanians started bombing the port. At first we hid in the city’s underground catacombs, but due to the damp and dark atmosphere we couldn’t stay more than a few days.⁴⁸ The Romanians were looking for Jews everywhere, and they relied on the aid of local Russians and Ukrainians. When Romanian soldiers were coming to our courtyard, my mother would hide my father and his brothers in the basement and tell my sister and me to sit silently in our room. There were signs everywhere telling Jews to gather at what they called “meeting points,” which mostly turned out to be ghettos. We’d heard rumors that if we went, we would never come back alive, so we kept hiding. Then one day when I was standing on our balcony, I saw a Romanian soldier walk up to one of our neighbors, a young boy, and ask him, “Where are the Jews?” In silence, the boy pointed a little finger at the balcony where I stood. That day, my whole family was rounded up and taken to Slobodka. We’d thought of it as a meeting point, but as I later found out, it was our first ghetto.

In their first week of imprisonment in 1941, Nina’s uncle Ruvin, who walked with a limp, was shot “like a dog” in front of Nina’s eyes. Osip became very ill and lost his strength; he could barely walk after a month of hard labor in the ghetto. Tauba, Nina’s mother, tried desperately to find a way for her family to escape the barbed-wire enclosure. She finally bribed a guard with money her sister-in-law had smuggled in, and Nina’s family managed to flee into a nearby forest. For two months, they hid in the woods, surviving on raw and frozen winter potatoes and melting snow. Nina told me she would “never forget the coldness of those nights and the hunger of those days.” Exhausted, they were once again captured by the Nazis and transferred to another ghetto, this one in Chechel’nik, a small town in the Vinnytsia region. Osip died a few months after arriving and was buried somewhere Nina has never been able to locate. Less than six months later, Tauba managed to secure a false passport that identified her as a Ukrainian named Tatiana Semenovna Larushkina. With this document she was able to escape with her daughters to a nearby village. There they hid for three years, until the Red Army liberated that region.

When the war was over, Tauba and her daughters returned to Odesa. All of the Leihter brothers—except perhaps Sasha, who had immigrated to the United States—had been killed in the war. Two of Tauba’s siblings had survived: Theodor and Klavdia. “We came back to nothing,” Nina said. “My family had always considered themselves a lot better than the parochial [mestechkovye] Jews around; we held our noses really high in the air. But after the war, our noses were so low they were buried underground.” The family house had been vandalized, robbed, and taken over by others. “We were able to live in one of the rooms of our old house, but the rest were occupied by neighbors or complete strangers. Often, we’d see our belongings in other people’s apartments, but my mother gave us strict orders not to say a word.”

Veidlinger writes that many returning from evacuation found that “in their absence their homes had been occupied by neighbors or others in search of shelter” and, invariably, “their property had been plundered.”⁴⁹ Many had assumed that evacuees would never return, and that their property was free for the taking. Describing the return of evacuees in Odesa, historian Rebecca Manley notes that Jews were at a distinct disadvantage and faced particular difficulties in reclaiming their properties and belongings.⁵⁰

Nina explained at length how her mother never told anyone where they’d been; the previous three years remained a secret.⁵¹ In that sense, like Elena’s mother, Tauba treated the subject of the war as taboo and surrounded it with silence. Nina said of her mother:

She would often answer questions about where we’d been for the past couple of years with a simple answer: “evacuation.” She never said anything more, and at times she said less. I think she felt guilty that we’d survived when others didn’t, and at the same time, she was scared that others would consider us traitors [predateli] who must have protected our lives by acting as spies for the Germans. This was Stalin’s conspiracy against Jewish survivors, whom he labeled “enemies of the state.” Following my mother’s ways, we never talked about our time in the ghetto. Can you imagine living through that and never ever talking about it?

Tauba kept her Ukrainian name, Tatiana Larushkina. After the war Frida adopted the name Galina, and Rosalina became Nina. The practice of changing one’s name, as Sheila Fitzpatrick points out, wasn’t unusual for Jews in the Soviet Union; it was a way to “Russify” their identity and separate themselves from the “backwardness” of distinctly Jewish names, thus escaping their “dangerous” status as “enemies of the state.”⁵² The three women lived together until Galina married and moved to Saint Petersburg. Tauba went back to work. It’s notable that she chose an environment where silence was part of her daily routine: she worked as the head nurse and a teacher of young children in an orphanage for the deaf and mute. Nina, just ten years old when the war ended, started secondary school. She became a Young Pioneer of the Soviet Union, and later took the Komsomol oath. She went on to continue her education at the Odesa Art Academy, specializing in applied arts.

Nina married and divorced twice and had a son from each marriage—Yura and Kostya. She raised both on her own as she taught art and worked as an artist. And then, at the end of 1989, aged fifty-five, Nina immigrated to Israel. The decision to leave Odesa was one she had to make alone; it involved a lot of “back-and-forth thinking and contemplation.” Like many others in her circle, Nina wasn’t sure of her future in Odesa, which she described as “gloomy and bare” at that time, but she still considered it her beloved city (rodnym gorodom). As we walked down Pushkin Street one day, she stopped to recall how, a few days before leaving Odesa, she’d picked up a handful of earth from this very spot and carried it in a bottle all the way to Israel. “I wanted to take a piece of my home, a piece of my Odessa, with me.”

From the start of our conversations, it was clear that Nina’s decision to emigrate was not a matter of making aliyah (immigration to Israel). She did not see her move through a Zionist lens. She described her emigration from Odesa as “leaving home,” but she did tell me she was comforted by the idea of going to a place where no one would call her zhidovka (yid).

Having never traveled abroad, Nina had little knowledge of life outside the USSR. Yura had decided to stay in Odesa (he later immigrated to Germany), but her younger son, Kostya, would go with her. Before leaving Odesa, she attended information meetings organized by the Jewish Agency (Sokhnut) to learn about Israel’s housing, social security program, citizenship, and employment.⁵³ But she didn’t have much sense of what “Russian” immigrant life would be like in the “Holy Land,” unlike later migrants who had the benefit of letters and phone calls from those who preceded them. The question of where they were going seemed secondary to the question of departure per se. “Whether we would stay in Israel forever wasn’t decided, but it seemed unimaginable that we’d ever be able to return [to Odessa].”

Nina and Kostya, then nearly eighteen, sailed from Odesa to Haifa, where Israeli state representatives welcomed them with instant immigrant visas, a prerequisite to applying for Israeli citizenship.⁵⁴ Beyond the welcoming, there were challenges. Nina had great difficulty finding employment and struggled with other social problems associated with an immigrant’s life. “I was terribly homesick. Whenever I heard the word ‘Odessa’ I’d have hot flashes and my eyes would light up. If I learned someone was from Odessa, I’d go out of my way to meet them, talk to them, invite them for tea.” After nearly four years in Israel, Nina’s overwhelming nostalgia, and a certain curiosity about other options, led her to book a monthlong return visit to Odesa.

When she arrived back in the summer of 1993, it seemed to her that Odesa hadn’t much changed. “It was still rather gray,” she said, “but life was slightly jollier.” She told me with excitement how she had visited the Privoz market, a place she’d greatly missed and where she felt at home. She reflected that it was in this city that she had been born and had spent most of her life; it was here that her family graves spoke of her history, allowing her to imagine life as it was, prior to her own generation, as told in the stories of her parents. It was a place where everything was familiar—the language, people, climate, architecture, even the trees. In Odesa, she didn’t have to prove herself as an artist, as a person; she could just be. This visit was very important to her.

Five years later, in 1998, Nina’s economic situation in Israel worsened and she made up her mind to return to Odesa permanently. “I came back to a changed Odessa,” she said, “but I still came back home.” She didn’t miss Israel. “On the contrary,” she said, “I’ve started to see my life here in Odessa very differently, and I’ve developed a new love for this city through my weekly walking tours.” Besides occasional visits to Gmilus Hesed, the center for elderly Jews, Nina did not take part in the city’s Jewish activities, nor did she identify herself as being Jewish through any of the new avenues available to Jews in Odesa. Her two sons had taken divergent paths. Yura shared his mother’s secular and nonaffiliated Jewish orientation as part of the Russian-speaking intelligentsia, while Kostya (whose story is told in chapters 4 and 6) had started to partially observe Jewish religious commandments.

As in Viktor’s and Olga’s families, Nina’s immediate relatives were educated Russian-speaking Jews who enjoyed their social status in Odesa. But this world was only a faint memory for Nina, whose early recollections were overshadowed by her arduous and terrifying experiences during Nazi occupation. Nina’s silenced Jewish identity and her official Ukrainian documentation made daily life easier after the war, as they had for Elena. Nina didn’t deny her Jewish roots, but nor did she call attention to them. She avoided talking about Jewish subjects not because of her Soviet convictions, as with Olga, but because of the fear and horror brought by the Holocaust, a taboo subject.

Conclusion

The stories of these four elderly Jews of the intelligentsia give us a set of reference points and identifiable themes that they themselves saw as central to understanding their lives and family trajectories: the impact of the Soviet period, Holocaust trauma, and observations on Jewishness, Russianness, and Ukrainianness. These themes reflected their understandings of self and of their families; their relationship with Odesa and their thoughts about it being a distinctive place with its own history; and their sense of the present-day sociopolitical atmosphere. They thus chart orienting points for inquiry through Odesa’s altering social, political, and cultural landscape.

Viktor and Olga spoke of the changes in Jewish values and orientations, both in their own families and in the greater Odesan Jewish population, which they saw as “progressive.” They viewed Odesa’s accomplished and “assimilated” Jewry as a product of that specific urban culture. For them, this was one of the great modernizing achievements of their time. They felt that the newly arrived Jewish educators were trying to reverse this progressive trend by inculcating the younger generation with the patterns of a traditional Judaism that Viktor, Olga, and their families had voluntarily relinquished.

Elena’s story focused on her hidden Jewish identity, the hardships of WWII and the Holocaust, and the Soviet antisemitism endured by her parents. But Elena also relayed more positive memories of Jewish cooking, family stories, teaching her children about their Jewishness, and learning Hebrew herself as she made plans to move to Israel. The main themes of Nina’s story were the tragedy of losing family members, the family’s property, and its social status in Odesa, as well as her departure from, and return to, Odesa.

No single interpretation of Jewish lives in the Soviet Union could reveal a complete picture of Odesa’s Jews; there are too many ambiguities and ambivalences embedded in memories and representations of Jewishness. For instance, when Olga recalled experiencing the war and anti-Jewish sentiment, she stressed the distinctive nature of her native city. She explained how discriminatory policies were offset by “personal relations,” which “determined more than state politics.” In support of this observation, other life histories collected in Ukraine in the early years of independence suggest that an individual’s place of residency and generation had the most impact on the extent to which they followed Jewish traditions.⁵⁵

In contrast, we hear Nina’s story of Ukrainian and Russian collaborators in Odesa and her family’s betrayal by a neighbor child. Both Nina and Elena expressed ambivalence about the Soviet system. Elena blamed it for marking her mother as an “enemy of the state” simply because she was a Jew. Nina criticized Stalin’s regime for treating her family as “traitors,” along with other survivors of the Nazi occupation. Although Nina herself joined the Komsomol, and Elena understood her husband’s membership in the Communist Party, neither woman expressed much admiration for Soviet days. Olga and Viktor, however, deeply identified with and embodied many of the values that sustained the Soviet system.

Each of these older informants had adopted secularism for different reasons. For Olga and Viktor, it signified identification with the modernizing project of socialism, while Elena’s mother had denounced God for undeserved Jewish suffering. All the narrators proudly described the social status they achieved as members of the Russian-speaking intelligentsia and as individuals of cultured backgrounds who had enjoyed careers in art, tourism, and academia. In all cases, Jewishness was one of their inherited identifications—one strand of their being—but by no means the only lens through which they judged their experiences or the experiences of others. There were other social roles and allegiances that also defined their relationship to the state and to their city, family, friends, and colleagues.

These reflections also display a range of views about contemporary Jewish life in Odesa. Viktor and Olga, for example, questioned the sincerity of newly observant Jews and shunned the foreign rabbis and Jewish emissaries who came to Odesa. They participated in organized Jewish life but on their own terms, along with selected “like-minded people” who regularly convened at Gmilus Hesed or the Odesa Literature Museum. Elena had only recently approached the city’s Jewish organizations, and mainly used them as education centers for her future life in Israel. She welcomed Odesa’s cosmopolitanism, tolerance, and openness to religious freedom, but like others in her generation (and perhaps especially because she’d previously had to hide her Jewish identification), she wasn’t comfortable in groups that were exclusively Jewish or in very religious settings. After Nina’s long absence from Odesa, she had reached out to Odesan groups, not exclusively Jewish ones, where she and others shared a passion for walking and discussing Odesa’s history. She, too, was a member of Gmilus Hesed, which provided medical and other benefits, but unlike Olga and Viktor she didn’t take much part in the club’s activities.

Soviet-era Jews are often depicted as being highly assimilated, secular, and nonobservant; some see the category as one “largely emptied of its cultural content,” with few, if any, key markers of Jewishness.⁵⁶ After seventy-plus years of Soviet leadership, the tragedies of the Holocaust, and massive migration, Jewish identity in the Soviet Union has been described as “an ethnicity without an ethnic language; without Judaism as a religion or a way of life; without major cultural markers such as rituals, education, and public performances; without community organization; and even without deep historical roots and memory.”⁵⁷

Russian ethnographer Igor Krupnik defends this portrait, a contrast with the situation of Jews prior to the 1917 revolution, when the Russian Empire’s Jewish population was seen as a religious community, as opposed to Soviet Jews and their “largely hollowed Jewish identity.”⁵⁸ One goal of this chapter is to counter this academic construction, which has long been due for careful examination and criticism. In the Western imagination, the figure of the Soviet Jew came to be defined, as literary scholar Sasha Senderovich points out, by its ambivalence toward traditional Jewish religious and cultural practices.⁵⁹ Zvi Gitelman has problematically referred to the Soviet Jew’s “thin culture.”⁶⁰ While Senderovich attempts to look at the Soviet Jew as imagined in Soviet historical and cultural contexts (especially novels, short stories, literary sketches, and films) before it became a figure that needed to be “saved,” I use the medium of oral histories to challenge narrow visions of Soviet Jewish experiences embedded in emptiness and repression.⁶¹ Paying attention to how these Jews raised in the Soviet Union have talked about the changing nature of their Jewishness shows how memories of family history and of achievements and hardships have endured, connecting many Jews to a much more complex but no less substantial Jewish orientation.⁶² The cases of Viktor, Olga, Elena, and Nina demonstrate that Soviet and post-Soviet Jewishness—though it may be subtle, nuanced, privatized, and internal—is far from “hollowed.” As literary scholar Harriet Murav reminds us, questions of Jewish belonging can’t be approached “with a fixed template of what Jews and Jewishness are” because the markers of ethnoreligious distinction, particularly in the context of Soviet life, were redefined more than once.⁶³

Sociologist Herbert Gans’s notion of “ethnicity without content” emerged from his observation of the “symbolic ethnicity” of American immigrant communities (including Jewish ones).⁶⁴ Jews in the Soviet Union were exposed to different pressures and opportunities of assimilation than the groups Gans describes and have come to regard themselves as Jewish, mostly along secular, ethnocultural lines without practice or participation in Jewish ethnic or religious culture. They have immersed themselves in the larger Russian, Soviet, and local (here, Odesan) culture, and they have found identity constructions more rewarding than devoting themselves exclusively to their old Jewish culture—which, with the passage of time, had little meaning apart from pleasing the older generations.⁶⁵

As the previous stories show, evolving historical circumstances forced Jews in the Soviet Union, as well as those in America and Europe, to develop their own set of markers (both positive and negative) to recognize one another and define themselves as Jews. For most (urban) Soviet Jews, these markers were mainly concentrated on the value of education (predominantly reading), career achievement, and participation in the activities of the Russian-speaking intelligentsia; they also took the negative form of enduring quotas and other forms of antisemitism. As Markowitz concludes, “To have lived a Jewish life [in the Soviet Union] is to have suffered.”⁶⁶

It must be understood that for these Jews, the values of education, career success, and the activities of the Russian-speaking intelligentsia were seen as Jewish values—a distinctively urban-Jewish way of living and approaching the world. Other ethnographic studies of ex-Soviet Jewry demonstrate that Jews engage in “contradictory but always meaningful and contextual processes of identity formation” as they combine the supposed mutually exclusive categories of Russian (Ukrainian or Georgian) and Jewish.⁶⁷ Literary scholars Larisa Fialkova and Nina Yelenevskaya point out that many of the Russian-speaking Jews they interviewed in Israel “spoke about some elements of the Jewish tradition that had been preserved in families despite all the obstacles. But the meaning of the tradition had undergone significant changes, often remaining obscure even to those who tried to observe it.”⁶⁸

Collecting the life histories of elderly Odesan Jews is one of my most cherished experiences. Through their stories, I saw how the lives of middle-aged and younger Jews had been shaped by family and historical lineages. Many of today’s middle-aged Jews constitute a generational link between very different values and ways of being Jewish. Their own children have often departed from the orientation of their grandparents or have enriched their secular intelligentsia values with new orientations and behavior patterns linked to Judaism, Jewish culture, and Jewish history. The following chapter moves on to the generations after Viktor, Olga, Elena, and Nina and to the recent and highly visible developments on Odesa’s Jewish frontier.

2

Remembering the Past and Making Sense of the Present

Narratives of Elderly Jews

Viktor Feldman and Olga Notkina

Elena Martyanova

Nina Malahova

Conclusion