Introduction

A Jew in a Kippah

As my father and I walked in Odesa’s Shevchenko Park one afternoon in 2006, we came across a group of children from a nearby Jewish kindergarten.¹ We sat down to rest and watch them play. “I know we’re in Odesa,” my father said, “but I can’t believe these Jewish children are openly walking around the park in kippahs.”² He knew what Odesa represented, but he had grown up in the Soviet Union, where public displays of religion were banned. As we sat talking, a little boy came up, having recognized me from previous visits. He said hello, asked how we were, and chattered on. At one point, he asked if my father was Jewish. We told him he was. He then pointed to my father’s head and asked, “Well, why isn’t he wearing a kippah?”

Taken together, my father’s surprise and the boy’s response reflect the profound changes Odesa has undergone since the fall of the Soviet Union. Contemporary Odesa—for locals as much as visitors, the young as well as the old—is a place where multiple orientations of Jewishness converge. Since the late 1970s and ’80s, when Soviet migration policies began to loosen, more than seventy thousand Jews have emigrated from the city—an exodus that especially picked up after the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, which opened up emigration to Israel, the United States, Germany, and elsewhere. For the approximately thirty thousand Jews who resided in the city at the time of my research, new opportunities for Jewish expression had emerged from multiple sources: a complex of migration patterns that interconnected Odesa to many points in the world; the widespread post-Soviet religious resurgence; and the social, cultural, and political transformations that characterized the Ukrainian state at the time.

This book is based on fieldwork I carried out between September 2005 and February 2007 and during follow-up visits in May 2014 and May 2019, as well as my ongoing engagement with Odesans. In these pages, I explore the lived experiences and orientations of Odesa’s Jewish residents in the decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union: their shared and conflicting efforts to construct forms of Jewish belonging, to rediscover and negotiate historical and traditional expectations of Jewish life in the twenty-first century, and to cultivate and question the institutional forms of togetherness and community. To this end, the book follows the trajectories of particular Jewish Odesans of different backgrounds and generations as they discover, develop, and then redefine their sense of being Jewish in independent Ukraine. It illustrates how the discourse of Odesa as a cosmopolitan and Jewish city shapes their identity formation, their sense of the city as home, their interpretation of change, and their vision of the future.

Figure Intro.1. Map of Odesa. (Locations marked “Closed” were closed after the 2022 Russian invasion.) Map by Johnson Cartographic LLC.

Figure Intro.2. Three students from the Jewish kindergarten sitting on the stairs of the Chabad Jewish school. Photo by author.

The ethnographic picture I present reveals the complexity and diversity of engagement with this discourse among Jewish Odesans who understood that the city’s unique historical and mythical narrative was both supported and disrupted by international efforts of Jewish revival, the larger processes of nationalism, and the unfolding of regional politics surrounding Ukraine and Russia. These conditions contributed to an ambivalent and contested notion that Odesa represented what it meant to be a tolerant, open, effectively cosmopolitan city. And yet this city—both as a reality and an idea—does indeed operate as a source of meaningful identity, livelihood, and social relations. The ambiguous, contradictory, and challenging process of identity formation experienced by the Jewish Odesans I’ve interviewed and studied stands, I argue, as part of the desecularization experienced throughout the ex-Soviet Jewish world and beyond at that time.

While Odesa has been defined as “Jewish,” cosmopolitan, and tolerant throughout its history; these features have also been questioned and debated by scholars from different disciplines writing about the city. Built as a key international port of the Russian Empire, it was shaped by a multiethnic and multireligious population from its earliest days. In the 1890s, it was home to a population that came from more than thirty countries, spoke around fifty-five languages, and adhered to a wide variety of religious beliefs.³ Two related themes that run throughout this book are how the multiethnic and multireligious makeup of Odesa’s population has fed into the idea of the city being “Jewish” and, as a result, how its Jewishness metonymically defines Odesa as a whole. This argument dovetails with the book’s central focus on how Odesan Jews have oriented themselves to the new forms of Jewishness that have appeared in the city from the early 1990s, in a process broadly described as a “Jewish revival.”

For the young generation of local Jewry involved in Jewish religious organizations, the orientation to Judaism has been not handed down but adopted. Only then is it brought into the family—a reversal of the traditional knowledge transmission seen in other parts of the ex-Soviet bloc two decades after the dissolution of state secularism.⁴ Indeed, in some of the families I met in 2005, children enrolled in Jewish schools were the ones teaching their parents and grandparents about the “proper” ways to be Jewish. For some of those, like the boy who questioned my father’s Jewishness because he wasn’t wearing a kippah, religious observance has become a natural way of identifying oneself and others as Jews. This is not at all the case for older generations. Indeed, in the encounter between the boy of contemporary Odesa and my father, born in 1947 and raised in the Soviet Union, their mutual bewilderment at meeting as Jews is characteristic of Odesa today—multiple systems of meaning of Jewishness sharing a common designation.

Currently, more Jews born in Odesa are residing abroad than in Odesa itself, meaning that the idea of Odesa as a home for Jews is threaded through with movement and migration and with associated networks of relationships, attachments, information, people, and goods. In the context of Zionist or classical models of diaspora centered on a Jewish homeland, Odesa is part of the diaspora, and yet it is also the central point for a diaspora of its own. My study helps us understand how the Jewish population doesn’t always orient itself toward a Jewish center as laid out in classical analysis of diasporic groups and how, in some cases, the center is defined within the so-called Jewish diaspora.

Jewish Odesans of different generations—residents, former residents, Jewish activists, those who returned after emigrating to Israel, and those who assumed a transnational way of life—described home and belonging using many references to places other than Israel. Instead, they were oriented by a constellation of destinations and communities. Stories of those who emigrated only to return show clearly that while many Jews found themselves maintaining their connection to Israel, they did not necessarily feel it was a home they could live in—or even, for some, an option for the future. Many returnees regarded Odesa as a home, some lovingly calling it “Odesa Mama,” even as they understood it was undergoing change. Some experienced their return as a homecoming; for others, it was an encounter with something almost foreign.

The Jews in Odesa became increasingly connected to global Judaism through interactions with international Jewish organizations, philanthropy outreach, transnational media, migration and travel. But a significant transformation also took place at the urban level, as they built their own traditions in response to Ukraine’s processes of nationalism and globalization. Similar to the historical representations of the Soviet past, which were negotiated among competing groups and emerged as “sites of cultural contestations” following Ukrainian independence—as described by the anthropologist and scholar of religion Catherine Wanner—Jewish Odesa became an arena of many new orientations.⁵ In the nearly fifteen years since Ukraine’s independence, there have been multiple efforts, initiated both locally and from abroad, to restore, shape, and stimulate forms of Jewish life via the formation of Jewish cultural and religious organizations. Each institutional form has competed for recognition, legitimacy, authority, and authenticity, and each has, in turn, shaped Odesa’s Jewish spaces.⁶

Odesa: A Jewish City?

Located in the southern part of Ukraine, on the coast of the Black Sea, Odesa is the fourth-largest city in the country, with a population of just over 1 million and with 2.5 million people in the greater Odesa area. It is a major seaport and transportation hub for Ukraine and neighboring states and has commonly been recognized, by locals and others alike, as unique, special, and different as compared to other Soviet, Russian, or Ukrainian cities. Odesa has been called a “state within a state.”⁷ Historically, it maintained strong links to Russian-speaking culture and the ethnoreligious heterogeneity typical of borderlands and other port cities.⁸

Figure Intro.3. The Odesa port. Photo by author.

As an “imagined community,” to use the famous term of the historian and political scientist Benedict Anderson, Odesans imagine themselves and are seen by others as a distinct narod (people).⁹ They have been described as “a breed apart,” known for their joie de vivre, sense of humor, southern temperament, resourcefulness, and entrepreneurial spirit; for their specific dialect of Russian (mixed with Yiddish and Ukrainian); and for being apolitical.¹⁰ These qualities are attributed to growing up in a “cosmopolitan,” “tolerant,” and “ethnically mixed” city and also to the region’s warm climate and the influence of its port-related commercial activity.¹¹

A number of locals at the time of my fieldwork regarded their city as simultaneously European, due to the influence of its foreign rulers and architecture; Russian, due to its founding by Catherine the Great and therefore having been historically part of the Russian Empire; Jewish, due to the long presence of Jewish culture in the city; and Ukrainian, due to its being part of independent Ukraine. Odesa’s historically multiethnic character is reflected in its street names: French Boulevard, Italian Street, Jewish Street, and Greek Square. Most of the streets were returned to their prerevolutionary names after 1991, as part of the city’s initiative to “remove the imprint of the Soviet past from the cityscape and to inscribe a new understanding of history” and to “evoke Odessa’s traditional plurality.”¹² Others were renamed after prominent Ukrainian figures. Even so, most residents continued to use the Soviet, prerevolutionary, and new names interchangeably.¹³ Street signs and most of the official inscriptions on the streets appeared in both Russian and Ukrainian at the time of my initial fieldwork.

Figure Intro.4. Statue of Duc de Richelieu above the Potemkin Stairs. Photo by author.

Anthropologist Tanya Richardson notes regarding Odesans that “while on the one hand mixing [of cultures] is stressed, on the other, the important role Jews played in the city and the strong influence of Yiddish culture on the development of what is felt to be distinctively Odessan is virtually always cited.”¹⁴ Local scholars and guides of Jewish Odesa proudly describe the imprint of Odesa’s Jews on the city and the impact that Odesa’s Jews have made on the world. Odesa is often recognized as one of the important centers of the Zionist movement and home to many Zionist activists. Literary scholars cite Odesa as a “cradle of modern Hebrew literature” where Jewish intellectuals known as the “The Wise Men of Odesa” or “Sages of Odesa” (Leon Pinsker, Moses Leib Lilienblum, Ahad-Ha’am, Mendele Mocher Sforim, Semyon Dubnov, Joseph Klausner, and Haim Nachman Bialik) contributed to the intellectual debates about the future of the Jewish national culture.¹⁵ Odesa is the birthplace of many prominent Jewish families like the Ephrussis, whom Edmund de Waal describes in his memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes. It was also the birthplace of Jewish gangsters like Benya Krik, the fictional hero of Isaac Babel’s book of Moldovanka stories, How It Was Done in Odessa.

Figure Intro.5. A sign, “Jewish Street,” written in Ukrainian and Russian. Photo by and courtesy of Igor Oks.

Jewish residents and others who admired the city’s history joked about its “Russo-Yiddish-Ukrainian” tongue and praised the delicious Jewish Odesan cuisine. “In Odesa, everyone is a little Jewish and a little of everything else,” said one of my friends. Many non-Jewish Odesans considered the city’s uniqueness to be linked to the Jews. “Evrei eto iziuminka goroda” (Jews are the special character of Odesa), insisted a Ukrainian woman in her twenties when we discussed the character of her hometown in the summer of 2022. We see that when Odesans used the term Jewish to describe their city, they didn’t literally mean that only Jews lived there or that they dominated the place in any significant shape or form (especially given their low numbers in the contemporary Ukraine).¹⁶ Rather, this stereotype served as a metonym for the city’s cosmopolitanism and tolerance, without cloaking its other characteristics (or inhabitants). Indeed, claims of Odesa as an international city, a multiethnic and multireligious city, a Russian city, a Ukrainian city, a Greek city, and a relic of the Ottoman Empire live alongside the idea of “Jewish” Odesa.

Figure Intro.6. Deribasovskaya Street in Odesa, 2007. Photo by author.

Odesa presents a unique urban context for studying cultural, ethnic, and religious orientations in the present-day Ukraine. The history and present-day images and realities of Jewishness have been built and rebuilt, and sometimes torn down, in Odesa. The city is an arena for the negotiation, representation, and reproduction of what it means to be Jewish. The sense of attachment that many Odesans feel toward their place of residence includes the physical qualities of “their” parts of the city as well as their own personal views of its history.

The recent shifts in its demographic makeup raise the question of whether Odesa can still be regarded as a “Jewish” city. And if so, what makes it Jewish today? Some scholars have declared that in the USSR and its successor states, Jews and other nationalities like Russians or Ukrainians were mutually exclusive categories.¹⁷ The Soviet government classified Jews as one of more than one hundred natsional’nosti (nationalities or ethnic groups) within the Soviet Union. The separation of nationality from religion in the Soviet definition of a Jewish nationality suggests that the closest translation of the Russian term evrei is actually “Hebrew,” not “Jew.”¹⁸ After 1932, all urban residents had to carry internal passports that specified, on the fifth line, their official natsional’nost’. Anyone with two Jewish parents was classified as a Jew, whatever his or her choices, feelings of belonging, language, residence, or religion. Members of mixed families could choose which natsional’nost’ would be inscribed in their official documents. Since 1991, however, Jews are no longer bound by these Soviet markers. Exposed to new components of Jewish identification, they face pressure from many sides on how, where, and whether to be Jewish.

My work details how ethnic categories or nationalities in Odesa were historically more fluid than elsewhere, more porous and intermixed, and more strongly influenced by the local city culture. On some levels, the same can be said about contemporary Odesa. But on another level, its ethnic and cultural categories—Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish—have become more definitive and more mutually exclusive, a point on which I elaborate later in this book.

According to the census conducted in 2001, approximately 62 percent of Odesa’s total population identified themselves as Ukrainian, 29 percent as Russian, and only 1 percent as Jewish. All of the city’s non-Russian minorities grouped together—Bulgarians, Moldovans, Belarusians, Armenians, Poles, and Jews—made up just over 4 percent of the population. Despite the abolition of internal passports labeling Ukrainian citizens by their ethnicities, the census categories at that time still categorized Jews as a separate “nationality” (ethnicity) in population surveys throughout the country. Many of the Jews I met spoke of being Jewish as their nationality. Statistics on the number of Jews in the region vary greatly, from the estimate of 12,500 declared in the 2001 city census to numbers as high as 45,000 concurrently provided by some community leaders.¹⁹

It’s important to remember that many Jews choose not to be officially registered as such. Though they regard Jewishness as one of their identifications, they register as Ukrainian or Russian in a mark of allegiance to their nation-state or their language. I met several Jews who, despite their self-identification as Jewish, felt it more appropriate to label themselves as Ukrainian or Russian in official documents. The number of those receiving Jewish aid from various Jewish centers was higher than the official census data, indicating that the number of Jews in Odesa was closer to thirty thousand. This figure was most often recognized as correct by local scholars of Jewish history and by the Museum of the History of Odesa Jews. Official statistics for all of Ukraine are equally debated: based on the 2001 census, estimates of Ukraine’s Jews range from 71,500, identified as the “core” Jewish population, to 200,000, in a total population of 43 million.²⁰ But these figures overlook the smaller communities of Israeli Jews, returnees, and transmigrants who travel back and forth. Furthermore, no recent census has been carried out in the country that reflects the annexation of Crimea, the war in the Donetsk region, and the most recent outflow of Ukraine’s Jewish population as a result of the Russian invasion.

Ukrainian is the official language of the country, but during my initial research, and even on later visits, I rarely heard it spoken on the streets of Odesa. The Jewish families I visited all spoke Russian at home and with each other, although many increasingly used Ukrainian at work and in public spaces.²¹ Government legislation passed in 1992 “stipulated that in all schools the history of Ukraine be taught in Ukrainian,” but “there was some variation in how this was actually practiced.”²² It wasn’t unusual to hear conversations in both languages, with questions posed in Ukrainian and answered in Russian, or for conversations to switch from speaking in Ukrainian in public to speaking Russian in private. This was often the case in the university seminars I attended with some of my interlocutors. Although Ukrainian was officially the dominant language in the media, especially after 2006, when President Viktor Yushenko signed a law stipulating that 75 percent of the content on radio and television had to be in Ukrainian, many Odesans continued to use Russian in social media and less-regulated public platforms.²³

At the time of my fieldwork in the mid-2000s, most Odesan Jews I met identified with Russian-speaking culture, even if they also knew Ukrainian, held Ukrainian citizenship, and considered themselves civilly Ukrainian.²⁴ Many of the same individuals expressed a connection with Ukraine through family history or the fact that their city lies within Ukraine’s state borders and that they are, as a practical matter, subject to Ukrainian laws and regulations. Their attachment to Russian culture did not mean that these Odesans considered themselves “Russian Jews” rather than “Ukrainian Jews.” In different contexts, my interlocutors expressed a connection with both groups or with neither. They saw the Jewish history of the city as linked to the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union. As anthropologists Abel Polese and Anna Wylegala note, in the case of Odesa, a “Russian speaker might not be Russian, might not identify at all with Russia and [yet] still be accepted as Ukrainian.”²⁵ Depending on the circumstances, the terms Ukrainian and Russian were sometimes used interchangeably or replaced with Odesan. Odesa’s mayor at the time of my fieldwork, Eduard Gurvitz, even supported “the idea of ‘Odessan nationality’ (Odesskaia natsional’nost’) as a kind of supra-ethnic identity.”²⁶ It was not uncommon for my interlocutors to elevate their affinity with the city above their connection to the state.²⁷ Historian Roshanna Sylvester notes that “despite the fact that Odessa served as an incubator for both virulent Russian nationalism and Zionist activism, and that a series of pogroms marred the city’s history, most Odessans took pride in their cosmopolitanism, asserting the primacy of local (and international) over national identity.”²⁸

Events from 2013 until today have made such relations even more complicated. Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the simmering battle with Russia in the Donbas region, internal divisions within Ukraine—if to a lesser degree in Odesa—and then the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine have created new stakes for the ways Jews in Odesa identify themselves. The 2013–14 Euromaidan protests and counterprotests were violent and deadly—forty-eight anti-Maidan activists were killed in Odesa in May 2014. Moreover, those protests created a context in which even cultural orientations toward Russia could be politicized and disputed, as was the case with Ukrainian-Jewish relations as a whole, where the past (specifically World War II and the Holocaust) has been kept alive and enhanced—historian Paul Robert Magocsi and Jewish studies scholar Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern refer to this process as “the politicization of the past.”²⁹ Although I discuss Maidan and its aftermath in the epilogue, in the book I focus more on the formation of Jewish life in a post-Soviet pre-Maidan environment that wasn’t so politically restrictive and that couldn’t have foreseen the attack on Ukrainian sovereignty and the threats to its national viability that came with war.

At the time of my study, Jewish leadership in Odesa involved both local activists and multiple international Jewish organizations. The city had three active Jewish religious congregations, with several affiliated educational facilities. Two of the synagogues—sponsored by Orthodox congregations, Chabad Shomrei Shabbos and Tikva Or Sameach—have since the 1990s occupied structures originally built as religious institutions and used for other purposes during the Soviet era. They have the largest number of congregants, nearly 3,000 each.³⁰ The third, Emanu-El (renamed Shirat Ha Yam in 2016), sponsored by the Reform Jewish movement, was a community of some 120 congregants that functioned in a rented space during my study. Despite many years of authorities trying to return the famous Brody Synagogue building—once home to a thriving modern Jewish congregation and later turned city archives—the Reform congregation could not gain city approval or find necessary funding to take on restorations. In 2016, the building was officially granted by the city council to the Chabad congregation, who took responsibility for its future repairs. In 2012, the World Council for Conservative/Masorti Synagogues started operating its programs in Odesa. The affiliated Kehillat Tiferet congregation had about sixty congregants in its opening year; it organized educational programs and Jewish holiday celebrations for its community.

Odesa has two ritual baths (mikvaot), run separately by the two Orthodox congregations, as well as four kosher stores (two that are online) and four kosher restaurants. Strolling through the city center, you could find nonkosher restaurants that were named after famous streets in Tel Aviv, such as Dizengoff and Allenby.³¹ Six hotels advertised their “Jewish Observant Friendly” (JOFY) services on the web.³² There is a salon on Jewish Street where observant women go to style the wigs they bought at the huge Seventh Kilometer Market or ordered from Israel. The city has one old Jewish cemetery and two newer ones: one run by Chabad; the other, by Tikva Or Sameach.

In 2007, I visited Warsaw with a group of American Jewish families who were involved in a cemetery restoration project. I was surprised by the contrast: Odesa seemed much more Jewish than Warsaw, not only because of the sheer number of Jewish institutions but also in the vibrant zeal of the people and the visibility of public celebrations, Jewish holidays, and Jewish culture. I thought of the giant chanukiah (the nine-branched candelabra lit on Chanukah) displayed near the famous statue of the Duc de Richelieu (Odesa’s governor in 1803) at the top of the Potemkin Stairs; the street musicians playing the popular Jewish song “Hava Nagila” beside a sign asking for spare change; the posters outside the Odesa Opera House advertising “Jewish Tours of Odessa”; the parade of men carrying beautifully decorated Torah scrolls on Odesa’s Jewish Street; and Chabad congregants singing “Lekhah Dodi” at the welcoming of Shabbat with as much energy and enthusiasm as if it were their national anthem.³³

Sporadically, episodes of anti-Jewish sentiment occurred in Odesa, sometimes involving violence and hooliganism. In 2006, during my fieldwork, stones were thrown through a window of the Chabad synagogue. The same year, one of my religiously observant friends was attacked and beaten on the street; he attributed it to his Jewish appearance. Shortly after I left Odesa in February 2007, 320 Jewish gravestones and a Holocaust memorial were vandalized and painted with swastikas and antisemitic slogans. Many people I knew, both Jews and non-Jews, considered these tragic attacks to be out of the ordinary for Odesa. The incidents were rarely discussed at length by either Jewish or non-Jewish Odesans; most residents adamantly supported the rhetoric of tolerance as one of the city’s chief characteristics.

Odesa: A Cosmopolitan City

Tolerance and cosmopolitanism were indeed traits often ascribed to the city by Jewish Odesans. A key theme of this book is the way a discourse of Odesa as a cosmopolitan and Jewish city shapes the process of identity formation among Odesa’s Jewry—their sense of the city as home, their interpretation of change, and their vision of their future. It was in this way that they spoke of the city’s distinct Jewish history, for these terms dominate the wider historical perspective about its Jewish past while also playing a role in the way local Jewry see themselves and others (including foreign religious leaders) as either continuing or breaking away from these fundamental traits in the process of revival.³⁴

In the chapters that follow, I demonstrate the complexity and diversity of different people’s engagement with this discourse, but I also show how contemporary Jewish Odesans are becoming cosmopolitan—in the way that scholars today use this term to talk about cultural dimensions of globalization. Thus, Jewish Odesans are experiencing different dimensions of cosmopolitanism that delve into the historical realities of their city’s multicultural and ethnically diverse past, where Jews felt themselves to be part of the modern world, and the contemporary ways Jews feel a connection to the world through a network of transnational organizations, tourism, and philanthropy.

My goal in the discussion of cosmopolitanism and tolerance in Odesa is not to debate whether Odesa was or is cosmopolitan or tolerant. Rather, I want to tease out what, when, and for whom something is or isn’t cosmopolitan and what that trait means in different contexts. I also want to analyze the ways in which Odesa’s Jews and religious leaders used these terms and wove them into their personal or public narratives to confirm, question, or authenticate their own place in Odesa’s Jewish spaces. And I analyze the ways in which Jewishness is used as a metonym for cosmopolitan Odesa and the Odesa myth that lives on in the public imagination through stories, images, city tours, films, and conversations about the city.

When writing about cosmopolitanism as a feature of Odesa’s past, historians, literary scholars, musicologists, and other academics highlight the multiethnic fabric of the city in the first half of the nineteenth century. This phenomenon was the result of Catherine II’s initiative to welcome Turks, Greeks, French, Italians, Jews, and others to the new and bustling city on the periphery of the Russian Empire. An “entanglement of international culture” was created by the commercial and cultural exchange taking place in this free port city that looked to the Levant and the Mediterranean.³⁵

Many scholars have pointed out that the Jewish presence played an important role in defining Odesa’s modern and cosmopolitan experience. Describing Odesa in the late imperial period, Roshanna Sylvester writes that the Jewish experience was central to what it meant to be a modern Odesan.³⁶ Indeed, a potential causal connection between Odesa’s cosmopolitanism and its thriving modernist movement across social and cultural spheres was at the heart of the 2021 conference “Odessa, Cosmopolitanism and Modernism,” organized by the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies. But as literary scholar Mirja Lecke acknowledged in her opening notes at the conference, cosmopolitanism is a “contested notion, diverse in its layered historical meaning.”³⁷ Jewish studies scholar Brian Horowitz points out that unlike cosmopolitanism as “commitment to a society in which national borders as well as internal ethnic and religious differences have less significance than universal values,” Jewish cosmopolitanism in 1900s Odesa was “a specific kind of individual self-consciousness.”³⁸ It meant “one’s openness to people of other nationalities, to integration into non-Jewish society, and to a rejection of Jewish exclusivity.”³⁹ In other words, the usage and understanding of the term “cosmopolitanism” in the context of Odesa’s intelligentsia, unlike other meanings often ascribed to the term, didn’t signify a harmonious coexistence of Jews and non-Jews, but rather it was “the Jew’s self-conscious openness to non-Jewish elements, especially in public spaces.”⁴⁰ Historian Evrydiki Sifneos expands the picture of cosmopolitanism in imperial Odesa by focusing on the intersection of different ethnic groups in the sphere of economic and social activities.⁴¹ Anthropologist Caroline Humphrey suggests we think of “cosmopolitanisms” in the plural, pointing out that “the forms of cosmopolitanisms were very different at the beginning of the 19th century from those at the end.”⁴² In the specific context of Jewish Odesa, the pogroms that took place in the city in the late 1800s “erased a good deal of the city’s cosmopolitan luster.”⁴³

Cosmopolitanism is often juxtaposed with nationalism. The idea, born in ancient Greece, has meant to define oneself as a citizen of the world. For some, like the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, cosmopolitanism was regarded as a modern argument against the tyranny of “tradition,” defined as narrow parochialisms and ethnocentrism.⁴⁴ In this exact way, Odesa was what historian John Klier dubbed “a kind of anti-shtetl,” where Jews came when fleeing the traditional and distinctive way of life that had trapped them elsewhere in the Pale of Settlement, the area where Jews could legally reside from 1835 to 1917.⁴⁵ Cities, and port cities specifically, have been “a privileged site” for cosmopolitan lifestyles.⁴⁶ In Russia and the Soviet Union, cosmopolitanism was rejected “as a bourgeois, yet misconceived idea of international coexistence.”⁴⁷

Anthropologists have long explored practices of socialization among different cultures, ethnicities, religions, and people. The new vocabularies of “rooted cosmopolitanism,” “vernacular cosmopolitanism,” and “actually existing cosmopolitanisms” arise from a characteristically anthropological acknowledgment of diversity and attachments to place.⁴⁸ Based on the definition of anthropologist Ulf Hannerz’s “genuine cosmopolitanism,” I see cosmopolitanism primarily as an orientation toward, and willful interaction with, the other—or what Hannerz calls a “state of mind” and anthropologists Humphrey and Vera Skvirskaja describe as “a capacity for openness, an appreciation for others and the ability to stand outside the givens of one’s own community.”⁴⁹

Some discussions of cosmopolitanism, including that of Hannerz, have been criticized for their elitist assumptions that travel and movement can be undertaken with ease and that encounters with other cultures are a matter of free choice.⁵⁰ Other critiques of cosmopolitanism “questioned the use of an enlightened notion of cosmopolitanism.”⁵¹ These critiques apply to our conversation about Odesa, as not all of the city’s Jewish citizens could engage freely with others in the fashion that Hannerz assumes to be true in genuine cosmopolitanism, and the cosmopolitan experiences I refer to are not all connected to an elitist vision of culture, as some notions of cosmopolitanism assume to be true. The “entanglement of cosmopolitan discourse,” which includes the “demotic cosmopolitan practices” observed by anthropologist Ruth Mandel in Berlin, is also visible in Odesa’s “shifting cosmopolitics.”⁵² In my analysis, I discuss cosmopolitanisms in the plural, as suggested by the historian James Clifford, noting “a complex range of interpersonal experiences, sites of appropriation and exchange.”⁵³ But looking beyond intellectual orientation, I also note the need to see cosmopolitanism as practical coexistence and peaceful interaction with different ethnoreligious groups—accepting and valuing the other’s cultural capital, expressing concern for other humans, and rejecting a xenophobia grounded in specific places. As scholar of comparative literature Ackbar Abbas writes, “cosmopolitanism must take place somewhere, in specific sites and situations.”⁵⁴ In this regard, twenty-first-century Odesa is, as Tanya Richardson notes, “much less ethnically diverse than it was even before WWII, while its economic and port status is more marginal than during the Soviet period.”⁵⁵ Indeed, historians of Odesa have noted an end of cosmopolitanism in different times of Odesa’s history.⁵⁶ With its fading maritime connection to the world and changed demographics, Odesa has been described as a “post-cosmopolitan city.”⁵⁷ But we’ve learned that cities can wax and wane into and out of cosmopolitanism. Clifford, in particular, focused our attention on hybrid cosmopolitan experiences in what he refers to as “discrepant cosmopolitanism.”⁵⁸ Although Clifford focuses his discussion of discrepant cosmopolitanism on the multiple identities, outlooks, and practices that remain in a state of flux and are continually subject to redefinition, renegotiation, and contestation, authors writing about Odesa have highlighted the different historical temporalities that cast a shadow of doubt on the city’s proclaimed cosmopolitan reality.⁵⁹ Humphrey’s work on pogroms in Odesa and Charles King’s historical study of Odesa’s complex constitution of the genius and greatness and violence both underscore how cosmopolitan cities can experience crucial periods of brutality that challenge notions of lived cosmopolitanisms.⁶⁰

The changes in sociality brought on by the Russian-Ukrainian war present a new context for the timely discussion of cosmopolitanisms. As I describe in the epilogue, the circumstances of war have both fragmented and solidified different social classes, ethnic and religious groups, families, communities, and Odesa’s social networks of émigrés. It is obvious that the already-altered reality will continue to change with the turbulent currents of the war and Odesa’s cosmopolitan traits will be challenged by the growing anti-Russian sentiment, the recast of historical memory, language politics, and the economic, social, and political reality of postwar Ukraine. My research considers the historical dimensions of Odesa’s cosmopolitan claims as well as their contradictions and limitations. It also shows that there are competing notions of what counts as cosmopolitan in any one place throughout a city’s history and different ways of being cosmopolitan, as in experiences of staying, migrating, or being transnational. In other words, different groups and different generations within any one group draw on different historical truths to confirm, challenge, or debunk cosmopolitan claims about a place. In this process, some draw on universal connections of people and places and others draw on particular experiences and habits. And in this respect, different groups see post-Soviet transformations in Odesa as either asserting or challenging the city’s core values of tolerance and multicultural urbanity. My research suggests that a place can be simultaneously defined as cosmopolitan and not cosmopolitan, thanks to divergent understandings of the term brought about by different generations being exposed to the afterlives of empires and also exposed to the transnational networks connecting Odesa’s Jewry to destinations where family and friends reside.⁶¹ Moreover, Jewish Odesans find themselves to be part of different communities simultaneously: as Jews, as Odesans, as Ukrainians, and as Russians or Russian speakers. These categories also take on new meanings in the unfolding of history and the ongoing war at the time of writing.

One can argue that Jews have historically been cosmopolitan by the sheer fact of being part of a global diaspora. During Stalin’s regime, the term rootless cosmopolitans was often used as a synonym for Jews. In the context of post-Soviet Jewish Odesa, the religious landscape became dominated by Orthodox Judaism, and questions of tolerance, cosmopolitanism, and openness resurfaced in the contestations of various models of Jewish moral codes. This was especially evident in dialogue about Jewish education; in later chapters, I describe how some interlocutors feared that Jewish schools and cultural centers separated Jews from others, undermining the integrated quality of Odesa’s diversity.

Some elderly Odesan Jews see the religious “revival”—or, rather, what they believe to be new Jewish traditions—as detracting from the city’s cosmopolitan achievement of multiethnic social encounters, engagements, and relations. In their minds, that life was sustained, even in the time of Soviet ideology, under the rhetoric of international brotherhood or friendship between nations (druzhba narodov). Other Jews are less attached to those secular Soviet ideals and more critical of them. They celebrate religious freedom and the possibility to learn about traditions and openly practice Jewish rituals. And for many of the children raised in Jewish institutions—especially those in the Tikva and Chabad schools and orphanages—religious observance is now the norm. But a new form of cosmopolitanism has also emerged through membership in Jewish organizations that has increased the possibilities for travel, migration, and return migration. If we link cosmopolitanism and secularism with modernization—as many elderly Odesans did when I spoke to them about these trends—it becomes apparent that the entanglements of religiosity and modernity are complex and much scrutinized in contemporary Odesa, where diverse meanings of cosmopolitanism traverse “different spatio-temporal dimensions of modernity” and different understandings of modernity.⁶²

Main Themes of the Book

As an ethnography of Odesa’s Jewish people and places, this book draws together theories of Jewish belonging, diaspora, and migration studies and critically applies the concept of a “religious revival” to analyze change and continuity in a historically Jewish city. In presenting a picture of everyday life in Jewish Odesa, it weaves together history, anthropology, and Jewish studies to depict the aftermath of the legacy of state secularization and Soviet rule. My research thus touches on the wide-ranging phenomenon of postsocialist identity formations and shifts in morality as a result of migration, state-building processes, and the local, national, and global developments that have altered the region.

This book focuses on the Jewish communities that remained in what is now independent Ukraine. However, my study also engages with the migration and return migration of Jewish Odesans, examining the city itself as a place of belonging for the larger Odesan Jewish diaspora now scattered around the world. I locate the analysis of the bond of people and place in relation to the critique of the concept of Jewish diaspora put forth by Jewish studies scholars Caryn Aviv and David Shneer and others, and I analyze the changed status and position of Russian-speaking Jewry within the larger Jewish world and global Judaism.⁶³ Since the end of the Soviet Union and the establishment of independent Ukraine, the Jewish voices featured in this book are no longer those that Elie Wiesel lumped together as “the Jews of silence.”⁶⁴ These voices expand, alter, and enrich the stereotypical accounts of Jewish experiences in the USSR. The book thus opens a window on the processes of negotiating the identities and traditions that define Odesa, Ukraine, and the larger post-Soviet world today.

Soviet and post-Soviet Jewish research has become a distinct field within the larger realm of Jewish studies.⁶⁵ Its themes include issues of migration and resettlement, political and religious repression, religious and community vitality, and questions of Jewish identity. Recent anthropological work has likewise expanded the field’s focus to include new dimensions of Jewish life.⁶⁶ For example, anthropologist Sascha Goluboff’s ethnography introduces the idea of race to highlight how distinctions between nationalities, ethnicities, and racialized others were used in power struggles among Russian, Georgian, and Mountain Jews of Moscow’s Central Synagogue.⁶⁷ Likewise, cultural anthropologist Alanna Cooper’s book—part ethnography, part history, part memoir—draws attention to fractured identities among Bukharan Jewish communities in light of their internalized Soviet ideals, assimilation to Russian culture, and practice of customs native to the specific traditions, the authenticity of which are all challenged by foreign Jewish representatives.⁶⁸ But my work doesn’t just document the limitations and problems of Jewish “revival”; it also includes testimonies of those who have welcomed new centers of Jewish life and new models of Jewishness, both globally constituted and locally implemented throughout Odesa, in official, semiofficial, and informal settings. Like anthropologist Magdalena Waligorska, I see revival as “a space of interaction,” a contact point of various Jews and Jewish voices of authority.⁶⁹ In the context of Odesa, the use of the term revival was also questioned because it could mean a rebirth of Jewish traditions, a new way of defining Jewishness, and everything in between.

The type of negotiations I focused on from the mid-2000s in Odesa are specific to that time and place, but the questions they raise are not. Much like the “Muslim politics” Tone Bringa describes in Bosnia, “being Jewish” in Odesa was a negotiated concept defined by ordinary Jews, not solely determined by Jewish Orthodox doctrine or distinctively “religious” values.⁷⁰ Odesan Jews questioned what “being Jewish” meant, as Soviet markers of Jewish identity faded and various models of Jewish identification put forth by religious, Zionist, and cultural organizations replaced the symbolic production, control of institutions, and voices of authority on what makes people and places Jewish.

This is not a story of just one city or of a single ethnic or religious group. With the collapse of state secularism after more than seventy years of socialist ideology, religion resurged in public and private life, leading to important transformations in the lives of all ex-Soviet citizens. To date, the analysis of this religious resurgence in the FSU has mainly concentrated on the proselytizing religions and has tended to overlook the growth and development of Judaism and Jewish life. That’s because active proselytizing and the conversion of non-Jews haven’t been part of Jewish religious practice for many hundreds of years. This remains true of today’s Jewish revivalist movements. In contemporary Ukraine, Jewish activists are making sustained, highly visible efforts to connect existing Jews to “their” traditions and history.

Studies of Odesan Jews can help explain how individual actors combine secular and religious practices and orientations in their daily lives and how these practices are influenced by the development projects of international representatives and institutions. Like other groups, Jews are constantly engaged in the process of creating and refining their bonds of solidarity and structures of moral understanding.⁷¹ Therefore, one element of this study involves highlighting how Odesan Jews have come to identify themselves and the parameters of their communities in these new political, social, and cultural environments, and how their experiences compare to those of other ethnoreligious minorities in former Soviet states.

As with other ex-Soviet ethnoreligious minorities, the historical representation of Odesa’s Jewry is surrounded by assumptions, manipulated truths, and simplistic explanations of social realities produced by Soviet and foreign media and scholarship. Such views have not only influenced scholars but have also shaped how activists on the ground have approached Odesa’s Jewish population during this project of “revival.” This book thus explores the dynamics of a revival that was accepted and welcomed by some but questioned and challenged by others. The latter regard the modes of Jewishness introduced by foreign activists as completely new, and see them as proposing a new way of being a Jew. As an elderly taxi driver said, while he and I watched a group of black-clad observant Jews cross the road in front of us, “Odesa’s Jews never dressed so religiously. These are all tourists.” Indeed, that group was a delegation from Israel, but many of the local Jews I knew in the city did dress the same way: over the years, more and more women started to cover their hair, wear wigs, and adopt more modest dress, swapping trousers for long skirts. And of course, historically, Odesa’s observant Jews did dress much like those observant Jews we saw crossing the road. But to the taxi driver, the level of religiosity seemed foreign and inconsistent with his sense of Odesa and its mores.

In the chapters that follow, I look at the cultural, religious, Zionist, and philanthropic activists and organizations involved in Odesa’s complex Jewish network. I also examine the various reactions to the models of Jewish life they have introduced, as Odesans actively negotiate identities and traditions: local and global, Jewish and non-Jewish, religious and secular. I consider what implications the different international projects of Jewish revival have for Odesa’s historically proclaimed cosmopolitanism and Jewishness. While local initiatives in Odesa tend toward flexible cultural models of Jewish expression, the new authority figures associated with internationally driven projects have significant influence on the criteria by which Jewish identity is recognized. Orthodox religious organizations define a Jew as someone born to a Jewish mother or someone who converted to Judaism by Orthodox standards. Zionist organizations refer to the Israeli Law of Return, which allows Jews, along with their children, grandchildren, and spouses, to immigrate to Israel. Anyone who has at least one Jewish grandparent on either side of the family counts. These definitions challenge previous markers of Jewish identification in Odesa. Those markers were not just the formal, Soviet-state designations of “Jewish nationality”; they were also the informal, cultural, and cosmopolitan markers that permeated Odesa: attachment to the Russian language and culture, the education of the intelligentsia, a certain cultural refinement, a form of wit and humor, and even the flavor of the city’s signature cuisine.

This book explores discourses surrounding traditions. Often, traditions are viewed as customs and practices handed down from generation to generation.⁷² However, my research problematizes this supposed natural flow of transmission and reveals the different ways the term is used locally in various contexts of everyday life. In relation to religion, a tradition is “something learned in order to participate in a faith, for example in Christianity, Islam and Judaism.”⁷³ In the context of Jewish studies, tradition was often discussed in opposition to modernity, but many scholars have questioned this old opposition, identifying the “permeable boundary” between the two forces and going so far as claiming “traditionalism as itself modern” or even “beyond modern.”⁷⁴ This argument is part of the larger observation that religion isn’t merely an example of the tenacity of old ideas, and that this unidirectional view of religion’s decline under the weight of modernity missed a great deal of its resurgent force.⁷⁵

In Odesa, Jews used the terms tradition and traditional in different and sometimes contradictory ways. For some, being “traditional” was a place between religious and secular, where they followed some Jewish traditions that they had accepted committing to without fully dedicating themselves to being “religious.” At times, a “tradition” was referred to as something prescribed by Judaism that might not have been the case in the Soviet context but that has been maintained by Jews throughout history. For instance, the practice that required a man to be circumcised before burial was regarded as a Jewish “tradition” but also a transgression of a Soviet “tradition” where Jews were, for the most part, not circumcised. Specifically in times of life cycle rituals, the question of which tradition to appropriate was complicated by the altered norms defined by the established Jewish authority. Although many assume traditions are long-standing, established, and authentic customs and practices, they involve continual negotiation and contestation that is grounded in questions of legitimacy. In the context of contemporary Odesa, Soviet, urban, and family traditions were part of the ongoing and dynamic process of Jewish identification that entered into the arena of debate.

In his famous essay “Inventing Traditions,” historian Eric Hobsbawm writes that “traditions which appear or claim to be old are often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented . . . and this occurs more frequently when a rapid transformation of society weakens or destroys the social patterns for which ‘old’ traditions had been designed.”⁷⁶ The collapse of the Soviet Union and the process of state-building in Ukraine, coupled with global efforts to revive religion after communism, transformed the meaning of Jewish identity and urban-Jewish culture in Odesa. Soviet experiences and expectations didn’t disappear overnight, and even thirty years after the dissolution of the USSR, they still stand as a reference point for elderly Odesans. If we keep in mind Hobsbawn’s definition of old and new traditions coming together in periods of transition, we can better understand modern history and religious studies scholar Galina Zelenina’s description of the contemporary religiosity she observes among Moscow’s Jewry as a case of a new old religion.⁷⁷

Methodology

I have much in common with the people I met in Odesa, but I had never lived there, or anywhere in Ukraine, before beginning my fieldwork in 2005. Although my family is originally from Ukraine, Belarus, and Latvia, I was born and raised in Russia. I’m fluent in Russian and had a taste of living in the Soviet Union until 1991. That year, when I was nine years old, my father was offered a work contract in the United States as a physicist, and my family followed him there. I lived in the United States until I was twenty-three, when I moved to London to pursue a graduate degree in anthropology. I live there still. I’ve made regular trips back to Moscow since 1993, but I haven’t stayed in Russia for longer than a summer since my childhood. My interlocutors in Odesa regarded me as someone foreign, due to my years of living abroad, but also saw me as “one of them” because of my Russian-speaking Jewish heritage and fluency in Russian. Ironically, the same aspects of my identity that once defined my insider status as a researcher (speaking Russian and growing up in the Soviet Union) came to define me as an outsider after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Although I knew that my years-long relationships with friends in Odesa were sincere, and that we’d established trust in our conversations, I also understood that, in a way, I was part of a world that now defined their enemy.

Having been raised with an awareness that I was Jewish, I’ve had some of the same experiences as my interlocutors: being brought up in a secular Jewish environment; hearing family members tell stories about the prerevolutionary lives of ancestors; joining family gatherings where I heard the migration stories of relatives now living in Israel, Australia, and the United States; indulging in Jewish dishes on days that loosely marked the Jewish calendar; having an inscription in my passport that read “Jewish” and carrying a “Jewish surname.” I was always drawn to the topic of Jewish identity and curious about the destiny of those Jews who remained in the ex-Soviet state and the unexpected return migration of Jews to Russia, Ukraine, and other destinations in the FSU. This book was born out of my passion for learning about this new era of Jewish life, embedded in withering structures of socialism and the birth of a Ukrainian nation, and open to the globalization, democracy, and streams of religious, cultural, and national revival movements engaged in rebuilding Jewish communities. Odesa has its own history, and I wanted to know how the processes of Jewish revival played out in a city considered to be unique in the Jewish history of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and present-day Ukraine.

Like other Western researchers working in Ukraine and in other countries of the FSU, I’ve been accused—jokingly, but sometimes not—of being a spy. The fact that I was conducting ethnographic research on the local Jewish population offended some; they supposed that anthropologists should only study small, isolated indigenous populations somewhere far off. Occasionally I was subjected to analysis and critique.⁷⁸ To avoid this awkwardness, I occasionally referred to myself as a sociologist.

My affiliation with the Sociology Department of Odesa University, where I was supervised by Professor Emma Gansova, helped with my initial introductions.⁷⁹ Professor Gansova’s untimely passing in 2020 left an unfillable emptiness in my life and in the lives of all who knew her. It was through the university that I met some of my first interlocutors. Hearing that I was interested in how Jewish life in Odesa had changed since Ukraine’s independence, they were keen to tell their stories and to have me meet their families, friends, and Jewish activists in various Jewish organizations. The personal introductions that followed proved to be an efficient way to meet a diverse group of Jewish residents of different classes, ages, and orientations. Most of them had some connection, even if tangential, to organized Jewish life in the city. Through the “snowball” method, I met the students and teachers at Migdal, the Jewish community center where I regularly attended lectures, occasionally conducted interviews, and, for six months, taught English to Jewish youth. At the same time, I taught English to toddlers in a Jewish nursery at the early childhood development center, Mazl Tov.⁸⁰ Through these classes, I was able to engage students, parents, and grandparents, all of whom helped me understand both the Jewish and the non-Jewish spheres of Odesan society. During the last three months of my fieldwork, I also attended weekly religious classes sponsored by the Student Union of Torah for Russian Speakers. I regularly spent Shabbats with religious families who kindly invited me for Friday night dinners or Saturday lunches. Most of my friends were affiliated with one of the two Orthodox congregations, though I also made frequent visits to the Reform community, where I was always welcomed with open arms.

Most of my interlocutors were somewhat aware of Jewish activities in the city, even if they didn’t directly participate in any Jewish programs. Through several university students and my participation with Jewish philanthropy groups visiting the city, I met other Jews who weren’t affiliated with specific communal structures of Jewish life, perhaps because they didn’t know much about those organizations or simply because they avoided them. Some Jewish families either weren’t aware of their Jewish roots or placed little emphasis on this aspect of their history. It was harder for me to locate such individuals because most of them weren’t interested in discussing Jewish subjects and weren’t socially connected with the more aware and active Jews who made up a large part of my interlocutors. More formal interactions with the city’s academics, intellectuals, and leaders of various Jewish organizations gave me insight into present-day and historical issues of Odesa’s Jewish development.

At the start of my fieldwork, in June 2005, and at the end, I spent a total of two months in Israel, interviewing Odesans who had left Odesa and those contemplating a return. In the years since, I have also visited a number of Odesan families who have relocated to Israel, Europe, and the United States.

My methods of gathering data varied depending on the situation and the individuals. Most of my data were collected in Russian, which served as the primary language of communication for nearly all the people I met. On a few occasions, my interlocutors chose to speak English to practice their language skills. I didn’t encounter any Ukrainian-language Jewish social activities in Odesa; all the Jewish programs I attended were conducted in Russian. But Ukrainian often appeared on displays and in public Jewish memorials. I met a number of Jewish youths who spoke fluent Ukrainian, mostly as a result of their education (it had been the official language of instruction since the 1990s), but others who were educated in Russian-language schools did not. A few among their parents’ and grandparents’ generations spoke Ukrainian; others struggled with even the basic phrases needed to deal with the state bureaucracy. I met a few elderly Jews who knew basic Yiddish, but none who could converse freely in that language. Hebrew was only used to communicate among Israeli Jews, in religious services, and occasionally among returnees.

For most of the early phase of my fieldwork, I conducted informal interviews and engaged in ordinary discussions with those Odesans who agreed to make time for me. A main part of my early research included observation, which naturally turned into participation. This wasn’t always easy. For example, Orthodox Jewish settings are designed to prevent the interaction of men and women during prayer and most rituals, so at such times I could engage only with the women in the congregation.⁸¹

It was also challenging at times to maneuver among the one Reform and two Orthodox congregations as well as the many Jewish organizations in the city. People would make assumptions about my beliefs based on my choice of activities. Some read me as close to Israel; others, as aligned with the Orthodox community; and still others, as part of the Reform congregation. These interpretations weren’t unexpected, based on my interactions with different groups or congregations in the city, so I had to make decisions about where I’d celebrate holidays and share in the welcoming of Shabbat and which programs, trips, and other activities I’d participate in. To some extent, my choices affected which social circles I was invited to join and which I’d be excluded from—and, consequently, what material I was able to gather. However, I was fortunate to build genial relationships in most of my disparate social circles. Whenever possible, I tried to clarify my role as an objective observer in religious participation and institutional associations.

I attended a variety of ceremonies and life cycle rituals, such as the wedding of an Odesa friend that took place in the city of Dnipro (see chapter 4). I viewed many videos and photographs of other friends’ weddings that had occurred before my arrival. I attended a circumcision (bris), a ceremony for the redemption of the firstborn son (pidyon haben), and an engagement ceremony (erusin) as well as numerous Shabbat services and celebrations honoring the major Jewish holidays. I didn’t witness any burials in Odesa, but I did visit the Jewish cemetery with friends to pay respect to their family graves and to hear stories of their deceased relatives. Some informants invited me to their homes; others were more reserved. When I was welcomed as a guest, I was able to have deep, candid discussions over informal meals in the kitchen with friends and their families. These conversations served as “small doorways into a complex system of meanings and values, ideologies, identities and life strategies” that I try to make sense of in this book.⁸² Throughout my time in Odesa, I met regularly with five elderly Jews and their families and collected their life histories in great detail; these make up the body of chapter 2.

I sometimes recorded my conversations with my interlocutors; at other times, I took notes. Sometimes, I simply listened. My interviews with leaders of various Jewish organizations were arranged and conducted with a degree of formality; these I recorded. I often used my evenings to augment my notes with material I hadn’t been able to jot down at the time. I made short videos and took many photographs—another useful way to capture the details of Odesan life—some of which appear in this work. Because I lived on my own, I was able to welcome guests to my apartment for meals and tea. Over time, many relationships flourished into friendships. Personal invitations from friends, walks around the city, and shared family celebrations became part of my Odesa experience.

Conducting research in Odesa after the Orange Revolution and again after Maidan, I was privileged to be a witness to the complexities of my interlocutors’ “changing life-scapes” amid the structural transformations of independent Ukraine.⁸³ Most of my interlocutors were educated individuals who reflected on their own experiences and history and on current events and provided a high level of analysis. I’ve tried not to speak for them but rather to give prominence to their stories. And I’ve worked to present every social actor within the context of his or her particular background and the setting of the interview or conversation, to reveal to the reader each individual’s “distinctive mix of insight and blindness.”⁸⁴ Except for the individuals who were public figures and asked to be included with their real names, all names in the text are pseudonyms to protect the privacy of those who so kindly shared their thoughts and stories with me.

Book Outline

The first two chapters focus on Odesa’s history and legacy. Much of this background centers on the myth of Odesa as an open, cosmopolitan, and Jewish city perceived as a “distinct place” within the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and present-day Ukraine. These two historical chapters provide the background needed to understand Odesa today; they also challenge the picture of a single, monolithic Soviet Jewish experience by recognizing the influence of specific urban cultures on the development of varying Jewish orientations.

Chapter 1, “Historical Background: The Lost, the Revisited, and the Re-created,” lays out the backdrop necessary to understand the Jewish presence in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union generally and the qualities of Odesa, in particular. This introduction to the city’s historic past sets the stage for contemporary developments affecting the Jewish population of present-day Odesa, especially the multiple and often conflicted responses to international efforts to revive the Jewish life of the city. The chapter highlights the diverse experiences, loyalties, and orientations of Jewish Odesans and the often complex trajectories of their lives. This material helps counter much of the earlier literature on Soviet Jewry influenced by crude anti-Soviet stereotypes. It challenges conventional truisms that were based on a negative and monolithic picture of Soviet Jewish experiences and gives due attention to the specificity of urban cultures like Odesa’s on the development of varying Jewish orientations.

The subject of contested history and memory is expanded in chapter 2, “Remembering the Past and Making Sense of the Present: Narratives of Elderly Jews,” a detailed account of Odesa’s older generation of Jews. The accounts of elderly Jews I interviewed reflect on their experiences and consider how they judge their present-day status as individuals, family members, professionals, residents of Odesa, and members of its Jewish population. This ethnographic portrait comprises four families whose stories reveal some of the complexities, contradictions, and contingencies of living through Odesa’s Soviet period and its aftermath. I explore how members of this generation carry the past and make sense of the present, including the question of migration confronted by many elderly Jews as their children and grandchildren move abroad.

The next three chapters address the processes of Jewish cultural and religious revival that have been part of Odesa’s reforms since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Chapter 3, “Jewish Revival: Opportunities and Tensions,” describes the new forms of “being Jewish” through which Odesan Jews now identify themselves—forms brought in by the foreign emissaries and international organizations that have in large measure formed the Jewish revival in the city. These new voices of authority have reshaped the contours and content of Jewish identification; the chapter explores how these ideological agendas are internalized, negotiated, and contested by Jewish residents as they selectively appropriate new visions and practices of Jewish life.

Chapter 4, “From Evrei to Iudei: Turning or Returning to Faith,” focuses on the idea of religious adherence to examine how some local Jews enact a religious Judaism in their lives and how they negotiate these values and meanings with nonobservant family members and friends. Jewish leaders, religious scholars, and some academics in the field have often treated religious practice as a “return” to previously abandoned practices, but as this chapter illustrates, most Jewish Odesans who welcome Judaism into their routines—whether occasionally or daily—are exhibiting new patterns of living imbued with new values.

Chapter 5, “Asymmetric Cultural Encounters: Jewish Philanthropy Missions and Revival on Display,” details the visits of foreign donors, known as “missions,” that are designed to give sponsors a sense of their investments in building up the city’s Jewish life. This chapter opens up questions about the relevance and feasibility of Jewish outreach projects and development and explores how foreign missions intended to unite Jews around the world may indeed separate the givers from the receivers of Jewish philanthropy.

The final two chapters examine how the Jewishness of Odesa has been shaped and reshaped by historical patterns of migration. Chapter 6, “Jewish Is a Mode of Transportation: Between Home, Homeland, and Diaspora,” explores how the present-day Jews of Odesa think about emigration and remigration (that is, the return to Odesa from Israel or elsewhere) in terms of home and diaspora. The complexity and fluidity of these concepts are illuminated by the individuals presented—those who remained, those who are leaving, and those who’ve recently returned from Israel—and their relationships with Odesa, Israel, and other possible places of belonging. The conventional wisdom that Israel is the homeland is broadened and enriched by the attachments felt by local Jews toward their life in Odesa and to other places where family and friends reside. This chapter shows how the concepts of home and diaspora are not fixed or absolute for those in Odesa, who are now part of a larger global community of ex-Soviet Jewry.

The image of Odesa as a “Jewish” city and a home to Jewish humor, cuisine, language, music, and literature is the theme of chapter 7, “Odesa: A Jewish City?” By examining the intertwined discourses of myth, history, and individual realities that simultaneously reproduce and contest Odesa’s trope of Jewishness, this chapter demonstrates how locals draw on the Odesa myth to reaffirm it as a “Jewish city” for many purposes: as a claim to partial ownership of cultural traits, as a strategy of empowerment, as a way to maintain long-distance ties, and in some cases as a tactic for challenging global Judaism and Ukrainization.

In the conclusion, I argue that Jews in contemporary Odesa, like other minority groups, face the challenge of redefining themselves in a new cultural and political environment. Under these circumstances, the myth and reality of the city’s character—its Jewishness, its Greekness, its Russianness, its Ukrainianness, and so on—serve to valorize and protect Odesa’s distinctive nature.

It is impossible to write about Ukraine today without acknowledging the region’s political upheavals and the political and social challenges they present for Odesa generally and for its Jewish population in particular. The war with Russia in the Donbas region, expanded through Russia’s 2022 invasion, has created much animosity toward the Russian state, although relations with the Russian people, culture, and language are more nuanced. This book’s epilogue therefore sheds light on how, as the political situation fluctuates, Jewish Odesans and leaders of religious organizations are positioning themselves within the changing array of alliances, loyalties, and identities.