Epilogue

It is impossible to make conclusive statements about Odesa’s Jewish identity in the years after Ukrainian independence without considering the political reverberations of the past decade: the 2013–14 Maidan protests, the subsequent Russian annexation of Crimea and incursion into the Donbas region, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Nor can we predict the final outcomes of the current war and the eventual impact on Odesa, its Jewish population, and its cosmopolitanism, as the war of more than two years has no end in sight.

What occurred in 2014, however, is instructive for the ways it compelled Odesans to navigate distinctions between what is Ukrainian and what is Russian and the areas where the two intersect. In this epilogue, I focus on my visits to the city in 2014 and 2019 and on Odesa amid the political turbulence that started with Euromaidan and the fire that occurred in the city on May 2, 2014. On that day, street fighting broke out between pro-Maidan and anti-Maidan activists. Forty-eight were killed in a fire set at the Trade Unions House, where Russian supporters had taken refuge.¹

The politics percolating throughout Ukraine at that time had an impact on Odesa and on the people I knew there, leaving scars that have no doubt been torn open by Russia’s 2022 invasion. Both the city and the people I repeatedly spoke with became more political, a turn that was not predictable, definitive, or always enduring. Given what I’ve shown in these pages, this isn’t surprising. Most Odesans I knew came to see themselves and their city as part of Ukraine in a way that hadn’t been the case during my time there in the mid-2000s. Many of these individuals regarded Russia as the aggressor state waging a war on their home. Others drew a careful distinction between governments and people or between politics and reality. They blamed politicians on both sides of the Maidan conflict for creating narratives that stoked violence, including the waves of Russian propaganda that depicted a nationalist Ukraine driven by fascist and antisemitic Nazis.

Discussing the horrific fire at the Trade Unions House, some of my Jewish friends declared that there was no room for street violence and vandalism in their city, as such Manichean politics went against the grain of what Odesa stands for. Others refused to accept that native residents could be involved in the disturbances, claiming that the events were orchestrated by politicians and carried out by hooligans “from elsewhere.” “I can’t believe this is happening in my hometown,” one woman told me. “The city is already crumbling, and these hooligans, without any thought, vandalized and broke everything.” In her view, no “real” Odesans were involved in the fighting, because they would never damage their own city the way the protesters and police had done. But despite the speculations, real Odesans—Jews included—were undoubtedly part of the pro- and anti-Maidan camps involved in the chaotic attacks.²

In this way, Odesa did not change overnight, and its changes were not monolithic. Younger generations of Odesans grew up with a different mentality, constructed in post-Soviet society, and without the same exposure to the meta-narrative that Russification equals modernization. Until the escalation of Russia’s aggression, many older Soviet-born Jews in Odesa and the eastern and southern parts of the country still regarded themselves as “Soviet people, firmly convinced of their connection with Russian culture and the primacy of this culture above others.” In other words, all things Ukrainian were still perceived as second class, simple, and in many ways folkloric.³ But in the context of an ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, these perceptions greatly shifted. Much of the Ukrainian population born during and after the last decade of Soviet rule started to question others’ attachments to Russia under the rhetoric of anticolonialism. The trauma of the war further intensified and politicized these views, and support of Russian culture or even neutrality toward Russia was regarded by some as a betrayal of patriotic allegiance. For them, the Ukrainian language, its symbolic vocabulary, and just being Ukrainian took on new positive associations, while identifying as Russian was increasingly linked with an aggressive and colonizing imperial power. Russian speakers in Ukraine, Jews included, were thus forced to navigate being viewed as “symbolic pawns” used by opposing sides to diminish the credibility of the other through accusations of discrimination and, in the case of Jews, antisemitism.⁴ Some Jews were led to sever ties with friends and relatives, and families of mixed origin suffered the painful reality of this political rift and violence even more. Since the start of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, air travel has ceased between Russia and Ukraine, and the distance between the two nations is internalized by those with family members living across the border.

Tatiana Zhurzhenko has said that the Russian action in eastern Ukraine did what previous Ukrainian presidents had failed to do: it catalyzed the creation of a political nation.⁵ Euromaidan and the events following it transformed Ukrainians’ sense of individual and collective agency. Many of my close friends took a pro-Ukrainian stance. When I first met David in the mid-2000s, for instance, he was religiously observant. The last time I saw my friend, in 2014, he was wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a pistol. I learned that he’d enrolled in a self-defense league and was heavily involved in the local operations that followed Russia’s annexation of Crimea. “I’m not a Ukrainian patriot,” he told me, “but if some filth wants to enter my city, I will fight till the end.”

During that same visit to Odesa, I also saw large protests in support of Russia and signs asking the Russian state to save Slavs and protect them from Ukrainian nationalists. Many of my interlocutors speculated that the protesters were bused into the city and paid for their presence, but others recognized that the city residents were still divided on their stance toward Russia. One journalist, following the pro-Russian protests in 2014, noted the lack of support these gatherings had among real Odesans. A Jewish woman she met observing the mobs of people with pro-Russian symbols expressed outrage at these demonstrations, screaming, “What nonsense, Odessa is a Jewish city!” as she stormed away from the crowds.⁶ For some, the battle took place on Facebook and other social media platforms where people engaged in heated arguments, “unfriended” those who took opposing views, and formed new alliances.

Seven years after the Odesa fire, Anna Misuk, a retired employee of the Odesa Literature Museum who now lives in Israel, acknowledged that the city’s political atmosphere had changed—the historical and political pressures created opportunities for new loyalties among Odesans of her generation. She told me that many of her formerly apolitical friends had become involved in the conflict at the onset—whether by taking part in online debate or by protesting in the streets: “There are two extreme views among Odessan Jews and other citizens in the city. The first is called ‘Ukrainian radicalism,’ where individuals regard all things Russian as the enemy. The second is a pro-Russian stance among people who don’t tolerate Ukrainization and regard an attachment to being ‘Russian’ as protection against Ukrainian right-wing nationalism. But most find themselves between the two extremes: they communicate in Russian but support Ukraine as a nation-state.”

Others I spoke to in May 2014 and on my last visit in 2019 might have been pro-Ukrainian or anti-Putin, but they still spoke in Russian and still used the language in unofficial communication. Moreover, while claiming to support Ukraine, they criticized aspects of Ukrainian nationalism, decried the corruption and other ills of Ukrainian society, and took issue with some of the blatant displays of anti-Russian sentiment toward Russian speakers. While some Russian-speaking Jewish Ukrainians adamantly retained their use of Russian, due to their lack of proficiency or lack of desire to change their habits, others switched between Russian and Ukrainian with ease, depending on the circumstances. Several Russian-speaking Jewish Ukrainians told me that their knowledge of Ukrainian wasn’t proficient enough for professional use, and although they could understand the language, they couldn’t achieve fluency overnight. In one Jewish family I knew, the daughter spoke Russian with her father and Ukrainian with her mother. Most found a comfortable balance of using both languages, understanding when to switch to the appropriate choice of communication. More importantly, their language use did not translate into language identity as Volodymyr Kulik has argued to be true about the larger population of Russian speakers in Ukraine.⁷

As a native Russian speaker, I myself worried that these tensions could create a chasm in my friendships. But the political tension and later the war didn’t separate us—presumably because I shared their political views. We continued to speak to one another in Russian, which was still the language on the streets and in the homes I visited. But the tenor of our conversation changed, since political topics commonly arose and, in some circumstances, divided people. Diana, who was born in 1984 in Odesa and moved to Moscow in 2015, told me her friends assumed she had become pro-Putin because she lived in Moscow. Heated arguments circulated online among her Beitar friends about Jewish participation in national conflicts. When we exchanged messages in October 2021, she explained that according to the philosophy of Beitar, debated by her friends, Jews are meant to be active in the political life of the state of Israel, but participating in political conflicts in other countries can only harm Jews.⁸ The reasoning goes like this: taking a side in any conflict leaves Jews dangerously open to attack—communal responsibility dictates that they stay out of local politics except for specific Jewish concerns.

When I spoke with leaders of Jewish organizations in Odesa after the events of 2014, they tended to take a neutral stance, choosing not to discuss politics with their members. “We are a Jewish organization, not a political one,” an activist explained. At the same time, leaders of global Jewish networks like Chabad and others in Russia and Ukraine were divided by the events and revealed their loyalties to their respective states. In a New York Times article entitled “Among Ukraine’s Jews, the Bigger Worry Is Putin, Not Pogroms,” Andrew Higgins wrote that Ukrainian Jews aren’t falling for the propaganda of Putin, who “described the ouster of President Viktor F. Yanukovych of Ukraine as an armed coup executed by ‘nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes, and anti-Semites’ who ‘continue to set the tone in Ukraine to this day.’”⁹ Indeed, some Jewish leaders blamed pro-Russian Ukrainians for antisemitic provocations in Crimea, including graffiti that read “Kill the Zhids” spray-painted on a synagogue.¹⁰

Many Jewish leaders wrote to Putin asking him to stop claiming that he invaded Crimea “to save Jews.” Some went so far as to state that the anti-Jewish acts that broke out in Kyiv and other cities during and after the Maidan protests were provocations by anti-Maidan forces seeking to prove that pro-Ukrainian nationalism is linked to neo-Nazi movements and guided by antisemitism—thus justifying Russian involvement in the crisis.¹¹ Other leaders, like Baruch Fichman, founder and president of the Ukrainian League Against Anti-Semitism, expressed concern that Ukrainian neo-Nazis were emboldened by the success of the revolution and were indeed becoming more dangerous.¹² In Odesa, such narratives were confounded by events on the ground. After all, the right-wing Pravyi Sektor (Right Sector) Party supported Odesa’s Jewish community by protecting Jewish property in the city and by condemning antisemitism after a Holocaust memorial was defaced with neo-Nazi graffiti.¹³ Rabbi Wolf told me he couldn’t believe that the same organizations they once feared for their right-wing politics were now offering them protection. But he also acknowledged that this move was a strategic alliance for both. Ukrainian groups like the Jewish Federation of Ukraine, the largest umbrella organization representing Ukrainian Jewry, openly declared their support for Ukraine’s national project. Indeed, “strengthening Ukraine’s independence” is stated as one of the Jewish Federation’s strategic tasks, along with “development of the Jewish community, fighting anti-Semitism, memory of the Holocaust and supporting the State of Israel.”¹⁴

Four years after the 2014 disturbances, relations with Ukraine’s right-wing groups changed for the worse. When Tatiana Sorkina, head of Pravyi Sektor, addressed a crowd of supporters during the 2018 March for Ukrainian Order, held on the anniversary of the tragic events of May 2, she declared, “We will restore order in Ukraine. Ukraine will belong to Ukrainians, not Jews and oligarchs.” I found this speech disturbing; however, it didn’t make headlines in the Jewish press, nor did it appear in any of my friends’ social media posts. When I raised this incident with Lika, a Jewish woman in her early forties, she dismissed it. To Lika, Sorkina didn’t represent Pravyi Sektor as it stands today, and her antisemitic statements were out of touch. Her husband pointed out that Sorkina was quickly removed from her post after her hate speech and never seen again in the public eye. Through this example, he also underscored Ukraine’s stringent laws against antisemitism and the support the Ukrainian state offers to Jews today.

Figure Epi.1. The president of Ukraine with Odesa’s Rabbi Wolf (to his right) and other Ukrainian Jewish leaders. Photo copyright Chabad.org, used by permission.

The 2019 election of Volodymyr Zelensky, who became the first Jewish president of Ukraine, was celebrated publicly; the media presented it as a victorious moment in Ukrainian Jewish history.¹⁵ But at the time, Zelensky’s election and his new status as president did little to diminish the anxiety felt by some Jews in Odesa about what was to come. Several of my elderly Odesan friends doubted that Zelensky really cared about his Jewish identity. “He never denied that he was Jewish, but he never advertised it, either,” one said. Zelensky grew up in a Russian-speaking secular Jewish family, but he is not observant and is unaffiliated with Ukraine’s cultural or religious Jewish organizations. His marriage to a non-Jewish woman and the baptizing of his children not only brought more suspicion about his Jewishness but also solidified his Ukrainianness. And because Zelensky’s presidential campaign was widely known to have been financed by a Jewish oligarch, Igor Kolomoisky, many Jews were wary of the potential for continued corruption that could tarnish the image of Jews in the country and lead to a rise in antisemitism. Any impropriety by Zelensky, they feared, would reflect badly on all of the country’s Jews. Similar concerns were expressed among older Jews in other cities, including the Dnipro district, where Zelensky was born.¹⁶ But at the same time, as political scientist Olga Anuch and historian Henry E. Hale observe in their book, The Zelensky Effect, as a Russian speaker of Jewish heritage from the country’s industrial southeastern heartland, Zelensky “embodies civic Ukrainian national identity” and is perfectly positioned to understand how the “‘The Divide’ was a kind of myth . . . that obscured the middle ground into which he tapped.”¹⁷

David, my observant and armed Odesan friend, wasn’t alone in 2014 in his fear that Putin would invade Odesa because of its strategic location as a port city with a coastline and a connection to the Danube.¹⁸ The city’s position next to the separatist, Moscow-backed region of Transnistria and its proximity to the northwest peninsula of Crimea made Odesa particularly susceptible to invasion.¹⁹ David was unusual in taking an active part in physically defending his city. But others who chose not to take up arms at that time still volunteered to help the wounded, families affected by war, and the many refugees arriving in Odesa from the southeast part of the country.

Thus, we have seen how Odesa’s tolerance and cosmopolitanism were tested and how its deep connection with Russian culture was jeopardized. And yet the reality of everyday life revealed that those lineages still remained, even if they were undergoing the kinds of historical transformations that I focus on in this book. For many Jewish Odesans, new bonds were formed and new allegiances created between Jews and Ukrainians. These added a fresh dimension to the Jewish and Ukrainian elements of Odesa’s living cosmopolitanism—a cosmopolitanism that developed with rather than against Ukrainization. They referred to themselves as Ukrainian Jews and took pride in the Ukrainian language and culture in a way that hadn’t been part of the social imaginings two decades before. Some spoke openly of themselves as patriots, while others used less political terms to describe their belonging in Ukraine. Commenting on the transformation of Jewish life in Ukraine, Joseph Zissel, head of the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of Ukraine, established in 1988, observed the same phenomenon. “Jews who always lived here in Soviet times were Soviet Jews,” he said. “That is, they were very assimilated and knew almost nothing about their history or culture. Then, when the Soviet Union collapsed, fortunately, they became Jews in Ukraine. . . . And the third stage after the Soviets and Jews in Ukraine is Ukrainian Jews.” As “Soviet Jews,” their Jewishness was derided and placed them on the margins. Even as Russophiles and Russian speakers, they were never “Russians.” The new identity of “Ukrainian Jews” recognizes the full citizenship and residency rights of Jewish people born and raised in Ukraine. They are part of Ukraine’s narod, and by the same logic, they have obligations to serve Ukraine, as many now do in time of war.

In Ukraine headed by Zelensky, Ukrainians and Ukrainian Jews are co-creating their relationship as equal members of Ukraine’s civil society. The current government has made great efforts to bring Jews within the framework of Ukraine’s polity and culture. These joint initiatives are evident in the published media clips of Jewish leaders speaking Ukrainian and discussing their relationship with the Ukrainian state. One short clip, made with the sponsorship of the US Agency for International Development, appeared on Ukrainer.net and began with “Jews of Ukraine. Who are they?” In it, individuals like Zissel, who had been a political dissident and political prisoner, and Oleksandr Duhovnii, head rabbi of Progressive Judaism in Ukraine, describe their own Jewish and Ukrainian identities as intertwined. “I have always been close to Ukraine, but my core was always Jewish,” said Zissel. “I will never be purely Ukrainian, but I have already become a Ukrainian Jew.” Duhovnii speaks of Ukraine as a country that has learned how to fight antisemitism, racism, and xenophobia. He compares the Ukrainian state to a wreath made of different flowers woven together. “For me, Ukraine is the first Motherland. The first and last. I still have a historical homeland, but Ukraine is my land. I studied in London and I could stay there because my wife worked there, but it was very important for me to return to Ukraine.”

I would argue that the larger process of Jews redefining their relationship with Ukraine, and Ukraine redefining its relationship with its Jews, stems not only from the turbulence of the current epoch but also from the public recognition of such historical atrocities as Babyn Yar and the Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis during World War II and the closer look being made at historical moments of coexistence and coalescence between Jews and Ukrainians. In 2019, at an event commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Babyn Yar, attended by then president Poroshenko, many Ukrainian and world Jewish activists expressed their commitment to bridging the gaps in Ukrainian-Jewish relations and forging more intimate ties.

In the last two decades, scholars have used a Ukrainian rather than a strictly Russian or Soviet lens to study Jewish history in the territory of present-day Ukraine. Growing initiatives to see, research, and analyze Jews in Ukraine as “Ukrainian Jews” are being made across academic and cultural sectors by important groups like the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter and the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine and by such publications as Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern’s Anti-Imperial Choice: The Making of the Ukrainian Jews. But the time period of the mid-2000s, which represents the core of this book, provides an important reminder of how Jewish Odesans lived prior to the current conflict and how reality has been transformed—and will only be further transformed—by living through war and the aftermath of this deep trauma.