7

Odesa

A Jewish City?

When I told my family and friends that I was doing fieldwork in Odesa, their first response was that it would be “exceptional,” a one-of-a-kind place to study because it was the quintessential Jewish city. Then, inevitably, they’d pause and ask: “But how many Jews are left in Odessa? Is it still a Jewish city?” A similar duality plays out in two popular jokes about the place:

“How many people live in Odessa?”

—“One million.”

“How many Jews live in Odessa?”

—“You already have your answer.”¹

Two Odesans are walking down the street. One says to the other:

“Look, here comes a woman! I think she might be Jewish.”

—“No, it can’t be. All the Jews left in the nineties.”

“Still, I’ll ask. Madam! Madam! I’m sorry to ask, but are you Jewish?”

Woman: “I’m not Jewish; I’m just an idiot.”

The first joke, from the early Soviet era, evokes a wholly Jewish Odesa. The second, post-Soviet, suggests an emigration so complete that only “an idiot” would have remained.

The theme of Odesa as a “Jewish city” has long been established in the public perception and imagination, both at home and abroad, through literature, music, stories, mass media, tourism, and local discourse. I argue that with Odesa, “Jewish” has served as a metonym—a figure of speech where the name of one element of something is used to represent the whole.² In other words, it is precisely the Jewishness of the place that stands in for the entire city. Jarrod Tanny writes that throughout history, some cities are branded as “Jewish” due to the sheer number of urban Jews living there.³ Compared to the majority or near-majority of Jews in cities like Vilnius and Minsk at the turn of the twentieth century, Odesa was nowhere near as demographically Jewish. At its peak, in the 1920s, Odesa’s Jewish population reached close to 40 percent. But in the 2000s, the city’s Jewish population was less than a tenth of what it had been. If its image as a Jewish city has lived on, the meaning imparted by the adjective Jewish is neither clear nor stable. That meaning is kept in flux by the constellation of personalities, attitudes, and ideas about the social and cultural space that its residents inhabit and by the important perceptions they share or dispute concerning its character.⁴ Ever-evolving and entwined discourses of myth, history, and individual realities both support and call into question the trope of Odesa’s Jewishness.

I found that first and foremost, it was the local Jewish intelligentsia and religious leaders I met who defended the idea that Jews defined Odesa in a meaningful way. They were deeply invested in the claim that Odesa was, is, and always will be Jewish as a way to mark the city’s diversity. This conception builds on the potent Odesa myth, which has cast the city as a unique and particular sphere within the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and present-day Ukraine, with distinct qualities that can at least partially be attributed to the influence of the city’s Jews.⁵ At the same time, the rhetoric of Jewishness in the daily life and conversations of ordinary residents is much more varied.

In what follows, I trace how these different internalized views manifested themselves in official or commercialized representations, such as tourism, and through the varieties of everyday life. I situate my analysis of Odesa’s trope of Jewishness alongside the work of anthropologist Michael Herzfeld, who believes that stereotypes play an important role in both reproducing and contesting power relations at the local level.⁶ Using Herzfeld’s paradigm, I go beyond an analysis of whether Odesa should be considered a Jewish city today and focus on why and for whom the idea of a Jewish Odesa matters.⁷ While Tanya Richardson has pointed out that “implicitly, contemporary representations of Jewish Odesa reinforce the idea that Odesa is situated in Russian cultural geographies but not Ukrainian ones,” I later demonstrate that since the escalation of Russia’s war with Ukraine, Jewishness has also become a powerful image for a new Ukrainian civic nation.⁸

History and Mythmaking: The Odesa Myth

According to a number of city chroniclers, Odesa was considered a famous Jewish city not only because of its impressively large Jewish population in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but also because that population was both well integrated into the cosmopolitan fabric of the metropolis and relatively empowered. Large numbers of Jews participated actively in the city’s social, economic, political, and educational institutions and made significant contributions to its cultural and intellectual life (see chapters 1 and 2). But as Brian Horowitz points out, on the basis of his research on the Jewish intelligentsia in late imperial Odesa, the myth surrounding “Jewish” Odesa is full of paradoxes, contradictions, and uncertainty.⁹

In the twenty-first century, the city’s cosmopolitan makeup includes a much smaller Jewish population but rising numbers of Ukrainians, Moldovans, Turks, Chinese, Koreans, Tatars, and other ethnic groups. In an age of a supposed Jewish revival, there’s a concomitant growth in Christianity, Islam, and other religions. Today, Christian and Muslim populations represent a much higher percentage of Odesa’s religiously observant population than do members of the Jewish faith.¹⁰ The emergence of Ukraine as a nation-state also plays a significant role in perceptions of Odesa. That emergence has brought political, social, and economic pressures to make Odesa more Ukrainian—implementing changes at the level of language, politics, and education that grew in popularity as Ukrainian-Russian relations deteriorated.¹¹ Post-Maidan events (discussed in the conclusion and epilogue) have further solidified this process of nationalization and cast a new light on the imperial nature of the Odesa myth discussed further in this chapter. As Amelia Glaser asks, “How viable or lasting is the Odesa myth in the twenty-first century, particularly amidst a war between Ukraine and Russia?”¹² At the same time, some Ukrainian scholars, like Taras Maksymiuk, who conducted a tour of Ukrainian Odesa for Tanya Richardson during her fieldwork in the city, argued that Ukrainians had always contributed to the city’s development and that people have often overlooked Ukrainian Odesa by not acknowledging the works of Russian-speaking Ukrainians and Russian-language Ukrainian publications on Ukrainian themes.¹³ Literary scholars Mirja Lecke and Efraim Sicher remind us that from its early days, competing narratives of cultural ownership circulated in the various language communities and cultural groups.¹⁴ The uniqueness and Jewishness of Odesa offered different points of contrast throughout its history. Rebecca Stanton notes how Odesa in early Soviet times presented a contrast to the “homogenizing impulse emanating from Moscow.”¹⁵ During the time of my fieldwork, the metonym “Jewish” also functioned to align Odesa with a minority culture versus the national (Ukrainian) culture. This alignment changed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as “supporters of the Kremlin have seized upon historical conflict between Jews and Ukrainians.”¹⁶ Not only was the idea of Odesa as a Ukrainian city solidified in the context of war, but the rhetoric of “Jewish” Odesa exhibited in various public and private conversations had also gained a political tone. The city was “Jewish” and therefore not “Russian.”

History and demographics aside, Odesan natives and knowledgeable visitors relied on the Odesa myth to shape their image and experience of the city as well as their sense of self within its boundaries. In turn, their engagement with this myth perpetuated its existence. The myth I am referencing was built on an already-established picture of Odesa as “a multicultural, largely Jewish, urban, modern, and cheerful city” that stood for “alterity, nonorthodox ways of life, sin and a Southern savoir vivre.”¹⁷ Richardson describes the Odesa myth that followed as a “constellation of images and ideas” that originated in nineteenth-century Russian literature.¹⁸ Efraim Sicher notes that Alexander Pushkin enthused about the multiethnic diversity of Odesa (although he excluded Jews) in the portions written for Eugene Onegin and “cemented Odesa into his vision of a European Russia.”¹⁹ To Pushkin and others, “most notably Kuprin, Balmont, and Bunin, Odessa represented a place whose very identity was bound up in ‘otherness,’ a place defined by its non-normative and nonmetropolitan status.”²⁰

Some scholars claim that “the myth of old Odessa became the city’s history and Odessa’s myth-makers became its leading historians.”²¹ Jarrod Tanny reminds us that the relationship of myth and history is indeed complex and fluid in many cities. It is pronounced in Odesa because many of the literary characters that helped give expression to the myth actually lived, the events described actually took place, and the humorous words were actually spoken.²² Reinforcing the myth, a heterogeneous cohort of the city’s mythmakers, writers, musicians, and actors have followed the same blueprint of rhythm, intonation, language, and themes that frame tales about the city since it first coalesced in the nineteenth century. Although the repression of the mid-1930s affected Odesan culture for the worse, Tanny argues that the myth “achieved hegemony and a near monopoly over the way the memory of old Odessa is publicly articulated, much as Marxism-Leninism previously governed the writing of history under Communism.”²³

In the early and mid-twentieth century, the image of the city was infused with new themes of Jewish humor and of the criminality and dark underside of city life, vividly portrayed in the works of Isaac Babel, Valentin Kataev, Ilya Ilf and Evegenii Petrov, Yury Olesha, and others.²⁴ These renowned Russian and Soviet writers, together with “local historians, film makers, poets, novelists, journalists, memoirists” and comedians, “extolled Odessa as a cosmopolitan, energetic oasis of freedom and beauty, and elaborated on the Odessa myth.”²⁵ The overall effect was to “portray the city as a special place dominated by trade that seemingly sprang up from nowhere in the steppe, populated by people from different countries.”²⁶

Literary scholar Rebecca Stanton outlines the components of what came to be a standard repertoire for characterizing the city: “the sun, the sea, the dust; the ‘live varieties’ of languages and nationalities, composed of sailors, traders, holidaymakers, Italian singers, Jewish fiddlers, and Russian poets, with a steamy admixture of smugglers, gangsters, and exiled Russian malcontents.”²⁷ The multilayered myth of the city emerges from diverse impressions from literature, folklore, music, and art, that live in the minds of the city’s inhabitants.²⁸ The world created by Isaac Babel, especially in his Odessa Tales, is perhaps the most widely cited as the representation of Old Odessa or ta Odessa (“that Odessa”). Amelia Glaser writes, “No one has summed up the secular Jewish condition quite like Babel, who described fantastical Jewish gangsters in his Odessa stories at a time when the Bolshevik revolution had turned the world upside down.”²⁹ His work is credited with “popularizing the image of Odessa as a city of swashbuckling Jewish swindlers.”³⁰ Moreover, by putting Jewish characters at the forefront of his stories, Babel helped counter the depictions of Jews common in the work of Russian writers like Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky, who tended to portray them as “small, bent, weak and pathetic” individuals who lived in fear of the next pogrom.³¹

Babel was popular, and his achievements as a writer elevated the status of this imagined community of Russian Jewish intelligentsia. His descriptions of Odesa generated an image of city life in which Jews “embodied the physical strength, revelry and wit.”³² Babel’s Odesa is “the most charming city in the Russian Empire. If you think about it, it is a town in which you can live free and easy. Half of the population is made up of Jews, and Jews are a people who have learned a few simple truths along the way. . . . To a large extent it is because of them that Odessa has this light and easy atmosphere.”³³ Babel introduces areas like Moldovanka, a neighborhood where immigrants settled, including new Jewish “types” such as Benya Krik and his gang of “tough but honorable criminals.”³⁴ In Babel’s stories, Jewish people, affairs, practices, food, humor, and language became vivid expressions of Odesa’s reality for many. Tanny believes that “with a few notable exceptions, most of Odesa’s myth-makers and the legendary gangsters and musicians they have celebrated have either been Jewish or have been significantly influenced by Jewish culture.”³⁵ Thus, as writer and literary scholar Sophie Pinkham, writing about the blatnaia pesnia (songs of the underworld) of Leonid Utesov (1895–1982) and Arkadii Severnyi (1939–1980), explains, Odesa’s Jewishness in post-Stalin years became “detached from any actual religious or ethnic identity” to “become strictly metaphorical.”³⁶ The symbol spread across the entire Soviet world, representing a “refuge from official culture”; “a category used to express otherness”; “rebelliousness, outsider status, and freedom from the law of the state”—carried along in the popular Soviet music depicting the criminal underworld.³⁷ While I agree that Jewishness was a fluid category in the world of culture and music, and often stood in for other qualities of otherness, I would argue that it was not fully detached from Jewish identity in the way Pinkham describes. Jewishness in Odesa was undoubtedly affected by Soviet policies, but its manifestations still drew on real Jewish experiences and identities of the time.

In the midst of waning Ukrainian-Russian relations and heightened political tension—and all the more after Euromaidan, Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022—some Odesans have followed the ideological transformation of the psychologist and poet Boris Khersonsky (born in 1950).³⁸ He switched to the Ukrainian language in solidarity with the Maidan “Revolution of Dignity” and in a 2019 interview noted that “the city’s imperial past should take its proper place in history. But we should know that Odesa has another past: Turkish, Greek, etc. And most importantly, Odesa has a future. And this future is part of modern Ukraine. This means that the Ukrainian string in the city’s past (and it was! and is!) should sound louder.”³⁹

While other Odesan artists and performers have spoken up against Russia’s aggression, in some cases, their work has nonetheless perpetuated the Russian version of the Odesa myth that has been politicized. Writing about Mikhail Zhvanetsky, Amelia Glaser has pointed out that “his comedy perpetuates the trenchant cultural imperialism that Russia has sought to maintain in Ukraine which denies the significance of Ukraine in the Russian cultural landscape.”⁴⁰ Khersonsky, who considers himself ethnically Jewish but belongs to the Christian faith, is not a popular figure among the general Jewish population or the leaders of the “Odesa cultural space.” Still, his work is well known among literary circles outside the city and reviewed by scholars in and outside of Ukraine.⁴¹ He has widely deconstructed and criticized the Odesa Myth for its hint of imperialism in what Amelia Glaser refers to, using Walter Mignolo’s term, as Khersonsky’s “critical cosmopolitanism.”⁴² Speaking against Odesa’s claim to uniqueness, Khersonsky said in an interview with Shoizdat magazine, “If we admit that Odesa is more than a city, it is a country, then the (cultural) capital of this country is and will be Moscow.”⁴³ While Khersonsky’s view of the Odesa myth has been picked up by literary scholars, the Odesa myth still lives on in the popular culture of the place through the works of prominent cultural figures, the media, humor, tourism, and even fashion. For instance, the creation of Benya and Zubrick, a fashion brand of T-shirts and other clothing items that was started in late 2000 by two Jewish Odesans born in the late 1970s, has gained great popularity among Odesans and others by giving life to Jewish Odesan humor on apparel.⁴⁴

Culture, Media, and Tourism

Historically, Odesa’s Jewish image in popular culture was extended and enhanced through the satirical works of Mikhail Zhvanetsky; memoirs by Odesan locals and emigrants; films such as The Art of Living in Odessa, directed by Georgi Yungvald-Khilkevich in 1989; the television series Likvidatsiia (Liquidation), produced by Sergei Ursuliak in 2007, portraying the Odesa of the 1950s with Yiddishisms and humor; and the film Odessa, produced by Valery Todorovsky in 2017, depicting the internal drama of a Jewish family in Odesa during a cholera outbreak in the 1970s.⁴⁵ In his review of the 2005 film Odessa . . . Odessa! by the Israeli French director Michale Boganim (which I discuss later in this chapter), Tanny notes the film’s grim picture of a contemporary Odesa from which significant numbers of “Jews have gone . . . taking the city’s character with them.” And yet, he writes, Odesa is a place “where Jewish integration was reciprocal: while the Jews became more Russian over the years, Odessa’s Gentiles became more Jewish.” Thus, in Tanny’s view, Jewish contributions to Odesa’s cultural landscape haven’t been forgotten; they’re actively commemorated today in the streets, parks, and museums. Even though “most of Odessa’s Jews may be gone . . . Odessa remains a Jewish city.”⁴⁶

While Tanny’s statements point to the Jewish out-migration that halved Odesa’s Jewish population in the Soviet days, it also assumes that Jewishness in post-Soviet Odesa is not necessarily linked to the remaining Jews, but rather diluted in the general population of Odesa and the city culture. However, this type of Jewishness, tied to the Odesa myth, is still relevant today. Jewish Odesans and community leaders from abroad see themselves and their activity as key makers of Odesa’s Jewishness. The new layer of Odesa’s claims to being a “Jewish city,” put forth by Jewish activists and institutions of Jewish life that operate in the city, is linked to the imagined community, but we must not forget about their real-life existence. Indeed, the city’s defining features of Jewishness carry different meanings depending on who is applying the term and in what context.

In the digital sphere, blogs, websites, and online periodicals about Odesa help perpetuate the city’s stereotypes and reveal their virtual and transnational force.⁴⁷ Various websites dedicated to Jewish travel describe Odesa as “one of Europe’s Jewish capitals,” often falling back on Babel’s description of Odesa as a “city built by Jews.”⁴⁸ But both historically and today, those making such claims share an understanding that in Babel’s literary world (and, we can say, in modern-day Odesa), a “Jewish city” is not only “a reference to the sheer numbers of Jews in the city” but also a marker of the “general atmosphere, tolerant towards minorities.”⁴⁹ Moreover, contemporary Odesa has an active Jewish life, not merely in terms of its marks of Jewish heritage but in actual Jewish presence, practice, observance, and public visibility.

Various Facebook groups linked to the topic of Jewish Odesa are some of the platforms dedicated to the topics of Jewish history and everyday life in the city. The English-language magazine The Odessa Review, published from 2016 to 2019 by Regina Maryanovska-Davidzon, an Odesan native who now resides in Paris, and her husband, Vladislav Davidzon, covered cultural events in Odesa (and greater Ukraine) and regularly featured stories about Jewish life there. For example, the October/November 2017 issue was dedicated to Jewish-Ukrainian relations; its cover showed a folkloric image of Hasidic men with long side curls and black frocks, dancing along with traditionally dressed Cossacks.

Large-scale events have been geared toward reaffirming the Jewish presence and associations with Odesa. In 2006, Migdal sponsored a weeklong, citywide Rainbow of Jewish Diaspora Festival with performances of Jewish plays, an exhibition of Jewish art, tours of Jewish Odesa, and various workshops and music concerts. That year, Odesa also celebrated a festival of klezmer music that, according to the organizers, was very successful in bringing Jewish and non-Jewish Odesans closer to Jewish, Yiddish, and Odesan culture. In October 2017, Odesa hosted its first Jewish Film Festival, screening both foreign and local productions.

In the 2010s, foreign media began to play a more prominent role in shaping an image of Odessa as a city that “throbs with Jewish life.”⁵⁰ In 2018, Haaretz used the headline “Odessa, the Cradle of Israeli Culture, Enjoys a Jewish Renaissance” to explore Odesa’s Jewish history and the qualities its contemporary culture shares with, and offers to, Israelis. The article’s subhead announced, “The Ukrainian port city of Odesa, once home to hundreds of thousands of Jews, is experiencing a ‘golden age’—with modern Israel proving an unlikely inspiration.” The text and lavish photographs blended history and tourism promotion, mentioning the Holocaust as well as Israeli restaurants named after famous Jewish Odesans who helped build the state of Israel.⁵¹

Similar claims about Odesa’s Jewish renaissance were streamed on the Israeli media channel ILTV in a short report entitled, “Odessa, Ukraine, Experiences Jewish Renaissance,” followed by “Did you know that Odessa, Ukraine, was once home to one of the most Jewish communities on the planet?” The clip gave a broader vision of Odesa’s historical importance (especially for the Zionist movement) and contemporary revival. In the segment, Rabbi Arie Rov, of the Litvak synagogue, says that “over the years, most Jews have immigrated to Israel, the United States, or Germany. But Odessa has remained a Jewish city.” Recalling the long lines outside the synagogue for matzoh before Passover in 2018, Rabbi Rov points out that besides the active religious life many Jews lead, these changes are welcomed by the wider population. “Real Odessa locals,” he claims, “know that when Passover comes, everyone goes to the synagogue to buy matzoh.” The footage showed the city’s numerous Israeli restaurants named after famous figures (like Allenby, the British general who led the conquest of Palestine in 1917–19, and Dizengoff, the first mayor of Tel Aviv), reinforcing an image of twenty-first-century Odesa as a modern-day Tel Aviv. “It truly is a place that draws back Israelis and Jews who want to do business,” concludes Rabbi Wolf, of the Chabad congregation.⁵²

Figure 7.1. Cover of the City Guide of Jewish Odessa, published in 2007. Photo by author.

The visibility of Jews and Jewish places is part of the larger transformation of Odesa’s urban terrain, where “new ethnic restaurants, cafes, and fast-food stalls—Turkish, Armenian, Georgian, Chinese and Arab,” as well as Bulgarian, Greek, French, and Italian food establishments, are scattered throughout the city.⁵³ Vera Skvirskaja also reminds us about the less visible places of Odesa’s ethnic diversity that are overlooked in social analyses of Odesa, such as the Seventh Kilometre market outside the city, populated by “Vietnamese currency dealers, Turkish leather goods traders, Afghan and Ghanaian show-sellers and Chinese selling a variety of goods.”⁵⁴ But none of these groups have become immortalized in the Odesa myth the way the Jews have. The new aura of “Jewish cosmopolitanism” is no longer primarily the blend of Russian and Jewish orientations that Horowitz discussed in the Odesa of the early 1900s (see chapter 1). Rather, it is a combination of social, physical, and virtual spaces that bring together and display Jewish, Israeli, Ukrainian, Russian-speaking, and other international references, references brought in through the process of development, philanthropy, heritage travel, and the personal and professional connections of Odesa’s historical and contemporary diasporas.

Figure 7.2. An advertisement for Odessa Tours, including Jewish Odessa. Photo by author.

Not surprisingly, the tourism industry has picked up on this legendary myth of the city and turned Odesa’s Jewishness into a “brand” in a tourist economy. Ruth Ellen Gruber describes a similar phenomenon across eastern Europe, where Jewish or “Jewish-style” expression (religious, cultural, pop-cultural, and other) was becoming part of the mainstream and a “recognized and recognizable commercial commodity that formed an off-the-shelf ethnic decorative and catering category alongside ‘Chinese,’ ‘Japanese,’ ‘Indian,’ ‘Middle Eastern’ and even ‘Wild West.’”⁵⁵ The street markets and souvenir shops I visited in Odesa in the mid-2000s offered matrioshkas (wooden nesting dolls) decorated with images of Hasidic households, and metal figurines of stereotypical Jewish jewelers and scholars (more positive images of old Jewish stereotypes than the figurines of Jews clutching coins, as described by Ruth Ellen Gruber in Kazimierz, Poland), alongside Cossack-style belts, decorative lacquered boxes, and mock ID cards and passports that state the bearer’s nationality as “Odesit.” Besides other official guides, the city released a City Guide of Jewish Odessa, published in 2007 in Russian and English. It continues to be in print and is, according to the director of Migdal, “extremely popular.” “Jewish Heritage Tours” are advertised on posters near the open-air electric cars that can be rented for excursions in the city center. But as Gruber points out, the new Jewish constructs, including souvenirs, “now form part of the Jewish (or ‘Jewish’) reality of the post-Holocaust, post-communist world . . . and are integral parts of the texture of living cities, with layer by layer, their own models, perspectives and shorthand stereotypes that add to the palimpsest.”⁵⁶ In Gruber’s analysis, these layers of city life form “new authenticities” of what she calls “real imaginary spaces.”⁵⁷ In her analysis of klezmer festivals, Waligorska also questions stable realms of authenticity, criticizing a bipolar system of meaning where “‘real’ Jewish heritage is understood as made by Jews and for Jews and simulated Jewishness as produced by non-Jews for non-Jews.”⁵⁸ Rather, she suggests seeing these categories as constructed entities with unstable boundaries, and, I would add, a mixture of Jewish and non-Jewish audiences.

Figure 7.3. A display at the Museum of the History of Odesa Jews. Photo by author.

Odesa is different from Poland, Germany, and the parts of eastern Europe described by Gruber, Waligorska, and others, who depict a revival in places where Jewish life has been wiped out by the Holocaust and the Jewish heritage boom is driven by non-Jews. In Odesa there are different voices of authority that shape Jewish religious and cultural projects in the city and, similar to other places, questions around what defines Jewishness are intensively negotiated and redefined. But unlike the above-mentioned communities, in Odesa, the process of Jewish heritagization and revival—outside the tourist industry—involves mostly Jewish actors and live Jews.

Gruber raises important questions that are also relevant to our thinking about Odesa: What does it mean to say that something or, I would add, someone is Jewish? One can see how applying this adjective leads to myriad representations and interpretations. It’s obvious that the souvenir figurines of Orthodox Jewish men in long coats and fur hats depict “Jewish” (such as an Orthodox Jewish man in scholarly pursuit, marked by a book in the figurine’s hands), but the Jewish tours depict “Jewish” as part of the city’s history and experience, based on relics and real-life expositions and visions of Jewish life.

Many Jewish historical and fictional characters are commemorated in statues throughout the downtown area. Two in the courtyard of the Literature Museum are dedicated to Odesa’s humor, as personified by Sashka the Fiddler and Rabinovich, the Odesan character in many Soviet-era jokes. Farther up, on Odesa’s main pedestrian thoroughfare, Deribasovskaya Street, are two more statues dedicated to Jewish Odesans—one of the comedian, singer, and writer Leonid Utesov, and the other of the missing “Twelfth Chair” from the 1928 novel by Ilf and Petrov. Utesov’s music and performances celebrated “Odessa as a Jewish city of sin,” and his memoirs “effectively constructed old Odessa as a Jewish city using Yiddish-inflected narrative style, pervaded with Jewish characters, fables, and witticisms.”⁵⁹ This type of “implicit Jewishness” was used by other mythmakers in the city.⁶⁰ The first monument to Babel was erected in Odesa in 2011, across from his former apartment on the corner of Rishelevskaya and Zhukovskaya Streets. It depicts him “sitting next to a massive wheel of fate, scribbling in a notebook while gazing dreamily into the distance.”⁶¹ The monument was built with donations gathered by the International World Odesit Club from Odesans around the world. Odesans often cite these contributions as a testimony to their love for the city’s history.

Borrowing the notion of a “Jewish space” from Diane Pinto, it might be said that the Jewish spaces of Odesa are indeed multiple, debated, and fluctuating; layered with real, invented, imagined, remembered, re-created, and created realities; and touching on various stereotypes, real events, people, and mythical Old Odessa.⁶² Like the contributors to Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Tradition of Place, I focus on the production of Odesa’s Jewish spaces, what Brauch, Lipphardt, and Nocke term “doing Jewish space” or what I refer to as “lived Jewish spaces,” which are defined by living Jews both within and outside Odesa.⁶³ And at the same time, I also engage with other Jewish spaces that exist in Odesa on virtual, textual, mythical, and metaphorical levels. Borders and definitions of different Jewish spaces often blur, converge, and overlap (as Gruber reminds us), and categories such as “Jewish,” “non-Jewish,” “authentic,” and “inauthentic” (as Waligorska points out) are constructed entities whose boundaries are in flux.⁶⁴ This was particularly visible on the tours of Jewish Odesa and in the festivals and exhibitions that were organized by Jews but also drew in the surrounding society. In the early 2000s, Jewish tours were mainly organized by historians of Jewish Odesa and their students, but those tours grew in popularity; when I returned in 2014, I found many non-Jewish operators offering their versions of Jewish Odesa, which continue to be popular online events even in the current context of the war.

Language

The notion that there’s an “Odessan dialect” is one of the city’s most deeply rooted myths.⁶⁵ A mix of Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish, plus other foreign words, intonations, and case structures, the dialect has been called the linguistic equivalent of a Russian chopped beet salad (vinegret).⁶⁶ Literary critics in the early twentieth century looked down on Odesan slang as a “barbarization of the Russian language”; an Odesa newspaper published around 1912 “consistently referred to the city as Iudessa [Judaeo-Odessa].”⁶⁷ But today, tourists can acquire books on the Odesan language and collections of “Odessan anecdotes,” many featuring the joker Rabinovich. Robert Rothstein writes that the Odesan language and music offer a way of approaching the “symbiotic relationship between and among nationalities.”⁶⁸ In his article “How It Was Sung in Odessa,” he shows how the Russian and Yiddish languages influenced each other in the public life of the city. He describes how the two were often used interchangeably in the context of songs and conversation. This was “life on the sidewalks of Odessa,” where Jews regularly interacted with Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Greeks, and others.⁶⁹ Anthropologist Abel Polese, who has long written about language politics in Odesa, reminds us that histories and cultures have always overlapped in this city and that its notion of cosmopolitanism depicts a reality “well beyond the dichotomy between Russian and Ukrainian cultures, identities, and nations.”⁷⁰

Today, the vinegret of Odesan Russian is far less colorful and mixed than it was in the past. Rothstein’s studies are historical in nature, as indicated by his use of the past tense in the title of his article. He cites the title of a 1997 book published in Russian by Anatolii Kozak when he concludes that “Odessa doesn’t live here anymore” (Odessa zdes’ bol’she ne zhivet).⁷¹ Indeed, Tanny suggests that people have mourned the passing of Odesa’s golden age since the city’s very inception.⁷²

Rothstein attributes Odesa’s changes partly to the processes of migration and globalization, both of which have affected the city’s patterns of life. But, as Polese points out, “the languages of Odessa have constantly changed since its inception.”⁷³ And yet Odesa hasn’t lost all of its Yiddishisms. Many of my interlocutors commonly used words like gesheft (business), maisa (story), schmuck (fool), sha (quite!), and mishpukha (family). They also occasionally deployed such Odesan Russian phrases as chtob ya tak zhil, a translation of the Yiddish expression zol ikh azoy lebn (used to emphasize the truthfulness of something just said).

Besides the Yiddishisms, many Jewish Odesans—especially those who’ve spent time in Israel and those who lead religious lives—also use Hebrew in daily conversation. When some of my interlocutors send get-well messages on Facebook, they wish the sick “Refuah Shlema” (complete recovery), and follow it with a request for certain psalms (tehilim) to be read. As these messages travel across international borders and time zones, they create a support community for those in need. On the other side of the spectrum, “Mazl Tov” (good fortune or good luck in Hebrew) has become a common way to respond to a happy moment that someone has posted online or shared in real life. Many of the affiliated Jews also use their Jewish names on social media, along with or instead of their original names, revealing a stronger bond to their Jewish identity.

Individual Reflections on Odesa’s Jewishness

Among those Odesans who believe their city to be Jewish is my friend Maya, who is devoted to preserving its historic character. After we spoke of the role played by Jews in the city’s past growth, she moved to the present to say, “First, compared to other ethnic and religious groups, Odesa’s Jewish obshchina [community] is by far the most active and involved in the life of the city.” When I suggested that Odesa had many more Christians and Muslims than Jews, she quickly corrected my definition of “Jewish community,” which was, implicitly, a religious definition. Religious Jews like herself were only a small portion of the Jewish population, but the Jewish national (ethnic) group was a more inclusive social structure.

To Maya, Jews’ level of “activeness” was shown in the cultural programs they organized—festivals, classes, conferences, concerts, exhibitions, and publications. These often featured various strands of Jewish life in Odesa. She also referred to the positions held by local Jews in Odesa’s political and economic structures: “Many of the city deputies are Jews,” she pointed out, “and the mayor [Gurvitz] is Jewish. This couldn’t happen in many other cities in the ex-Soviet world.”⁷⁴ What’s more, she said, Jews owned many local businesses and thus helped support the local economy. They were also well positioned to conduct business internationally because of the network created by all the Jewish Odesans now living in other countries as a result of migration. Though Maya highlighted the important roles played by Jews as politicians and entrepreneurs, she also recognized the rise of Jewish self-awareness, calling this process “strengthening your evreikosti,” or “Jewish bones.” She concluded, “There might be fewer Jews in the city today, but they have stronger evreikosti” because they now know Jewish history and traditions and they participate in the Jewish holidays and life cycle rituals.

Maya’s notion of evreikosti highlights the bodily experience of Jewish identity. It also illustrates the transformation of one’s understanding of what makes someone a Jew: once a biological given, it now means one who learns to do “Jewish” things. Jewish practices thus not only make the individual “stronger” as a Jew; they also make Odesa “more Jewish.” Jewish influence in Odesa, as Maya saw it, has risen not only by the influence of Jews in society but also by the “quality” of the Jews who have become “stronger” through knowledge and self-awareness. This idea of strong Jewish bones connects the biological and performative nature of Jewishness, where the Jewish body becomes stronger as one learns Jewish history, traditions, and rituals and performs the commandments. Expanding on the process of religious education described by Alanna Cooper, where Jews “learn to do Jewish things,” Maya also included knowledge of Jewish history, local and biblical.⁷⁵

Maya judged Odesa’s Jewishness by the extent to which Jews and their activities had been accepted and absorbed in the larger realm of city culture. In other words, the acceptance of Jewishness confirmed the city as a tolerant and cosmopolitan place.

More proof that Odesa was a “Jewish” city, in Maya’s view, is that non-Jewish Odesans welcomed the Jewish festivals and celebrations, at times even participating in them. She added that some non-Jews send their children to the Jewish cultural centers as part of their upbringing.⁷⁶ And, Maya asked me rhetorically, didn’t many Odesans of non-Jewish descent know a lot of Yiddish terminology? And weren’t they familiar with the major Jewish holidays and with Jewish cuisine? Indeed, “gefilte fish is a dish everyone knows in all the restaurants in Odessa,” said Rabbi Arie Rov, of the Litvak synagogue, in a TV interview.⁷⁷ I met a number of non-Jews who were actively involved in Jewish organizations, some even playing leadership roles.⁷⁸ All this could be because the locals believe that, as a Ukrainian taxi driver once told me, “In Odessa, everyone’s a little bit Jewish and a little bit everything else.”

In a January 2021 interview in Gazeta, Chabad rabbi Avraham Wolf identified Odesa as a Jewish city judging by its successful and vibrant Jewish community, with its extensive programs and key Jewish institutions. He noted that of the thirty Ukrainian cities where Chabad operates, Odesa has the largest impact, reaching approximately thirty thousand Jews.⁷⁹ In another interview, Wolf noted: “The spectrum of programs (cultural, religious, educational, social and economic) that Odessa’s Jewish community offers its members is unmatched. . . . My colleagues around the world don’t have the success we have in Odessa in building synagogues, schools, etc., and having such a vibrant community. . . . Odessa gives its Jews 100 percent possibility to live by Jewish laws. Not in every city and country can you do that.” Nonobservant Jews have a different sense of Odesa’s Jewish space. As Elena, who was in her sixties when I met her in 2006, explained:

Some twenty to thirty years ago, one could still have called Odessa a Jewish city—not so much for the number of Jews living there, but more because of the influence their presence had on all Odesans of all different nationalities, which you could sense. Undoubtedly, Yiddish and to a small extent Hebrew had an influence on the “Odessan language,” by which Odessans were recognized by others and recognized one another in any corner of the Soviet Union. One can’t overlook Jewish humor, khokhmah [Yiddish for wisdom], and of course Jewish food, which Odessans adopted in full as part of their cuisine.

Describing the Odesa she knew in the late 1960s, Elena said, “I remember seeing elderly and not-so-elderly women easily conversing in Russian and Yiddish on the street in a very natural fashion.” While she acknowledged that Odesa was an international city, she insisted that its “Jewishness” was more pervasive than any other ethnic orientation.

However, Elena felt that once the borders opened after the breakup of the USSR and many Jewish Odesans left, the city was drained of its Jewish kolorit (tone, color, character, or carnivalesque or exotic quality). As another Odesan said, “Few of the Odessans with whom I grew up remain in Odessa today. At one time, they inhabited my city as the soul inhabits one’s body. They have scattered, fragmenting Odessa into pieces, and these pieces are now making their mark on the streets of Israel, Australia, America, and Canada.”⁸⁰ In recent years, Elena said, different Jews had appeared in place of those Jews who departed: “Religious Jews, Israelis, people foreign to Odessa, incomprehensible to Odessa, who do not know, and I think do not love Odessa the same way we do. They have their own goals and missions, which have nothing in common with the Soviet, jolly, easygoing and carefree, secular Jewish Odessa.” Elena did not blame the loss of Odesa’s Jewish world solely on the outflow of Jews from the city. Rather, as was common in other conversations, she pointed to the influx of newcomers (priezzhie), especially those from rural villages and small towns. Odesa during the current war is also experiencing a new influx of newcomers—internally displaced refugees—whose presence has altered the social landscape in new ways. Mila, who was in her fifties when we met in 2006 and working at the Israeli Cultural Center, expressed a similar view. “When I came back to Odessa with my parents after the war, all but two families in my courtyard were Jewish. Today, all but two are non-Jews. They’re all priezzhie who don’t care about our city.” Vera Skvirskaja has even argued that some urban residents in Odesa have been “transformed into a new diasporic community in their own city” as they have been “confronted by demands of the nation-state, their social circle has emigrated, and new engagements have been blocked by a form of tolerance marked by indifference.”⁸¹ But Mila’s and Elena’s reflections point out the important distinction Odesans make about belonging in Odesa: between “true Odesans,” who might have moved to the city later but adopted an Odesan perspective and are touched by the departure of the Jews, and “newcomers,” who, in their eyes, are not knowledgeable about the city’s past or are indifferent to it.

According to Elena, Odesa’s great reputation lives on, but those who created it are “long gone.” “They live in Russia, the USA, Israel, even Australia—but unfortunately, no longer in Odessa.” She spoke of the nostalgia for this “lost world,” a nostalgia felt by many of its current inhabitants and by Odesans abroad, Jews and non-Jews alike. The type of nostalgia Elena describes is not only a nostalgia for a romanticized “once was” socialist past of “multiethnic collectives”; it’s also a nostalgia for sincere relations and a moral community based on shared values and ideals that many ex-Soviets lament, as noted by anthropologists working in postsocialist contexts.⁸² Elena’s reference to missing Jews is about the people who made Odesa a different city; their absence is a reminder of the historic ruptures and the irrevocable change. Thus, their departure is linked, also, to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But unlike some expressions of nostalgia associated with the process of modernization, in Odesa, Tanya Richardson points out, expressions of nostalgia for the city’s kolorit speak of a longing for the city’s other forms of modernity, prerevolutionary or Soviet.⁸³ Anthropologists Maya Nadkarni and Olga Shevchenko, writing about the forms and practices of postsocialist nostalgia, note that the themes of spatial and temporal displacement are closely intertwined.⁸⁴ The nostalgia expressed here reminds us that nostalgia can also be experienced as social displacement by those who remain rooted but long for the people whose departure has altered the tone and character of the place.

Elena told me that Odesans love to sing songs about the city whenever they reunite with their compatriots, and many of those songs were written by Jews, speak about Jewish literary characters, and include a hint of Yiddish. Many like to read memoirs about the city or perhaps write them themselves. She made it clear that she wasn’t just talking about Jewish Odesans. To illustrate her point, she told me this story: During a short trip to Odesa (from Israel) in 2008, she’d planned to spend her last day helping plant herbs at a new dacha her friend had rented for the summer. They arrived to find the homeowners still present, seated around a beautifully laid table in the midst of the May Day celebration. Elena and her friend were invited to sit and eat. Not wanting to be rude, they joined the company but said they couldn’t stay long due to Elena’s imminent departure.

When their hosts learned that Elena was headed back to Israel, the atmosphere suddenly changed. “They jumped up to kiss and hug me.” Elena was somewhat surprised at this reaction. She told me that the congratulations quickly turned into a shower of kind words about Odesan Jews in general and about Israel. Reflecting on this incident, Elena said she’d never realized how much Odesans—real Odesans—missed the city’s Jews and how grateful they were that Jews were still returning to visit their old city. “I think this was how they expressed their nostalgia—they longed for the Odesa they’d lost. Lost because of the mass migration of the Jewish population who, at one point in history, made Odesa—the city it was—loved by Jews and non-Jews alike.”

When I sent a draft of this manuscript to literary scholar and city historian Anna Misuk to ask for her comments, she said, “It all sounds very serious, Marina. Here is something much lighter on the topic.” She shared an animation of a song (sung in Russian) by Svetlana Nisilevich:

Зачем уехали евреи

И нас оставили сирот?

Без вас одесский мир беднее,

Все делаем наоборот

Наш дом - одесская тусовка

Она для жителей всех стран.

Одесса всех связала ловко,

Евреев не хватает нам!

Евреи, милые евреи!

Я потеряла вас, кошмар,

и так жалею!

В моей душе для вас

Всегда есть место,

Я ваша мама, тетя, тёща,

и невеста!

Зачем, скажите, вам Канада,

Зачем Австралия, Германия и США?

Евреи, может вам туда совсем не надо, а?

Ведь здесь живет ваша душа!

А у Одессы-мамы,

У Одессы-мамы,

А у Одессы-мамы,

Все мы хороши,

Не будьте так упрямы,

Не будьте так упрямы!

Евреи - вы же часть

Её большой души!

А для Одессы катастрофа:

Без вас осталась наша мать.

Грустит все время тетя Софа

И вас не хочет забывать!

Вы приезжайте, дорогие!

Не любит вас лишь идиот!

В иных краях вы все равно чужие,

А мама любит вас и ждет!

Why did the Jews leave

And leave us as orphans?

Without you the Odessa world has lost its wealth,

We can’t seem to get it right since your departure.

Our house is the Odessa scene,

It’s open to all around the world.

Odessa brought us all together,

But it’s not the same without the city’s Jews!

Jews, my dear Jews!

I lost you, what a nightmare,

I regret it deeply!

In my soul there is always a place for you,

I am your mama, auntie, mother-in-law,

And your bride!

Tell me, why do you need Canada,

Why do you need Australia, Germany and the USA?

Jews, maybe you don’t need to go to those places, what do you say?

After all, your soul is in Odessa!

For Odessa-mama,

For Odessa-mama,

Oh, for Odessa-mama,

We are all good kids,

Don’t be so stubborn,

Don’t be so stubborn!

Jews, after all, you’re all

Part of her big soul!

It’s a disaster for Odessa:

Our mother is left without you all.

Aunt Sofia is so upset

And doesn’t want to forget you all.

Please come and visit, my dears!

Only an idiot doesn’t love you!

In other lands you’re still a foreigner

But mama loves you and she is waiting.

This sense that the city’s non-Jewish residents keenly felt the mass emigration of the Jews—and that many speak of their departure with regret—is borne out by the scholarship.⁸⁵ For example, “during the Humorina (Comedy) Festival in the late nineties,” Richardson writes, “a friend saw a sign that read: ‘Jews, come back to Odessa! We miss you—it’s boring without you. If you can’t come back, take us with you!’”⁸⁶ Among Odesan emigrants, there’s a similar sentiment that their departure was the end of “the real Odessa.” In his memoir Est’ gorod kotoryi vizhu vo sne (There Is a City I See in My Dreams), David Shehter writes from Israel,

We Odessan Jews took with us not OUR Odessa, we took away ODESSA [emphasis in the original]. We took away all which made her a magical city so dear to millions of citizens of the USSR who loved not only her beautiful streets but her aura of freedom, blazing love of life, sparks of humor, something so special which made Odessa not characteristic of a small Ukrainian city. . . . Today, when the Jews have left Odessa, her streets are the same, I hear even better, but Odessa became a very provincial city which it would not have been if it were not for those citizens who spoke Russian but thought in Yiddish or in Hebrew. Odessa’s Jews have gone and so has Odessa.⁸⁷

Not all the Jewish Odesans I met saw the Jewishness of today’s Odesa through the prism of nostalgia, particularly those in the younger generations. Gosha, for example, told me that Odesa couldn’t be considered a Jewish city anymore: “Too few Jewish people are left in Odessa. . . . There’s still something in the air, but. . . . For instance, when I started school in 1988, five of my classmates were Jewish, [but] when I graduated, I was the only one. When I was studying in Odessa Polytechnical Institute, I was the only Jew in my group.” While Gosha seemed to regret the changes that had taken place, he saw no point in mourning the past; instead, he concentrated on his plans for the future. He didn’t think Odesa could ever become a Jewish city again, despite the efforts of affiliated Jews and Jewish leaders.

Debating the character of her native city in a conversation that took place in 2006, Diana (a woman in her twenties) emphasized the difference between so-called public opinion and everyday life. There was the myth of Odesa’s Jewishness, and there was the reality. Yes, Odesa could be viewed as “Jewish,” but what was the point of assigning such a label? She said, “For me, the city is anational. Despite the fact that it has a large number of Ukrainians, they’re all Odessans first and foremost. They don’t open Ukrainian restaurants, they don’t speak Ukrainian, they don’t wear embroidered shirts, they don’t vote for Yuschenko, and they don’t fight with NATO or Russia. All that’s Ukrainian in them is the inscription in their passport; that’s it. The same goes for the local Russians, Germans, and others. They might each have their own religion, but the mentality of the people is neutral.”

Diana, who has since moved to Europe, has a very different rhetoric and undoubtedly sees Odesa and herself as Ukrainian by different measures. Her words of neutrality are a striking reminder of how much Odesa has been transformed by large-scale Russian aggression. Questions about Odesa’s Jewishness were often addressed in public conversation and debate. In April 2007, the Museum of the History of Odesa Jews organized an exhibition entitled Jews of Odessa: Is It Only the Past? Museum director Mikhail Rashkovetsky wrote in the Migdal Times, “Many renowned researchers insist that Ukrainian Jews are but a dried-up branch on the tree of world Jewry. But maybe Odessa can be viewed as an exception? After all, Odessa was always unlike any other place. That is how [Odessa] was thought of in the Russian Empire, that is how she remained in the Soviet Union and throughout its history.”⁸⁸ Rashkovetsky emphasized the museum’s desire to portray Odesa as “an extraordinary place” in which “its Jews are not only mourning their legendary past but also awaiting their bright future.” On the one hand, Rashkovetsky admitted, “Never in the history of its existence did Odessa have such a small Jewish population, except during the period between Spring of 1942 and Spring of 1944, when the city was ‘Judenfrei’ [Jew free]” during the German/Romanian occupation. On the other hand, Odesa is a city awaiting a bright Jewish future. “It is not [just] because of the collected materials about ‘Jewish revival’ that I make my claim about Odessa’s bright future,” he wrote. “The main point of optimism is some of the visitors to the exhibition—a group of parents and students from the Migdal center whose contribution to the future is already visible in the number of newborn babies among the group.”⁸⁹

Rashkovetsky doesn’t focus the reader’s attention on Odesa’s Jewishness as an artifact of the past, but as a thread of continuation. Seeing Odesa as a Jewish city in the present and the future contributes to the claims of the city’s Jewish intellectuals and activists that Odesa has been, and will continue to be, a Jewish city. It is the presence of Jews in the city and their connection to the historical tenets of Odesa’s Jewish past that allow Rashkovetsky and other members of the intelligentsia to present Jewishness as an everlasting temporality of the place. Extracts from the museum’s guest book, which appear in the same issue of the Migdal Times as Rashkovetsky’s text on the exhibition, support the idea of Odesa’s steadfast Jewish foundation. Those comments, inscribed in many languages, created a collage of affinity among visitors who came from Odesa, L’viv, Kyiv, Donetsk, Moscow, Minsk, New York, Baltimore, San Francisco, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, London, Amsterdam, Sydney, and many other world cities. One pronouncement summarized the very point the exhibition was trying to make: “Jews were, are, and always will be in Odessa.”⁹⁰ For the Odesans who believe that the aura of Jewishness is still alive in the city and extends to all periods of the city’s history, today’s Jewish revival signals the creation of a new post-Soviet chapter in the everlasting story of Odesa as a Jewish place.⁹¹

But others consider the city’s Jewish identity to be on a downward trajectory—its essence diminishing and not replenishing over time. Among this group are some who believe that those elements that once made Odesa a Jewish city can never be re-created, and thus Odesa as a Jewish city remains alive only in the form of memory or “a legend in the making.”⁹² In this perspective, the efforts of “active” Jews in their city and the current Jewish visibility can’t be seen as a continuation of something distinctively “Odesan,” but only as a new import. Like Elena, many people make a distinction between the Jews now living in Odesa and the “real” Odesan Jews.

For all the debates, questions, and assertions about Odesa’s Jewishness, there’s also a persistent ideology in Jewish Odesan circles that might be called a neutral stance. In this view, Odesans are Odesans, period. No single ethnic group or religion can encompass the city and a people. Diverse people, processes, and interests are alive in Odesa’s “urbanity.”⁹³ This line of thinking doesn’t dismiss the city’s Jewish traits or consider them unimportant; rather, those traits are not privileged over the other ethnic elements that make Odesans a people of their city—on equal terms.⁹⁴

Power, Politics, and the Jewish Stereotype

As I mentioned before, the Israeli-French director Michale Boganim’s documentary Odessa . . . Odessa! focuses on the supposed twilight of Jewish life in the city. One summer evening in 2006, friends asked me to watch the film with others at their home. We’d barely made it through the first thirty minutes when our host, Anna, from the Literature Museum, stood up and turned it off. Many of those watching were already frustrated by the film’s portrayal of Odesa and its Jews. Boganim begins by invoking dreams of a city that no longer exists. Then, as if filming in the faint light of a perpetual dusk, she conjures images of near-empty streets where solitary figures move slowly. These scenes are punctuated with interviews of elderly Yiddish-speaking Jews filmed in run-down, dimly lit Soviet-style apartments. The city of yore is cast as existing only in some nostalgic revelry; it now seems to be nothing but a gloomy and dying place.

In Anna’s view, Boganim’s selection of Yiddish-speaking Jews was based on an outdated sense of the city. Odesan Jews, she said, would typically speak to each other in Russian, maybe throwing in a few Yiddish words, but not speaking only in Yiddish as the film showed them. She and others that evening pointed out many things the film omitted. How could a collection of six elderly, lonely Jews and the single plangent theme of Jewish departure from this Black Sea port even begin to capture the essence of Jewish life in Odesa?

Interestingly enough, this group of viewers felt that the film showed their city as both too Jewish and not Jewish enough. Everyday Odesan conversations and local humor often used exaggerations like the ones shown in the film, but seeing these projected on screen by an Israeli director aroused a very different set of reactions. An outsider’s view had invaded the intimacy of characterizing local Jewish culture. It was apparent that Jewish Odesans weren’t inclined to accept any single interpretation of their city or to endorse a stereotype offered without their approval—even though they themselves often failed to agree on the character of the place.

Once we’d finished our discussion, Anna restarted the film. Soon she and her husband, Mark, were objecting to the portrayal of Odesans in the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, and the Israeli city of Ashdod. Images of elderly Jews continued to dominate. In nostalgic gatherings on Soviet holidays, the longtime emigrants expressed their dream to return to Odesa. In response, my friends recited numerous success stories of Jews who’d made America or Israel their home, and of others who, like Mark and Anna, had stayed in Odesa without regret (though later they moved to Israel when old age approached, to be closer to their daughter and grandchildren). My friends’ emotional reaction to the film prompted them to defend their social territory (a defense that may have been exaggerated by my presence). They despised being seen as victims, or as members of a dying breed whose destiny was limited to two bleak alternatives: death or emigration. It wasn’t just the director’s misreading of Odesa’s Jewishness that my friends objected to, but also the fact that this misrepresentation came in the form of a widely circulated and easily accessible medium—a “locus of stereotype production”—that was beyond their control.⁹⁵ The film’s vision might cause outsiders to see their city as a “Jewishless.”

In his book on Odesa, Charles King notes that many cities balance on a thin line between historic moments of genius and periodic explosions of violence and misfortune. The latter are often left out of popular memory, as historiography overwrites the times when “urban civility fell victim to the stresses of cultural difference.”⁹⁶ King’s book ends with a plea for Odesans to acknowledge their city’s dark times as well as the golden ages. Although Anna and Mark were well aware of the Jewish emigration from the city, and weren’t trying to deny Odesa’s darker periods, they still resisted the recasting of Odesa as a city dominated by the specter of a fading Jewish presence.

Likewise, some Odesans two decades after Ukraine’s independence were troubled by attempts to cast their city as Ukrainian, especially on the level of language politics, which included Ukrainian language requirements and new standards and strictures in education, the press, and mass media. As Skvirskaja notes of Odesa in 2005, many ordinary Odesans described the government’s political moves to “create a coherent pan-national Ukrainian identity” as Ukrainization (Ukrainizatsia) and “an attack on the city’s old cosmopolitan orientation and linguistic aesthetics.”⁹⁷ I spoke with some members of the Russian-speaking Jewish intelligentsia in the mid-2000s who pointed out the “absurdity of the legislation” as they objected to the idea of Pushkin being cast as a “foreign author” whose work needed to be translated into Ukrainian.⁹⁸

Others I met, especially the younger Odesans, were not troubled by the new rules and knew well how to maneuver different situations, depending on the circumstances. Although Ukrainian is the only official language, anthropologist Abel Polese and colleagues remind us that there’s a difference between language policies and language use: language politics are always negotiated between public and private spaces. In the Odesa I witnessed during my earlier fieldwork in 2005–7, people often switched between Ukrainian and Russian on a case-by-case basis, depending on their knowledge and habits—using Ukrainian, if they could and if required, in public spaces and Russian for personal and intimate conversations.⁹⁹ It was not uncommon for an official meeting, lecture, or even a conversation to start in Ukrainian and end in Russian. But amid the process of Ukrainization, the (Ukrainian) language that emerged from second-class status became fashionable for a younger sect to use.¹⁰⁰ The anti-Russian sentiment in Ukraine—caused by the resentment felt by many Ukrainians, Odesans included, after the 2013–14 events and even more so after Russia’s invasion in 2022—influenced many Odesans to adopt Ukrainian as a statement of their loyalty to Ukraine, first and foremost in public spaces. In private spaces, many still rely on Russian since it is the language in which they feel more comfortable expressing themselves, but attitudes towards, and use of, Ukrainian has changed from a practical question to a political statement.¹⁰¹

At the same time, however, even those Odesan Jews who regularly spoke Ukrainian objected to the pressure they felt, even among some peers, to use it as proof of patriotism or loyalty as Ukrainian citizens.¹⁰² In their view, language and geography could become the exclusive markers of Ukrainian identity.¹⁰³ Most of the younger Jewish Odesans who supported the popularization of the Ukrainian language believed that the development of such markers needed to come naturally, which would take time. From the mid-2000s, when I visited Odesa, to the early 2020s—as I write this book—none of my Jewish Odesan friends has switched from using Russian exclusively to using Ukrainian exclusively. Those who know Ukrainian well enough use it alongside Russian when appropriate. Some have made more of an effort to read or write in Ukrainian. Most understand and read both languages with ease, though some struggle to work and communicate in Ukrainian freely. But they all value the freedom to choose, recognizing some situations as appropriate for Russian and others for Ukrainian. Many Jewish Ukrainians denounce the claims that they are discriminated against as Russian speakers and argue that in instances when they are using Ukrainian, they are not acting out of fear or pressure from the state but, rather, are exercising their personal choice. Clearly, these choices are also supported by the legislation and infrastructure in place to support Ukrainian as the national language. Undoubtedly, as I discuss in Odesa-after-Maidan in the epilogue, more Jewish Odesans and others have developed a more positive attitude toward the Ukrainian language without abandoning Russian.

Figure 7.4. The Ukrainian flag replacing the statue of Catherine II, January 2023. Photo by and courtesy of Igor Oks.

In 2007, some Ukrainian groups protested at the unveiling of a new monument to the Russian empress Catherine II (the city’s founder). The new statue was part of Odesa’s ongoing historic restoration, replacing the original one removed by Soviet authorities in the late 1920s. The activists petitioned the Security Services of Ukraine against the monument’s resurrection, arguing that it would entrench interethnic hostility and provoke chaos and anarchy in Odesa.¹⁰⁴ Their protests invoked the heroism of the Cossack troops who died resisting the imposition of Russian imperialism and Catherine II’s orders to liquidate the Zaporizhian Sich (a semiautonomous Cossack polity) in 1775. This violent rallying of Ukrainian nationalist forces was seen as a threat by some local Odesans, and its reverberations went well beyond that particular incident.¹⁰⁵ In December 2022, amid Russia’s war on Ukraine, the monument to Catherine II was dismantled as part of Ukraine’s campaign to clear public spaces of monuments to Russia. The decision of the city authorities was supported by the majority of the citizens who voted in an online poll, and the statue of Catherine was moved to the Odesa Fine Arts Museum.¹⁰⁶ Most Ukrainian Jews I discussed the event with thought that, as the monument was vandalized numerous times and stirred up such emotional havoc, it was best the statue be moved away from its prominent position and kept safe elsewhere. Others clearly saw it as a relic of the Russian imperialism and colonialism they were fighting in this war.

These sentiments stood in contrast to those I observed earlier, in 2005, when some Odesans were concerned by Ukraine’s nationalistic turn and objected to the politicians trying to situate Odesa within this new Ukrainian project and, in their minds, downplaying the city’s international connections and inherent links to Russia. People spoke of how politicians insisted on making fundamental distinctions between Russia and the Ukraine. In the words of Arcadiy, a middle-aged cab driver I met in 2007, “I have relatives there [in Russia], and I’m not going to turn my back on them because the politicians are having a quarrel. We’re all the same people when it comes down to it. We all grew up on the same playground.” While Putin’s rhetoric of Russians and Ukrainians as one people is rejected by Odesans and other citizens of Ukraine, many of my earlier interviews reveal a sincere connection to Russian culture—a connection that has been troubled and, in many instances, undone by the ongoing war. For example, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, demands for the legitimacy of Russian as a second language in Ukraine became taboo, and yet I recall many of my older interlocutors interviewed in the mid-2000s complaining about old Soviet movies on TV being dubbed in Ukrainian. “They should recognize the legitimacy of both languages,” sixty-plus Inga said to me as she raised issues with Ukrainian-dubbed films and her inability to fully understand the dialogue.

In the current reality of war-scarred Odesa, I imagine that screening an old Soviet film would raise different concerns and trigger a set of radically different responses.

Conclusion

This chapter has illustrated the interplay of local, national, and global forces vying for the legacy of Odesa and thus shaping the character of Odesa as a city, a cultural index, and a field of social relations, values, and imagination. Just as in Soviet times—when “the mythical Odessa, cosmopolitan, Jewish, full of witty, ironic tricksters like Ostap Bender, functioned as a counter-site to the homogenizing influence of Soviet regime”—in the post-Soviet reality of the twenty-first century, Odesa’s Jews looked to the city’s myth and its Jewishness as a way to resist strong currents of national and religious revivals that could threaten the city’s unique qualities.¹⁰⁷ Ironically, after Russia launched a war on Ukraine, Jewishness was used not to undermine Ukrainization but to support it and to undermine Putin’s claims about Odesa being a “Russian” city. Thus, we can see how the new reality of war has transformed the image of Odesa from a Jewish city to a Ukrainian-Jewish city, but it has not shifted its image as an international and cosmopolitan place. Recognized by UNESCO in 2023 for its “outstanding universal value” visible through “its heterogenous architecture that reflects the diversity of its multicultural trading communities,” Odesa also remains a place of “notable diversity” through its Jewish presence and multinational population, a symbol of an ethnically and religiously diverse Ukraine.¹⁰⁸

Anthropologist Michael Herzfeld writes that stereotypes may function both to sustain and to struggle against configurations of power, “contesting and reproducing power relations on the local level.”¹⁰⁹ The term “Jewish” as used by most of my interlocutors to describe their city in the mid-2000s goes beyond Herzfeld’s interpretation of stereotypes as reductive and marginalizing. In actuality, the Jewish trope plays multiple roles. In calling their city Jewish, Jewish Odesans don’t literally mean that only Jews live there or that they dominate the place in any significant way.¹¹⁰ Rather, this self-stereotype stands in for other idiomatic ways of expressing what distinguishes Odesa—“cosmopolitan,” “tolerant,” and “international.” These are ideas supported and expressed by the historical and continuing presence of Jews as an accepted ethnic and religious minority. It’s also a way of crediting Jews with much of the special flavor of the city’s dialect, cuisine, humor, music, and literature, and hence, with its feeling of being “truly Odesan.” Understood this way, as a metonym for the city’s famous attributes, the stereotype of Odesa as a “Jewish” city doesn’t displace its other characteristics (or its other inhabitants). It was precisely this displacement that some Odesans interviewed in my early fieldwork feared might come to pass from a “Ukrainian” appropriation of the city’s historical narrative, language, and culture.

This chapter therefore argues that the inconsistencies, contradictions, and complexities found in the “insider” discourse of the city’s Jews exemplify how—following Herzfeld—stereotyping can be simultaneously a strategy of dominance, a tactic of resistance, a claim to some ownership of particular cultural traits, and a way to maintain long-distance ties between home and its many peripheries. Engaging in what Herzfeld calls “cultural intimacy,” Odesans may be seen as internally questioning the real existence and measure of their city’s Jewish stereotype, while externally supporting the stereotype when they feel it’s needed to preserve the “special” status of the city and of themselves as its representatives.¹¹¹ Their attachment to the city’s legacy serves as a strategy not just for living, but for living a life with distinction.