1

Historical Background

The Lost, the Revisited, and the Re-created

This chapter aims to illustrate how, along with Odesa’s development as a cosmopolitan city, the Jews of Odesa historically experienced periods of social and economic thriving alternating with dark stretches of hostility, discrimination, horror, and, later, rebirth. Both czarist and Soviet rule saw the development of social practices distinct to Odesa—with its vital commercial port and open, multiethnic population. The city’s internal dynamics and the political, social, and economic influences that concentrated there helped cultivate a rich and diverse range of liberal identities among its Jewish citizens.

While the many Jews in Odesa experienced a dynamic process of modernization and transformation in their communities in the nineteenth century, efforts aimed at further Jewish integration persisted, and indeed the twentieth century’s violence and brutality demonstrate the limitations of their acculturation. For some, modernization meant adopting a secularized identity: a sizable community of Jews in Odesa had left behind religious practices as they acculturated. For others, it meant bypassing Jewish identification altogether and taking up other meaningful identities that they felt brought higher status, whether at home or abroad. When Jews in Odesa altered their practices, beliefs, and self-identity, they were often prompted by the perception that social and economic adaptation was necessary to be successful in business. As historian Steven Zipperstein shows in his seminal book on the subject, by 1881, “religious traditions began to fade” and “all that truly mattered was business.”¹ “The commercial history of Odessa is the history of Odessa,” wrote Ukrainian historian A. A. Skal’kovskii about the city during the same time period.² Along with commercial activities, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Jews became increasingly involved in Odesa’s literary, musical, artistic, and scientific life. Cultural change among the city’s Jewry was also driven by ideas of Jewish enlightenment, sometimes in support of Soviet ideology and sometimes out of the sheer necessity of survival.

The goal of this chapter is to analyze the history of Odesa’s Jewish population by taking account of the sociopolitical events of the Russian Empire and the territory of Jewish settlement in the Pale, as well as those in the Soviet Union and later the Ukrainian state. To understand the position of Odesa’s Jews, we must understand that the area that is present-day Ukraine was, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, divided between Russia, Poland, and the Ottoman Empire; in the nineteenth century, divided between Russia and Austria-Hungary; and in the twentieth century, except for a short period of independence after World War I, for the most part integrated into the Soviet Union with smaller territories partitioned between Poland, Czechoslovak Republic, and Romania. In other words, Ukraine has been on the edge of various empires for centuries.³ While the Jews of the newly acquired areas of the Russian Empire after the partition of Poland spoke Yiddish and other languages, the tsarist regime’s policies of integration encouraged Russification (such as the establishment of Russian-language schools in 1844 for Jews and other minorities). Czar Alexander II saw these policies “as a key condition towards further sblizhenie (rapprochement) between Jews and Russians.”⁴ Jews who were involved in trade found Russian helpful in business affairs, and proponents of Jewish equality and adherents of Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment movement, endorsed acculturation as a modernizing force. Odesa, as I later discuss, was part of the territory conquered and developed by the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth century, and the city and its Jewish population have historically been shaped by processes of Russification that continued to dominate language politics in Russia in czarist and Soviet periods. These earlier developments help us understand how Odesa and its Jewish population remained predominantly Russian speaking in independent Ukraine. In the current context of the Russian-Ukrainian war, the cultural affiliation with Russia of Odesa and the larger territory of “Novorossiia” has been manipulated to justify Russia’s territorial claim to large parts of Ukraine and is a crucial part of Putin’s propaganda rhetoric that paints Odesa as a “Russian city” and ignores Ukrainian political and cultural sovereignty. This chapter and the next also document how for many Jews in Odesa, their connection to Russia and the Russian language was a strong element of their identity and one that has been affected by the trauma of the Russian-Ukrainian war.

To maintain its focus on the history of Odesa, this chapter provides only a brief summary of the multifaceted history of Jews in the greater region.⁵ And while my book primarily considers Odesa some two decades after Ukraine’s independence, the city’s earlier history provides important reminders that the transformations defining contemporary Odesa are part of a long process of negotiation of lifestyles, traditions, loyalties, and identity politics. All these historical complexities and contradictions of Jewish relations with host societies and the influences of such encounters are relevant to recent events.

In presenting this history, I start by analyzing the way Jewish history in the region has been cast. My analysis is in line with the efforts of other scholars who seek to go beyond the “old paradigms of conflict and hostility” in the realm of Jewish-Ukrainian relations.⁶ I look beyond the “bleak portrait of Jewish life” to highlight the importance of urban contexts in the Jewish encounters with imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, and independent Ukraine.⁷ As other authors have demonstrated, the local distinctiveness of cities with large Jewish populations, regarded as “Jewish cities” in the Pale, expands our understanding of Soviet Jewish experiences. Odesa’s past also frames the experiences of Jews in the early twenty-first century, which are at the core of this book.

To understand Odesan Jewry before Ukrainian independence, we must question and challenge conventional histories of the prerevolutionary Jewish experience and revisit Jewish realities within the Soviet Union. The opening of archives and resulting research carried out in the last three decades in the former Soviet Union have allowed historians to produce more synthetic accounts of the history of the Jews in this region and to correct the overly sentimental and excessively negative view of their past that was prevalent in previous accounts.⁸ Needless to say, Russia’s war against Ukraine has influenced and will continue to change interpretations of the past away from ideas dominant in Soviet and Russian-centric framing of historical narratives and will shift toward a more specifically Ukrainian experience, however modern that understanding is.

Revisiting the long history of Jews in Odesa underscores how that history contributed to Odesans’ identity during the transformations that came in the post–Orange Revolution period. Oral histories presented in this historical background and in the following chapter sometimes support and sometimes challenge the collective memory of Jews in the Russian, Soviet, and Ukrainian contexts. This complex and contradictory historical account helps us envision Odesa as it was perceived by those who, despite the option of emigration, chose to stay in their city; those who left and returned; those who still contemplate a life abroad; those who identified as Soviet socialists above all; and those who, even in Soviet conditions, nonetheless sustained a Jewish identity. Through the diverse historical voices, we strive to keep in view the plurality of ideology and social practices that Jewish citizens of Odesa exhibit, given their differing loyalties to socialist values and Soviet life.

Recasting History

This section recasts history by exploring Odesa’s placement in and out of the Pale. Much of the focus on Jews in imperial Russia has been defined by the central role of the Pale of Settlement, a swath of territory officially established in 1835 and lasting until 1917. The Pale of Settlement was the only area within the Russian Empire where Jews were free to reside permanently. While they needed no special permission to live here, movement within and travel to areas outside the Pale of Settlement were regulated by a passport system required for all but nobility.⁹ The regulation of movement for most Jews in the Pale was long thought to have created “the least integrated of all the European Jewish communities,” set off as “quintessential outsiders and scapegoats.”¹⁰ Overly simplified and negative images of communities in the Pale of Settlement were reinforced by literary works depicting poor Jews fleeing Russian pogroms at the turn of the century.¹¹

A different school of thought cast the Pale of Settlement under the czars as a condition of Jewish preservation—a sanctuary within which Jews held to their rites, rituals, and traditions. Indeed, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern’s The Golden Age Shtetl highlights the diverse experiences of Jews living in traditional communities from 1790 to 1840, when the shtetls of eastern Europe were “economically vigorous, financially beneficial, and culturally influential.” He describes this as a space where “Polish, Jewish and Russian joined effort” and a “proud place with a fascinating social tapestry.”¹² Nostalgic and romanticized descriptions of traditional Jewish society were a familiar motif among Jews before 1914.¹³ Although Odesa, as previously mentioned, was regarded as a kind of anti-shtetl, some American Jewry contemplating their identity after World War II also romanticized the Russian Jewish past as evidence of a “spirituality, wholeness, and communal cohesion” that was later undone by Soviet rule and further destroyed by World War II.¹⁴

For other writers, Jewish identity under the Soviets had purely negative associations: Jews in the Soviet Union knew they were Jewish only because of daily discrimination. These perceptions were supported by interviews and memoirs of some Jewish activists, dissidents, and refuseniks.¹⁵ But they are often contradicted by ordinary Jews, many of whom strove for assimilation on their own initiative and who, if they left the Soviet Union, did so for a variety of complicated and personal reasons.¹⁶

From yet another perspective, Soviet Jews were one of the most successful ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union because of their ability to survive and live as strangers.¹⁷ As historian Stephen Kotkin said of those who participated in building socialism under Stalin, while there was a variety of reasons for doing so, “participate they did.”¹⁸ Historian Mark Steinberg and anthropologist Catherine Wanner describe how Soviet socialism, though often coercive, nonetheless “provided a type of moral community, a sense of integration, order, and shared values” to its people that many ex-Soviet citizens later mourned.¹⁹ Caroline Humphrey describes the Soviet collective as a “moral universe of comradeship” where real warmth flourished in many social spheres of multiethnic collectives.²⁰ And anthropologist Alexei Yurchak writes that “for a great number of Soviet citizens, many of the fundamental values, ideals, and realities of socialist life (such as equality, community, selflessness, altruism, friendship, ethical relations, safety, education, work, creativity, and concern for the future) were of genuine importance, despite the fact that many of their everyday practices routinely transgressed, reinterpreted, or refused certain norms and rules represented in the official ideology of the socialist state.”²¹ It was in this context, historian Yuri Slezkine argues, that the Soviet Union offered Jews a place in the collective efforts at modernization and mobilization, a unifying project that created the conditions for consciously abandoning shtetl ways and becoming a highly educated, Russian-speaking, and predominantly urban minority.²²

Other historians are more wary of the idea that the Soviet regime was responsible for transforming Jews from “quintessential outsiders to consummate insiders,” arguing that reforms practiced by the czarist regime and Jewish elites were already setting the path for modernity.²³ As Petrovsky-Shtern reminds us in his description of Jewish life in the shtetl, “the dichotomy of modernity and countermodernity only poorly convey the vagaries and travails of Jewish experiences throughout its history.” Questions of inclusion and exclusion and modernity versus tradition have remained important points of discussion in all periods of Odesa’s Jewish history, as they were in the other places of present-day Ukraine where Jews dwelled.

Following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia, I have had to think carefully about the way I describe Jewish history in the region, relying on credible historians but also remaining aware of our long-standing tradition of looking at the history of Jews through the colonial lens of Russia, Poland, and other empires. In the conclusion of this chapter, therefore, I raise the topic of Jewish history as a part of Ukrainian history and Ukrainian-Jewish relations as a topic of historical exploration, issues that I pursue further in the epilogue.

The First Jews of Ukraine

Jews likely settled on the northern shores of the Black Sea as part of Greek colonies in the early centuries of the Christian era.²⁴ Among those early settlers were Crimean Jews and a sect of Karaites—followers of Karaism, a branch of Judaism that rejected the Oral Law. During the Middle Ages, the Jewish presence and influence in this territory—later absorbed into the Russian Empire—grew as Jews moved to the region from Byzantium, Crimea, and the short-lived nomadic kingdom of Khazaria, which existed between the Volga and Dnieper rivers and western Europe.²⁵

Within Khazaria, Jews played an important role in international trade between the caliphate in Baghdad and the Byzantine Empire. But the expansion of the princedom of Kyiv into the Khazar region in the years 966–69 brought an end to Khazarian prosperity and reduced the Jewish population’s influence in the region.²⁶ Despite evidence from medieval legends, historians have questioned or ignored the role of Khazaria’s Jews in the formation of Jewish communities in Ukraine. Jews in Crimea engaged in trade prior to the establishment of the grand duchy of Kyiv (Kyivan Rus) in the tenth century but left little imprint on the later communities established in the region after the Mongol invasion in the mid-thirteenth century.²⁷ When Lithuania annexed Kyiv in 1320, Jews in the region were granted certain rights, and they grew in numbers and prospered, only to be expelled from Kyiv and Lithuania in 1495 and then allowed back in 1503.²⁸ Prior to the influx of Jews from the land of Ashkenaz (the territory inhabited by Yiddish-speaking Jews, extending from Amsterdam to Zhitomir) in the sixteenth century, Kyivan Rus had a very small community. After the dissolution of Kyivan Rus, Jews found themselves under three states: Lithuania, Poland, and the Crimean Khanate.²⁹ Jews living in Lithuania and Poland had the status of servi camerae, or servants of the royal chamber, who were given religious freedom and allowed to engage in moneylending, currency exchange, and tax collecting.³⁰ In the sixteenth century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Poland became one polity, and as part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, “Jews enjoyed a high level of legal and communal autonomy.”³¹

But the status of the Jews also brought with it resentment from the wider society that resulted in deadly attacks on Jewish communities. Paul Magocsi and Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern argue that because of the close economic ties between Jews and Polish magnates, the social tensions between the Orthodox Rus’ and Polish populations and later rebellions against the Polish nobility resulted in attacks on and killing of Jews. The social unrest in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth culminated in the 1648 uprising by the alliance of Zaporozhian Cossacks and Crimean Tatars led by Bohdan Khmelnitskyi, the hetman (military commander) of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, against the armies of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, bringing about the massacre of Polish nobility and Jews. This event is recorded in Jewish cultural memory as the Catastrophe of 1648–49—a heavy blow to eastern Jewish communities of the time. Jewish populations in Tulchyn, Nemyriv, and Polonne were decimated.³² An estimated fourteen thousand to eighteen thousand Jews residing in the area were murdered, nearly a thousand converted to Orthodoxy, and others fled as refugees.³³

As a result of Jews fleeing persecution during the Crusades, the Black Death in Germany, and expulsion and forced conversion in Spain, by the early seventeenth century the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth still benefited from an inflow of Jews from elsewhere. By the eighteenth century, the commonwealth had the largest Jewish community in the world, having grown from 10,000 at the end of the fifteenth century to around 750,000 (out of a total population of 14 million) by 1764.³⁴

Jews in the Russian Empire

It was only in the late eighteenth century that a large Jewish population became established in the Russian Empire. Before the partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793, and 1795, during which Catherine II (1762–96) annexed the homelands of a large majority of Jews of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, only a small number of Jews had lived within Russia’s borders.³⁵ As a result of the Russian Empire’s late eighteenth-century expansions, it came to control the destinies of approximately one million Jews of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.³⁶ By 1820, after the Kingdom of Poland was added to the new territories of the Russian Empire, the Jewish population increased to approximately 1.6 million, and by 1880, it had reached 4 million, constituting the largest concentration of Jews in the world.³⁷ By the end of the nineteenth century, Russia’s Jewish population had grown to more than 5 million. In the words of Simon Dubnow, the leading chronicler of Russian Jewry in the early and mid-twentieth century, “the country which had stood in fear of a few thousand Jews was now forced to accept them, at one stroke, by the tens of thousands and, shortly afterwards, by the hundreds of thousands.”³⁸

While Empress Catherine held, in part, to the traditionalist doctrine embodied in the Russian church and her predecessors who displayed hostility to Jews, she was also influenced by the rationalist doctrines of the European Enlightenment and mercantilism. She thus attempted to “transform” her Jewish population into “useful subjects” by ensuring that Jews were, for the first time, invited to join the ranks of the three guilds of merchants and townsmen.³⁹ This allowed them to practice their religion and granted them permission to participate (both as voters and as candidates) in local municipalities.⁴⁰ During the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, it was not government policy to Russify the heterogeneous population of the empire.⁴¹ For the Jews, this meant that the kehilot (Jewish self-governing councils) continued to preside over internal Jewish affairs.⁴² This period, from the partition of Poland to the death of Alexander I in 1825, was understood as a time when Jews were largely left alone and able to manage their own affairs.⁴³

But the integration of Jews into the social, political, and economic spheres of the empire presented new demographic and cultural challenges to the czarist regime. The Russian majority still viewed Jews as outsiders and regarded them with suspicion, owing to religious differences and their links to the old Polish Kingdom.⁴⁴ The freedoms experienced by Jews in trade, religious practice, and politics during Catherine’s early years were soon curbed as a result of the upheavals that followed the partition of Poland and the fear roused by the French Revolution, not to mention such internal stresses as the complaints of Moscow merchants and the church.⁴⁵ Jewish activity was restricted, first in the economic sphere and then politically, until the autonomy of Jews was severely constrained.⁴⁶ Catherine’s edicts of 1791 and 1794 limited where Jews could live and implemented double taxation for the region’s Jewish merchants and townsmen.⁴⁷ Essentially, Jews under Catherine’s rule were incorporated into existing social estates but maintained the autonomous structures established in Poland-Lithuania and endured hostility from those who saw them as harmful to the social order.⁴⁸

Alexander I, who followed Catherine after the brief rule of his father, Paul, created the Committee for the Organization of Jewish Life. It devised a program for “Jewish reform,” and it and many similar organizations that followed promoted access to state schools and universities for Jewish children and granted Jews the right to open their own secular schools using German, Polish, or Russian as the language of instruction. Other reforms required Jewish members of municipalities to wear European-style clothes, limited Jewish economic activity, and restricted conversion.⁴⁹

The policies toward the Jews pursued by Nicholas I and his successors developed in similar ways. Again, there were attempts to make Jews loyal subjects while mitigating their purported negative impact on society. According to Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern and Antony Polonsky, this was the basis of the decision to confine the Jews to the Pale of Settlement.⁵⁰ During Nicholas’s reign, attempts to incorporate Jews into the multiconfessional and ethnically diverse empire failed.⁵¹ Also, drafting Jews aged twelve to twenty-five in the military and establishing both state schools and two rabbinic seminaries greatly undermined traditional Jewish leadership, increased social stratification, and created a real chasm between a minority of Jews like the maskilim (supporters of Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment) and the majority, who did not trust the government and perceived them as hostile.⁵²

The Pale of Settlement

According to Russia’s first statewide census, held in 1897, 5.2 million Jews resided within the Pale of Settlement, making up 4 percent of Russia’s total population.⁵³ The Pale of Settlement was composed of territory in Lithuania-Belarus and Moldova, much of Ukraine, New Russia (or Novorosiya), and east-central Poland. Thus, the Pale was geographically, ethnically, and culturally diverse. Each of these different sections of the Pale, as well as the Polish region outside the Pale that was a major area of Jewish settlement, had a distinct historical background, ethnic composition, Jewish population, and urban and rural composition, plus different cultural elements and levels of industrialization. These factors affected the acculturation of Jews in each area.⁵⁴ The different areas within the Pale not only fostered diverse processes of cultural development throughout their histories but also attracted different types of Jews and provided different living conditions.⁵⁵ Zvi Gitelman describes how Jews in different parts of the Pale of Settlement started to diverge in their attitudes toward Jewishness during the last years of the nineteenth century: “The vast majority remained firmly rooted in their traditional primordial identities, something which was as much part of them as their own skin, assumed, unquestioned and perhaps unexamined. Others examined their Jewishness and found it wanting. They turned to enlightenment in an attempt to synthesize Jewishness and modernity, or they abandoned Jewishness altogether for Christianity and Russian culture or for socialism and ‘internationalist’ culture.”⁵⁶

Most Jews at the turn of the nineteenth century had been living in traditional, religiously observant communities and communicating primarily in Yiddish; the men worked as craftsmen or ran independent businesses, and most were poor. By the end of that century, a noticeable contingent of the Jewish population had started to depart from traditional values, abandoning some or many traditional religious rituals as they rose to higher ranks of business or established themselves in various professions.⁵⁷ The most successful Jews to benefit from “selective integration” (the process by which the Russian Empire hoped to disperse certain categories of “useful” Jews into the hierarchy of Russian society) were the Russian Jewish financiers who made their fortunes through military contracts and wholesale grain sales.⁵⁸ Others to follow profited from the state liquor monopoly, banking, and railway construction. Among the most prominent and well-known Jewish families at the time were the banking families of the Ephrussis, the Galperins, and the Guenzburgs; the railway magnates Samuel Polyakovs and Abram Varshavsky; the Kiev sugar king Iosef Brodsky; and the urban contractor Yakov Faibishenko. But we must not forget that most Jews in the Russian Empire of that time were poor and thus considered “unproductive”; they were, therefore, unfit for the social transformation embedded in the idea of “selective integration” that Benjamin Nathans describes.⁵⁹

In the late nineteenth century, the Pale of Settlement “saw the appearance and increasing ascendancy of ethnic and national conceptions of Jewish self-identification, in particular Zionism” and diaspora nationalism.⁶⁰ Some Jews supported socialism and idealized the notion that the differences between Jews and non-Jews would be overcome in the new socialist world. Concurrently, Orthodoxy developed as mitnagdic (opposed to Hasidism), Hasidic followings grew, and Yiddish advanced as a literary language along with Modern Hebrew.⁶¹ In cities like Odesa, Jews could therefore be part of various modern Jewish movements and, at the same time, partake in the growing economic, social, cultural, and literary spheres that departed from traditional Jewish life and strict religious observance.

Jews in the City of Odesa

It was once remarked that “if a Jew from the Pale of Settlement doesn’t dream about America or Palestine, then you know he’ll be in Odessa.”⁶² The city was founded in 1794 after the second Russo-Turkish war, when Russian forces led by Don Joseph de Ribas—a half-Spanish, half-Irish military commander under Catherine II—conquered the Ottoman fort of Khadzhibei, in the province of Novorossiia.⁶³ From the start, Odesa was a strategic warm-water port.⁶⁴ Catherine II offered incentives to attract settlers. The promise of individual freedom lured runaway serfs and other new arrivals, who received sizable land grants and other generous inducements in the form of monetary loans, exemption from taxes, and relief from military service. Russians, Ukrainians, Greeks, Albanians, Moldavians, Armenians, Bulgarians, and Germans settled there. Catherine’s policies promoted trade, allowing foreign merchants from Greece, Italy, Galicia, and other parts of the world to establish brokerage houses in Odesa. While the Greek merchants, followed by Italians, French, German, and the British, predominated in the early years of Odesa’s economic growth, after the 1870s Jews dominated the import and export markets in all mercantile activities.⁶⁵

Catherine made it easy for Jews to move to the region of Novorossiia. Driven by “mercantilist considerations,” she welcomed Jewish settlers who could boost the local economy.⁶⁶ Her governor general, the Duc de Richelieu (1803–14), and his successors, including the Count de Langeron (1815–22) and Michael Vorontsov (1822–56), further stimulated migration to the region by advancing Catherine’s policies. What made Odesa important in the history of the Jews in the periphery of the empire, where most Jews resided, was that, unlike a traditional shtetl, it was the only town that had a largely middle-class character until the second half of the nineteenth century.⁶⁷

Odesa’s rapid growth in the nineteenth century placed it among the fastest-growing cities in Russia—comparable to Chicago and San Francisco in the United States. “In the period of 1800–92 alone, the population [of Odessa] increased by an astonishing 3,677 percent compared to rates of 220 percent for Moscow, [and] 323 percent for St. Petersburg.”⁶⁸ During this time, Jews constituted the second-largest group of immigrants, surpassed only by Russians. In 1892, the city’s total population reached 404,000—roughly 50 percent Russians (198,233), 31 percent Jews (124,511), 10 percent Ukrainians (37,925), 4 percent Poles (17,395), and 6 percent other foreigners (25,751).⁶⁹ By 1897, nearly a century after its founding, Odesa was home to 138,935 Jews, who composed a third of its total population.⁷⁰ The 1897 census also showed that 32 percent of the population spoke Yiddish and nearly 50 percent spoke Russian, while 5.6 percent of Odesans relied on Ukrainian as their native tongue.⁷¹ For Jews, Odesa became a kind of sanctuary outside the borders of the Pale where they had rights unattainable in other parts of the country and could reside freely in any neighborhood.

While the earliest migrants to Odesa were mostly unmarried men looking for work and a new place to start their lives, later arrivals came with their families, attracted by the potential they saw in Russia’s grain trade and the new Black Sea port. Odesa’s status as a free port (1819–59) fueled prosperity driven by the trade in grain and other export goods, which were exempt from an otherwise heavy tax burden.⁷² By 1900, “Odessa was ranked as Russia’s number one port for foreign trade . . . handling the shipment of nearly all the wheat and more than half of the other grains exported from Russia.”⁷³ The city also derived commercial success from the railway network that, beginning in the 1860s and 1870s, connected Odesa to the Caucasus and facilitated the delivery of goods across the country.⁷⁴ Unlike other areas within the Pale, where competition in trade and industry led to anti-Jewish sentiment on a political level, Odesa’s ruling elite welcomed competition in trade and labor and thrived on the city’s lucrative achievements. Indeed, Zipperstein suggests that one of the reasons for the city’s tolerant attitudes toward Jews is that in Odesa, unlike elsewhere in Russia, Jewish policy was not framed with the implicit goal of minimizing Jewish economic competition and alleged exploitation.⁷⁵ But at the same time, there was economic rivalry among the middle-class merchants, and competition between Greeks and Jews in the grain trade was one of the factors in the pogrom of 1871.⁷⁶ While Jewish immigrants to the city ranged from laborers, tailors, wagoners, and cleaners to thieves, prostitutes, hawkers, and hooligans, many Jews were active in Odesa’s commerce and valued for their commercial trading skills.⁷⁷ Starting with the export of salt, Jews came to monopolize the production of various trade stuffs including starch, refined sugar, tin goods, chemicals, and wallpaper and to dominate trade in commodities such as silk, cotton, wool, hardware, iron, and shoes.⁷⁸ By 1842, Jews owned 228 businesses in Odesa; some ten years later, 477 of the city’s Jews belonged to one of the three merchant guilds.⁷⁹

Importantly, Odesa had no Jewish quarter, nor was Jewish residence ever restricted, which “reflected the city’s tolerance and testified to the wealth of relatively large numbers of Odessa’s Jews.”⁸⁰ Wealthier Jews settled in the center of the city; those who were poorer concentrated in Moldovanka and later Peresyp, which exposed them to the cultural practices of their Italian, Greek, Romanian, Bulgarian, Russian, and Ukrainian neighbors. Certain areas of the city where Jewish residents and their communal institutions were concentrated served as centers of Jewish life.⁸¹ It may not be appropriate to describe Odesa as a “melting pot” as there was relatively limited interaction between ethnic groups outside the marketplace, but the city did enjoy a cosmopolitan sociality from the outset.⁸²

Because Odesa was a new city, there was no established Jewish community or rooted Jewish traditions to define the place. Thus, from the beginning, it was dominated by “integrationalists, maskilim and a secular and Russifying Jewish elite.”⁸³ The fact that Jews in Odesa lived far from any other major center of Judaism and were deeply engrained in the city’s commercial culture, and that the city contained such varied ethnic and religious life, had a profound impact on Jews’ engagement with traditional Judaism.⁸⁴ For example, Jewish traders found advantages in using the Russian language and following a looser code of religious observance.⁸⁵ Thus, the city became associated with indifference to religion. Popular Yiddish sayings arose to describe the city and its Jewish citizens, like “seven miles around Odessa burn the fires of hell” (in reference to the changing canons of tradition in Jewish education) and “to live like God in Odessa.”⁸⁶ Zipperstein writes: “In an effort to adapt their social positions to their new economic standing, some Jews, a decade before the Galician immigrants (who arrived in Odesa around the 1820s), had already abandoned certain religious rituals and practices and tried to make themselves appear less distinct and foreign to the non-Jews.”⁸⁷

The Jews from Brody and elsewhere in Galicia (then in Habsburg, Austria, and now western Ukraine) had come to dominate the grain trade, becoming the wealthiest of Odesa’s Jewry. They were more liberal and progressive in their religious observance than most, and by taking a leading role in the functions of middlemen, factory owners, managers, and agents, they worked closely with the Greek and Italian merchants who still controlled most of the grain export in the 1830s.⁸⁸ For the Brody Jews, the terminology of the German-based eighteenth-century Jewish enlightenment movement Haskalah was pervasive and acceptable. Although they were mostly driven by economic and social opportunities rather than ideas of enlightenment, like other maskilim, they were eager to connect Odesa’s Jewish population with the greater world they inhabited, without necessarily abandoning their Jewish identity. As early as 1826, immigrants from Galicia had opened a modern Jewish school, the first of its kind in all of Russia, to provide education in both secular and Jewish subjects.⁸⁹ Fifteen years later, Odesa became home to one of the first major modern synagogues in the Russian Empire, organized by Jews who officially declared themselves as “enlightened.”⁹⁰ The Florentine Gothic building of the Brody Synagogue proposed by the Milan-trained architect Francesco Morandi was built between 1863 and 1868 and became famous for its men’s and boys’ choir and the organs installed in 1909 above the Torah ark. Seats were sold to members of the congregation.

According to local lore, even non-Jewish Odesans attended services here, which were conducted by German-born Rabbi Simeon Leon Schwabacher, Odesa’s official rabbi from 1860 to 1888. Worshippers were drawn by the musical prayers conducted on Shabbat and on Jewish holidays. By the 1850s, “Haskalah ideas had expanded beyond the confines of maskilim circles and had touched the lives of many other Jews in the city.”⁹¹ In Odesa, Jews could enjoy a cultural life enriched by artistic performances from around the world. “Jews flocked to the opera house and were said to nearly monopolize its seats, usually those in the hall’s least expensive sections.”⁹² By the 1860s, many sat in the more expensive stalls and “even Jews with side curls attended.”⁹³ The love of music and theater was so notable that some characterized Odesa as “the musical city of the empire.”⁹⁴ Describing the “cosmopolitan soundscapes of Odesa” in the early 1900s, musicologist Anat Rubinstein notes, “the city’s musical soundscape was an amalgam of Russian, Jewish, and Ukrainian musical genres and foreign influences that were brought in from Italy, Greece, and other countries.”⁹⁵

Indeed, because of its coastal location, migration, trade, and other activities associated with the port, Odesa was more open to wider cultural developments than the rest of the Pale of Settlement. Throughout its history, the city nurtured numerous violinists who would become world famous, including Mischa Elman and David Oistrakh. Even in the economic decline of the empire’s later years, Odesa became associated with music (classical and popular, especially jazz), film, theater (especially comedy), and, until the consolidation of Stalinism in the early 1930s, journalism and fiction.⁹⁶

Figure 1.1. Brodskaya (Brody) Synagogue, later used to house city archives and officially given to the Chabad Lubavitch congregation by the city council in 2016. Photo by author.

Much of the socializing in early nineteenth-century Odesa took place in cafés and coffeehouses with “graceful verandas or tables simply placed under plantains and acacias on shady, picturesque streets.” Because of its “similarities with the French capital, . . . Odesits, typical of their tendency towards exaggeration, liked to call their city ‘Little Paris.’”⁹⁷ And Odesa continued to present enormous economic opportunities for Jews and others.⁹⁸ The city’s Jews quickly earned the reputation, both within and beyond the city, as an increasingly assimilated, modern, Europeanized, and Russified Jewish community whose range of institutions and tenor of communal life were self-consciously becoming more and more modernized and enlightened.⁹⁹

Jewish acculturation to Odesa’s progressive atmosphere only continued in the second half of the nineteenth century. Jews there benefited from the Reform schooling introduced by the maskilim but also attended non-Jewish institutions more often, and some received their education abroad. Thus, by midcentury, Zipperstein observes,

ninety percent of the city’s Jewish-owned shops were . . . open on the Sabbath; Jews carried money on Saturdays [and] chatted in cafes, and when rushing off to morning prayer, put out their still-smoldering cigarettes on the synagogue’s outer walls. Neither fathers nor sons went to synagogue regularly; religious observance in general was erratic, and the same individual might fast on a minor holy day and then desecrate the Sabbath. . . . Even in the 1830s pious Jews were spotted in the local opera house, despite the religious prohibition against listening to women sing, and large numbers of Jewish children were in attendance at the modern Jewish school . . . despite widespread Russian Jewish fear of secular education. By the 1850s, prayer in the major synagogue was designed along self-consciously maskilim and “Germanic” lines.¹⁰⁰

Odesa’s cultural and economic conditions provided grounds for a uniquely Odesan way of being Jewish. In 1886, every third student at Odesa University and more than 40 percent of all medical and law students were Jewish.¹⁰¹ By 1890, Jews made up 68 percent of all apprentice lawyers on the Odesa judicial circuit.¹⁰² There were also many Jews in medicine (30 percent), engineering (30 percent), and politics (nearly 50 percent of local Duma representatives).¹⁰³

Culturally, in addition to the arts, there were literary societies, libraries, and publishing houses.¹⁰⁴ The city was the birthplace of a modern Jewish press in Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew.¹⁰⁵ In the 1860s, it was the main hub for Jewish periodical publications. Famous journals Razsvet (Dawn), Sion (Zion), and Den’ (Day) appeared in Russian; Ha-Melits (The Advocate) and Kol mevaser (The Herald) were published in Hebrew; and Yiddish and maskilic books were promoted widely by local publishers. This climate attracted prominent Jewish writers who produced work in Hebrew, French, and Russian, among other languages.¹⁰⁶ Recent studies bring our attention to the idea of “Ukrainian Odesa” in literature of Jewish and non-Jewish writers.¹⁰⁷ As was the case in Saint Petersburg, Odesa’s Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment (the second-largest branch in the country) was active in spreading Russian language, culture, literature, and learning among Jews and “providing substantial ideological buttressing.”¹⁰⁸

In many accounts, we can see the connection between emancipation and Russification. One Odesa-based newspaper declared in the 1870s, “If one can speak of a center of the Jewish intelligentsia where self-emancipation is becoming a reality, this without doubt is Odessa.”¹⁰⁹ Among the prominent Odesa figures were the author and playwright Sholem Aleichem (Solomon Naumovich Rabinovitch); writer Mordekhai Ben-Ami (Mark Rabinovitch); one of the founders of modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature, Mendele Mocher-Sforim (Sholom Abramovitch); the physician, political activist, author of the famous pamphlet “Autoemancipation,” and head of the Odessa Committee (officially known as the Society for the Support of Jewish Farmers and Artisans in Syria and Palestine) Leon Pinsker; philosopher and publicist Ahad Ha’am; the Yiddish poet Haim-Nahman Bialik; the writer, editor, and publisher Yehoshua Hana Rawnitzki (pseudonym Eldad); and Talmudic scholar and Hebrew author Rav Tsa’ir (Rabbi Chaim Tchernowitz), who, in the early 1900s, founded his own yeshiva, which attracted a number of the city’s Jewish cultural luminaries. Many of these intellectuals used Russian more than Yiddish or Hebrew, preferring its practical benefits and prestige. Of those who “converted to the Pushkin faith,” Slezkine writes, “young Jews were not just learning Russian the same way they were learning Hebrew: they were learning Russian in order to replace Hebrew, as well as Yiddish, for good. Like German, Polish, or Hungarian in other high-culture areas, Russian had become the Hebrew of the secular world. . . . If the Russian world stood for speech, knowledge, freedom, and light, then the Jewish world represented silence, ignorance, bondage, and darkness.”¹¹⁰

Polonsky explains that many young Jewish gymnasium and university students were indeed attracted to the Russian intelligentsia and embraced their values by rejecting the Jewish backwardness and provinciality they saw in their own families. He gives the example of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who believed that his mother saved him from “Judean chaos” and the “talmudic thicket” through her love of Pushkin.¹¹¹ However, this use of Russian should not be exaggerated. The Jewish intelligentsia of the time spoke many languages, including Polish and German, and some still communicated in Yiddish.¹¹² In the early twentieth century (1911–12), only about 35 percent of Jewish students claimed that Russian was their primary language, and more than 40 percent claimed a good knowledge of Hebrew. Nor did the use of other languages mean that Jews drifted away from their Jewish identity or completely deviated from Jewish topics. Only 16 percent said they had no interest in Jewish matters.¹¹³

In a similar vein, not all Jewish residents were analyzing this process of modernization in ideological terms. Many of the city’s Jews took advantage of new trends, adopting them into their pattern of living for practical reasons. But even if Odesa was not a center of traditional religious practice—like Vilna or Lviv—most Jews practiced Judaism.¹¹⁴ Even those at the outer edge of assimilation still partook in Jewish practices, at least nominally.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the city was home to some seventy synagogues and prayer houses, each requiring the presence of at least ten men for daily prayer. Most of the synagogues occupied small rented rooms or spaces donated by city landlords, but ten of them were in specially built structures.¹¹⁵ Among the more famous congregations were the communities of the large Orthodox synagogue Beit Hakneset Hagadol (established in 1795–96) and the Brody Synagogue, the first choir synagogue in Russia (1840). Generally, Odesa’s prayer houses were subdivided by professions, and congregants adjusted their working hours for observance.

In the early nineteenth century, Odesa “was the most ‘un-Jewish’ of Jewish cities from the traditional point of view, and the most ‘Jewish’ from the perspective of non-traditional Jewish life and attitudes.”¹¹⁶ Traveling by train through Poland and Galicia in 1898, Vladimir Jabotinsky, a writer and Zionist activist, writes in his journal, “I had not seen either the side-curls or the kapota, nor such wretched poverty. Nor had I seen gray bearded, old, and respected Jews, taking off their hats when they spoke to the gentile ‘squire’ in the street.”¹¹⁷ Unlike in other centers of Jewish life in the Pale, in Odesa “the less traditional Jews, maskilim and acculturated Jews were the standard bearers of their community.”¹¹⁸ Women’s participation in Jewish education was also three times as high in the southwest of the empire, mostly because of the role of Odesa.

While some distinguished Hasidim, like the tzaddik (righteous religious leader) Dovid Twersky, were joyfully welcomed when visiting the city, “Hasidic wonderworkers were isolated and scorned, approached only by the poorest, most unfortunate women; and so they viewed the city as the source of ‘neither gold nor fame,’ indeed as an ‘empire of hell.’”¹¹⁹ According to Osip Rabinovich, an Odesan notary, journalist, and editor of the Russian-language Jewish newspaper Razsvet (Dawn), writing in the 1860s, “Hasidism perhaps still flourished in tiny isolated townlets, but not in large cities like Odessa. All of Jewish Odessa . . . had shown an unmistakable willingness to move forward with the times.”¹²⁰ Indeed, the Brody Synagogue had become “the model for Jewish prayer in the city, and the older Beit Knesset Ha-Gadol was transformed in its image.”¹²¹

Odesa continued to grow economically throughout the nineteenth century, with the abolition of serfdom and commercialization of agriculture.¹²² Jews came to control 70 percent of the grain export, and Jewish brokerages were handling more than half of the city’s total export. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Odesa’s 160,000 Jews constituted more than 30 percent of the city’s 511,000 inhabitants, forming an integral part of its economy and society. The economic opportunities were often illusionary for the many impoverished Jews, and of course the city had a great deal of Jewish poverty.¹²³ At the turn of the twentieth century, one-third of the city’s Jews signed up for Passover relief (food distribution organized by Jewish philanthropic organizations around the Passover holiday). Jews were present in all spheres of society, including the underworld. For an analysis of ethnic markers in Odesa’s crime, see an important article by Gerasimov.¹²⁴ They owned many of the brothels in Odesa.¹²⁵ Jews were also involved in smuggling illegal and radical literature, and many Jewish students were prominent in Odesa’s populist circles at the end of the nineteenth century.

In the late 1800s, Odesa had become the fourth-largest city in the Russian Empire (after Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and Warsaw), but it had started to decline in production and trade.¹²⁶ Political pressures were also mounting. The infamous and reactionary May Laws (also known as the Temporary or Ignat’ev Laws of 1882) were implemented to limit Jewish activity and economic advancement and guarantee that Jews could “no longer exploit non-Jewish neighbors.”¹²⁷ These laws were also a way to appease Russians who might turn to revolutionary activity. Jews could no longer reside in villages, and they were forbidden from purchasing land outside the towns—and from working on Sundays, which hindered their economic advantage over Christians.¹²⁸ These laws weren’t fully implemented in Odesa, and Jews from the countryside within the Pale continued to migrate to the Black Sea area.¹²⁹ Although Jews departed from their traditions to assimilate into Odesa’s society, Jews and gentiles did not mix socially.¹³⁰ Jabotinsky noted that while growing up in the 1880s and 1890s, he didn’t have a single close gentile friend, but he would reminisce poetically about the joyous days in a lighthearted city by the sea where inhabitants “babbled in a dozen languages.”¹³¹

Tragically, anti-Jewish sentiment also grew in nineteenth century Odesa and the city experienced anti-Jewish pogroms and riots in 1821, 1849, 1859, 1871, 1881, and 1905 (which greatly influenced the development of the Jewish nationalist movement in the city as well as Jewish migration from the city and the empire).¹³² These upheavals mainly resulted from a growing commercial rivalry and animosity between Greeks, who had previously dominated the grain trade, and the Jews who were taking over important positions in the industry.¹³³ But as Humphrey explains, “sometimes, it was wealth, or privilege or perceived economic advantage that was attacked, rather than ‘Jews’ as such.”¹³⁴ However, the pogrom that swept through the city in the context of the Russian Revolution of 1905 was of a different order: some 400 Jews (and 100 non-Jews) were killed; approximately 300 people, mostly Jews, were injured; and more than 1,600 Jewish houses, apartments, and stores were damaged.¹³⁵ At that time, no other city in the Russian Empire experienced a pogrom comparable in destruction and violence.¹³⁶ Nearly 50,000 Jews left the city.¹³⁷ In this way, Odesa fit a predictable pattern of the empire more generally. The worsening situation of the Jews and the radicalization of the larger Russian society provoked a large-scale emigration—between 1880 and 1924, more than 2 million Jews fled the Russian Empire to Palestine, Argentina, and South Africa, but mostly to the United States.¹³⁸

While there was an outflow of Russia’s Jews from the rest of the country, Odesa recovered the post-1905 population losses, and its Jewish population continued to grow well into the twentieth century. Prior to the 1917 revolution, the city became home to a great many revolutionary and political organizations, turning it into one of the most active centers of Zionist activity in the empire. It was after the 1881 pogrom that Leon Pinsker wrote his famous pamphlet “Autoemancipation,” arguing that “anti-Semitism was a disease endemic to Europe” and urging Jews to immigrate to Zion.¹³⁹ Pinsker’s call was taken up by other Odesan activists, including Jabotinsky, whose “revisionist Zionism” was committed to a Jewish homeland on both banks of the Jordan River (not in Uganda, as others proposed).¹⁴⁰ Many Zionist efforts were initiated by the Palestine Committee founded in Odesa in the 1880s, which worked to relocate Jews from the Russian Empire to the territories of what eventually became the State of Israel. In the early 1900s, Odesa was commonly known as the Gateway to Zion for the frequent voyages made from its port to Jaffa, including the famous 1919 crossing of the SS Ruslan, which arrived in Jaffa carrying 617 Jews from Russia and was considered the beginning of the third aliyah (Jewish migration to Israel). Until 1927, ships conveyed many Jews from all over Russia to Palestine.¹⁴¹

Between 1917 and 1921, when the Soviet regime came to power, the city changed hands nine times and suffered a major outflow of its population.¹⁴² These turbulent conditions presented Ukraine with the rare opportunity to declare independence, which lasted from 1918 to 1921, when the three-way civil war between the Whites, the Reds, and the different national forces ended with the consolidation of Soviet power in much of the territory of the former Russian Empire, including Ukraine.¹⁴³ In the short-lived independent Ukrainian state, Jews were granted full national-cultural autonomy and allowed to establish their own houses of education and receive social benefits from the government, which issued its currency (the karbovanets) with a Yiddish inscription on the banknote as a way to win Jewish support in its struggle for independence.¹⁴⁴ While the Russian civil war brought heightened anti-Jewish violence elsewhere, Odesa largely escaped that fate.

Soviet Years

The 1917 revolution and the Soviet consolidation of power introduced freedom of speech, press, and assembly for all citizens, and Jews received an array of political and civil rights. Integration was encouraged by the abolition of all previous czarist restrictions, and Jews experienced upward mobility as a result of full-fledged citizenship.¹⁴⁵ Jews constituted part of the Soviet ruling elite and became part of the Russian-speaking intelligentsia. They were no longer defined as a religious minority but as one of many Soviet nationalities. Some Jews eagerly embraced the idea of a classless society. The Soviet regime allowed them to participate in the socialist society without prior discrimination and quotas. This sense of equality brought many Jews eager for mobility to the front lines of Communist Party activity.

In the aftermath of the WWI, Soviet Jewry made up the third-largest Jewish community in the world—in 1926, more than 2.6 million claimed Jewish nationality. That number rose to over 3 million by 1939, and historians estimate that in both years of the census, an additional 300,000 Jews claimed another nationality.¹⁴⁶ The 1926 census shows that Odesa’s population at the time was 39 percent Russian, 36.7 percent Jewish, and 17.6 percent Ukrainian.¹⁴⁷

In the interwar period, Soviet Jews officially had full equality, and intermarriage, which had previously required conversion, became more frequent. By 1936, approximately 42 percent of Jewish marriages in the Russian Federation, 15 percent in Ukraine, and almost 13 percent in Belarus were exogamous.¹⁴⁸ But while there was integration in the Soviet order, independent Jewish political organizations outside the Communist Party were banned, and religious Jews and their institutions were stripped of any meaningful way to contribute to Jewish life. In Odesa, there were campaigns against Jewish schools, synagogues, and other religious and cultural organizations.¹⁴⁹ This is not to say that state policy toward Jews was consistent, nor that all Jews accommodated themselves to the Soviet project. Indeed, as policies vacillated and were sometimes contradictory, many Jews found other ways to express their Jewishness.¹⁵⁰ All Soviet men and women were making such accommodations in some way: “Living in socialism according to the perceived rules made for its share of surprises . . . new categories of thinking suddenly appeared, old ones were modified; nothing stood still.”¹⁵¹

As historian of East European Jewry Elisa Bemporad points out, the transformation of core Jewish life occurred at a slower pace in historically Jewish centers in the Pale than it did in the Russian interior.¹⁵² This was certainly true for Odesa, a city on the edge of the state. Even as organized Jewish life was closing under pressure from the government, members of Odesa’s large Jewish population, approximately 180,000 to 200,000 in the interwar years, were still making their mark on city life, first and foremost on the Odesan language, regarded as a mixture of Ukrainian, Russian, and Yiddish. The city’s Jewish density fostered in its Jewish residents self-confidence and comfort about their Jewish identity, an atmosphere shared by other towns and cities with a similar demographic, like Minsk, Gomel (Homel), Berdichev, Zhitomir, and Vinnitsa, where Jews accounted for more than 30 percent of the population.¹⁵³

Soviet policy toward the Jews initially focused on their assimilation into the new socialist world. Lenin’s early policies sought to integrate Jews into society by supporting a specifically socialist Jewish identity; this integration effort included the promotion of Yiddish language and culture and the creation of the evsektsiia, the Jewish section of the Communist Party.¹⁵⁴ However, Stalin’s Great Turn of 1929–32 was marked by an intensification of terror, often directed at the Jews.¹⁵⁵ Stalinist pressure banned religious practice, closed religious institutions, and repressed Zionist activity and Hebrew education. Jews became persecuted as members of the intelligentsia and as “rootless cosmopolitans.” They were among the many Soviet citizens (estimated between 600,000 and 2 million) who lost their lives in Stalin’s terror campaign of the late 1930s. But in the midst of the extraordinary purges, Bemporad reminds us, ordinary life continued for Jews in the Soviet Union; even in the years of Stalin’s atrocities, Jewish identity was an evolving project, at once political, social, and cultural.¹⁵⁶

If the Jews in the greater Soviet Union “seemed much more Soviet than the rest of the Soviet Union,” the reintroduction of internal passports in 1932 concentrated the nature of the challenge: how to assimilate culturally while legally categorized as alien or “other.”¹⁵⁷ Being legally defined as a Jew, as inscribed in one’s passport under the heading “nationality,” exposed Jews to quotas, limitations, and other official and unofficial tactics of discrimination and antisemitism. Political scientist Volodymyr Kulyk notes that “the category of ‘nationality,’ which was introduced during the 1920s policy of ‘indigenization’ with the aim of establishing ethnicity that may not have been congruent with current language practice as a result of tsarist Russification, later came to be reclassified as primordial and, therefore, unchangeable, to be determined by the nationality of one’s parents (unless they had different nationalities).”¹⁵⁸ As a result, Jewish citizens took various routes to obscure their backgrounds or to highlight their assimilation and thereby avoid conflict: many Jews changed their names; in mixed families, children were registered according to the nationality of the non-Jewish parent; and some families simply never revealed that they were Jewish.¹⁵⁹ A number of Jews I met in Odesa in the mid-2000s had only recently learned of their Jewish lineage. It is in this context that Bemporad emphasizes that many Jews “attempted to walk a fine line between accepted Soviet behavior and social norms and expressions of Jewish particularity.”¹⁶⁰

In the absence of a more traditional basis in religion, Soviet Jews had their own markers of identity, linked to Russian culture and Soviet reality and later constrained by Stalin’s terror. But many Jews also embraced the Soviet ethnic Jewish identity and regarded themselves as Soviet citizens beyond all.

World War II and the Odesa Massacre

In June 1941, Germany invaded the USSR. The “Great Patriotic War,” as the eastern front in World War II became known in Russia, took the lives of 27 million Soviet citizens and left vast numbers permanently maimed. An estimated 1.4 million Jews perished among the 5.5 million (or by some accounts 7 million) killed as a result of Nazi policies in the territories that made up Ukraine (including Transcarpathia and Crimea). Nearly 350,000 were evacuated out of Odesa by the Soviets.¹⁶¹ By some estimates, 80,000 to 90,000 Jews remained in the city when it was besieged by Romanian troops, allies of Nazi Germany, in August 1941.¹⁶² The attack lasted seventy-three days. Ion Antonescu (prime minister of Romania at the time) wrote, “The War in general, and the battles in Odessa in particular, proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Jew is the devil . . . hence our enormous casualties. Without the Jewish commissars, we would have been in Odessa long ago.”¹⁶³

When Odesa finally fell to the Romanian troops on October 16, 1941, it was declared the capital of Transnistria. Romanian officials ordered all Jews to present themselves for official registration.¹⁶⁴ Between three thousand and four thousand Jews were taken directly to jail, where most were tortured, and then driven to the seaside and shot.¹⁶⁵ After the retreating Soviet armies bombed the headquarters of the Tenth Romanian Division, killing General Ion Glogojanu on October 22, 1941, the mass killings of Jews intensified. “I have taken steps to hang Jews and Communists in the public square in Odessa,” reported General Constantin Trestioreanu, Glogojanu’s successor.¹⁶⁶ (An explosion in Kyiv a few weeks earlier had resulted in thirty-three thousand Jews being shot by German SS and Ukrainian guards in the ravine at Babyn Yar.)¹⁶⁷

The Romanian forces killed 15,000 to 20,000 Jews in Odesa in reprisal, most of them shot or hanged in the streets of the city.¹⁶⁸ Hundreds of dead bodies were left hanging along Aleksandrovsky Prospect, one of Odesa’s central streets.¹⁶⁹ Romanian officials “ordered the execution of the remaining hostages”; “close to 19,000 Jews were gathered into four barracks on the outskirts of Odessa and then shot or burned alive.”¹⁷⁰ Thousands of other Jews were crammed into jails, where many died in horrific circumstances. The rest of Odesa’s Jewish residents were ordered into Slobodka, the newly created ghetto on the outskirts of town.¹⁷¹ The Romanians didn’t create extermination facilities in the region, but they did create an array of camps and ghettos where Odesa’s Jews and many non-Jews and Roma from Bessarabia and Transnistria were sent.¹⁷²

Some non-Jewish Odesans risked their lives to hide Jews in their homes or help them escape the city with forged documents.¹⁷³ But some members of the local police and ethnic German volunteers who formed their own SS police collaborated with the Romanian regime, helping the occupiers in their execution of Jews and others.¹⁷⁴ When Romanian officials issued an order that “those guilty of hiding Jews would be put to death,” most of Odesa’s remaining Jews were forced into the ghetto—for the first time in history, restricted from living in any other parts of the city.¹⁷⁵ In the winter of 1942, tens of thousands were deported to the Berezovka region in Transnistria, specifically to three camps: Bogdanovka, Akhmetchetka, and Domanevka. The evacuation began on foot and in horse-drawn carts in below-freezing temperatures. Those who tried to escape or who fell from exhaustion, hunger, or illness were shot on the spot; as a result, bodies lined the streets.¹⁷⁶ In Bogdanovka, all Jews were shot by Romanian and Ukrainian police. Thousands of Jews were shot at Akhmetchetka and Domanevka, and many died en route or during imprisonment from typhus or starvation as a result of neglect.¹⁷⁷ Those who survived were forced into slave labor by an official decree passed in December 1943 by Transnistria officials, which specified that all Jews between the ages of twelve and sixty had to work in specific jobs and that no work assignments (with the exception of special permission) were to be made in the city of Odesa.¹⁷⁸

Charles King points out that killing Jews was not the primary goal of the Romanian troops as they headed east, but “being a Jew became a surrogate for being an enemy of the state” and “the lines between Communist, Jew, partisan, refugee, and simple inconvenience were hazy and often nonexistent.”¹⁷⁹ Sometimes Jewishness depended on blood, and other times, it depended on faith. Despite the initial goals of Romanians’ collaboration with the Nazis in the region, the execution of Jews became a plan and a reality. During the Romanian occupation from October 1941 to April 1944, an estimated 120,000 to 150,000 Jews perished in Odesa and in the region’s death camps.¹⁸⁰ In only four days, 48,000 Jews were murdered in the Bogdanovka camp, “a record unsurpassed . . . even by the death factories of Majdanek or Auschwitz.”¹⁸¹ In Akhmetchetka, 4,000 captives died of hunger. Most of the 18,000 Jews in Domanevka were also exterminated.¹⁸²

From the time of the Romanian invasion in October 1941 to the day of the city’s liberation in April 1944, “the beautiful city of Odessa was transformed into a nightmare of terror, blood and pain.”¹⁸³ Eighty percent of the Jews who had remained in Odesa were annihilated.¹⁸⁴ One Odesan later wrote, “The Jews who died in the first days of the occupation were the fortunate ones.”¹⁸⁵ In the greater Odesa region, the prewar Jewish population was reduced by 40 percent,¹⁸⁶ and in total, Transnistria (the name given by the Antonescu regime to the territory of Ukraine between the Dniestr and the Southern Buh rivers occupied by Romanian troops) became the graveyard of some 250,000 Jews and 12,000 Roma, with many of the Jewish victims having been deported from Bukovina and Bessarabia, and many of the Roma victims coming from Romania proper.¹⁸⁷

Postwar Odesa

After the war, many surviving Jewish Odesans remained silent about their experiences, fearing that their survival would be interpreted as evidence of collaboration with the Germans or Romanians. Indeed, many Odesans had denounced others at the onset of the Romanian invasion. What would become known as the Holocaust, as I discuss in chapter 5, was overshadowed by the dominant narrative of Soviet suffering under Nazi brutality. For example, a monument erected not far from Odesa to commemorate the Jews who perished in the area was never unveiled, on the grounds that “Holocaust memorials must not honor Jews as such, but only Soviet citizens in general.”¹⁸⁸ In this way Jewish tragedies were downplayed, as were Jewish achievements, and mostly left unmentioned in official Soviet accounts of the war.¹⁸⁹

Odesa’s population after the war rose with those returning from the front or from evacuation; some moved to the city on work placement orders or seeking to escape an even more miserable existence elsewhere. Legally and illegally, many newcomers occupied the houses of those who never returned. For Jews, life in postwar Odesa was undoubtedly difficult, although it’s a matter of debate whether they suffered the same level of persecution as Jews experienced in Moscow. Jews in Russia’s capital, for instance, were targeted in Stalin’s purges in the late 1940s and early 1950s against “cosmopolitan” intelligentsia as well as in the so-called Doctors’ Plot, when Jewish doctors were arrested and charged with plotting the murder of party leaders.¹⁹⁰ Scholars have speculated about the planned deportations of Jews organized by Stalin in 1953, but those allegations remain undocumented. As author Joseph Rubenstein argues in his book The Last Days of Stalin, it’s impossible to reach a definitive conclusion about Stalin’s ultimate plans, and yet it’s obvious that the antisemitic campaign was gathering momentum in the press and the mood of the population.¹⁹¹ Indeed, at the time of the Doctors’ Plot, two hundred Jewish students were summarily expelled from Odesa University.¹⁹²

Following Stalin’s death in 1953, many of the charges accusing Jews and others of acting against the state were dropped, but the overall climate of censorship remained in place, as did the anti-Jewish quotas. The official Soviet policy toward Jews was “characterized as an attitude of silence” and “mild discrimination,” which had, to some extent, become normalized.¹⁹³ Under Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, Jews remained without much upward mobility, as compared to the prewar era.¹⁹⁴ They became experts in the “rules of the game,” including rules that were unspoken yet no less real.¹⁹⁵ For example, Elena, whose story appears in the next chapter, achieved higher education and a career of her choice by using a Ukrainian name to mask her Jewish lineage. Others spoke of dealing with the system through bribery.¹⁹⁶ For Soviet citizens, “ordinary actions undertaken as part of daily life had the effect of realigning, even if only slightly, what might be called the landscape of possibility.”¹⁹⁷

Although antisemitism was undeniably part of their experience, for many Jews it was simply accepted as a facet of everyday life and, in effect, normalized.¹⁹⁸ A few middle-aged Jews like Marina, whom we meet in chapter 7, claimed that they never experienced discrimination at all; in their view, this was due to Odesa being a “Jewish city.” Others declared that discrimination made them work harder and enhanced the sense of survival necessary in many life circumstances.

Despite the changes in policy toward Jews that took place under Stalin’s successors, Soviet Yiddish culture never recovered its prewar vibrancy, partly because by the late 1950s, barely 20 percent of Soviet Jews declared Yiddish as their mother tongue.¹⁹⁹ But one must not assume that the abandonment of Yiddish for Russian led to a disappearance of Jewish culture. As historian Jarrod Tanny demonstrates, the city’s myth has always had a very strong influence on the image of Odesa as a “Jewish city”: “Yiddish idioms and inflections pervaded the Russian spoken in Odessa, and the writers, musicians, journalists, and comedians from the city infused their work with Jewish characters, humor, and folkloric motifs.”²⁰⁰ Odesa’s history illustrates a Jewish culture surviving and growing after the transition to Russian language had taken place, although it was severely damaged in Stalin’s anticosmopolitan campaign.²⁰¹

Emigration became possible for Odesan Jews in the 1970s and again in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Some emigrants were fleeing discrimination, but many were simply looking for a better life abroad. Some of the ex-Soviet Jewish immigrants I met in the United States and Israel during my fieldwork and on other occasions drew a distinction between the role of the state’s socialist ideals and the ordinary lives of its citizens. Similarly, in literary scholar Maurice Friedberg’s interviews of former residents of Odesa who left the city in the 1970s, most of his interlocutors “spoke of their native town with surprising warmth, affection, and considerable nostalgia.”²⁰²

Such nostalgia can be explained by the fact that Jews in Odesa and elsewhere were unlikely to analyze their lives solely through the lens of being Jewish and more likely to do so by examining the full array of positions they held in both their personal and professional lives. For instance, a person’s career served as a significant marker of identity during Soviet times: your work history was so integral that it appeared in almost any official document.²⁰³ On numerous occasions, elderly Jews I was interviewing would proudly pull out their work history books to tell me of their life achievements.

Conclusion

It’s impossible to explore questions of identity without encountering invocations of the past. A person’s claim to being a korenoi Odesit (native of Odesa) or a nastoyashi Odesit (real Odesan) is strongly bound up with that individual’s connection to Odesa’s history and geographic location. The term korenoi actually means “rooted” in Russian. Locals often used the term “real Odesit” to compliment long-term visitors and nonnative residents who exhibit the qualities of an Odesan attitude to life, who know and appreciate the city’s social and historical settings, and who enjoy the Odesan language, cuisine, and even humor. After I’d been in Odesa for a while, my friends sensed my attachment to the city in the way I used Odesan expressions or bargained for goods as the locals do. Half-jokingly, they’d call me “a real Odesitka.”

Two decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Odesa is no longer Soviet; it is problematically Russian, barely Jewish, and increasingly Ukrainian. But this kaleidoscopic recombining of Odesa’s different histories has always been part of the city’s life. These historical entanglements are in large part what are traced as the rest of the book unfolds and show how the process of the social, economic, and political transformations witnessed in Odesa and the larger Ukrainian nation—including historical narratives that are often edited to justify political action—play out there. As an elderly couple I knew in Odesa would say, the city’s Orthodox rabbis and Ukrainian politicians both “recast the story of the city” to paint it in colors that served their purpose. Similar to the political elites of newly independent states like Ukraine, who “generate a sense of common territoriality and shared history in order to consolidate political communities,” Odesa’s religious leaders were engaged in struggles of community formation and contested identity.²⁰⁴ For Odesa’s Jewish intelligentsia, being part of their city’s historical narrative and knowing its history helped them define their particularities and separate themselves from others. This was evident in the ways in which local religious Jews distinguished themselves from the foreign religious emissaries who occupied the high ranks of Jewish organized life but weren’t necessarily recognized as leaders. These newly observant Jews felt that although the foreign emissaries knew more about how to be a “proper Jew,” they knew much less about the city’s own Jewish history, and thus couldn’t truly represent their community.

During my time in Odesa, I saw history being disputed, defended, invented, and manipulated in conversations and in cultural displays presented at different times and for different audiences. The history this chapter recounts is always part of whatever new story is being told. A sense of history and a sense of place are vital for our understanding of what was lost, what is revisited, and what is being re-created in Odesa, as it is elsewhere in the world.²⁰⁵