If I lived at the market.....

I am in Dnipropetrovsk, site of one of the largest markets in Ukraine. In addition to teaching, meeting with colleagues and running an English conversation club, I spend time in the Azerka market. Ostensibly, I do this to improve my Russian – the dominant language in this eastern Ukrainian town. Since both my purpose (to look or buy) and theirs (to sell) are clear, the scene is perfect for practicing a few Russian phrases over and over. “What is this?” “How much is this?” and so on.

The market covers an enormous area – several large city blocks – and sells everything from meat to whey, socks to furniture, crafts to raspberry bushes. Babushkas are there side by side with Azerbaijani pomegranate sellers and bored hired vendors. As I wander around, the patterns of activity continue. Do they ever stop? Even when the market is closed, vendors are moving goods in and out, purchasing stock from other merchandisers, settling up accounts, gossiping with others. It seems like the Azerka market never sleeps, which allows the impression that hundreds of people live at the market.

If I lived at the market, who would I be? Would I be the six-year-old who runs to get a snack for his mother? The person from the Carpathians whose brother-in-law’s cousin’s doctor’s son painted the little boxes, personally? The broom-maker? The woman who sells tea to the vendors from a metal cart, and picks up the latest news as she stirs heaps of sugar into the plastic cup? Would I be the one in a blue apron who sweeps around the “tyalets”? Perhaps the strong sixteen-year-old who is happy to demonstrate his biceps as he delivers huge dollies piled with bagged merchandise around corners and down alleys to his aunt’s stall. The hunched woman in her 90s, dressed in five layers, dispensing dried herbal medicines and advice. The dog who waits at the end of the day for scraps of lard from a woman who makes this task her daily charity. The sparrow dodging the metal roof rafters of the dried fruit section. Would I be the sweater seller who doesn’t look up from her dog-eared paperback as customers enter her tiny booth? Would I be the one who fries delicious cheese pastries for a steady stream of patient customers? Would I be the charming gray-haired university graduate who assures each customer, “This coat would fit you”? The vendor with hands worn red who never forgets a face, “Do you want some more lavash . . . .how was it”? The wholesaler who comes to each of her vendors once a week to monitor sales and inventory? The armed guard in a bullet-proof vest? If I lived at the market, would I be the woman in the scarf who displays three horseradish roots and four eggs? If I lived at the market, who would I be?

Map of Ukraine with Cities Visited (Click on Map to Enlarge)

Ukraine Bulletin #14

June 1, 2007

Odessa

There are three ways to say Odessa. First, you say “Odessa”, then smile, then sigh. The second way is to sigh, smile, and say “Odessa”. The third way is to smile, say “Odessa” and then sigh.

Odessa is all of those things. It is endlessly delightful, and if a city can be nostalgic, it is. It is a set of characters on a real life stage. It is a cluster of neighborhoods and networks, crimes and catacombs, smugglers and con artists, and gorgeous happy little children.

Everything seems possible in Odessa, and Odessa makes everything better than it is. It is an exaggeration, and a pleasant one, a wry joke, a secret bargain. Odessa enhances people, and even we seemed better than we normally are, while we were there. The city provides a glow to daily interactions, as does a wedding day, or a light snowfall, or a beautiful garden.

While here in Ukraine, I have thought a lot about how settings affect people – their learning, their openness, their eyes, their thoughts. I have felt for a long time that the academic setting affects the learning at an academy or school. This is not a theory I have proved, but rather an argument in favor of respectful, clean, ordered and artistically pleasing teaching environments. Learning in the Wind River Range of Wyoming last summer was always enhanced and enriched by the setting – a trout stream or a mountain or a crag. My supposition is that it is not simply a “visual” effect, but that the lovely and grand setting of a chapel or a reading room or a university green affects the energy of both students and teachers. Perhaps our sense of perception is piqued by what we see and feel in such settings. Perhaps we simply pay more attention because honoring life demands that we do so.

We only know one person in Odessa, a student Fulbrighter. We did not let her know we were coming. We met her twice in three days, without planning to. There were two girls cradling a black box – the size for fairy slippers – at an outdoor café. Eager to share in their secret, I peered in. A turtle, “Masha”, who travels with them, banked with cabbage leaves and carrot slices. Lisa and Sasha, turtle caretakers, were delighted to make Masha a model of terrapinic beauty. They were adorable in their own right, and gladly posed for the camera.

Yet, behind me was the majestic cream colored Opera House, all gargoyles, dome, columns, sculpture. Should I turn the camera there? At another angle was a film crew gathering a crowd as the actors appeared in wedding garb – should I turn my camera there? For, just as the vows were the most solemn, a wild fight erupted between bride and groom. Mary Belenky was quietly relating a fascinating story. At the critical moment of her story, she gasped. “He is ripping off her dress!”.

We turned to see a naked bride ferociously disrobing her groom. As they stood in the heat, in scant panties and not much more, we realized this was no Disney film. Horrified, we forgot our conversation, and gaped while we watched the director ask the cameras to “cut” the action and call for a break. Bride and groom redressed (odd word in this case) and prepared for Take Two. Police kept gawkers (and Bob’s tall conspicuous camera-bearing self) from approaching too closely, but twenty-year-old boys hid behind bushes for a closer look. We tried to concentrate on the waiters at the restaurant, who, ever vigilant, gently laid blankets over the shoulders of lovely women who were cold in the soft breeze. It was no use. After repeated lessons, we learned that the gown and tuxedo were attached with Velcro in the back, and ripped off rather easily. Her veil still covered her lovely breasts, until that little wind blew it aside.

Bob returned. “Not my kind of photography, really.” It was at once riveting and disheartening, lovely and mildly pornographic, and the couple’s anger (roused for each take) jarred with the lovely setting of plane trees and topiary. The most disciplined waiters in the world now gathered discreetly in the café doorway, timing their eyes for the scene’s salient part.

Mary wisely waited to finish her story another day.

There were many unforgettable vignettes: a beach walk, a morning promenade, an inspection of the port, wading in the Black Sea, a tour of the only functioning synagogue in Odessa, reminiscences about Jewish aid organizations (JOINT/JDC) which, funded largely by Americans, helped Ukraine’s surviving Jews during and after the famine of the early 30s, and continues to do so today. We saw crumbling baroque architecture, shaded city parks filled with people, each bench holding a conversation, mother and daughter strolling arm in arm, men playing chess or passing along information. We ate well, choosing from the cuisines of the 100 different nationalities in Odessa. We smiled. We sighed.

“In Odessa, Jews had a chance,” Mikhail paused, “they had a chance here”. This poignant phrase is oddly hopeful-sounding, and it has been an inspiration for my thoughts about Odessa. Mikhail is the erudite and lively director of a young Jewish Museum in Odessa. As a new city just 200 years ago, Odessa quickly gathered immigrants of dozens of nationalities from both east and west, drawn to the business potential of a port city. An early governor devoted 20 percent of the city’s revenue from the port (for a few decades it was a “free” port) to beautification of the city. City planners set up clusters of neighborhoods around lovely open parks, figuring that with so many ethnicities, families would feel most comfortable living with “their own kind”.

To describe the effect of the wars on Odessa would take a volume or two. But the cores of some of these ethnic neighborhoods survive. Few churches or synagogues remain after Stalin (a nickname that means “steel man”) ordered their destruction or reuse and banned all religious practice. As elsewhere, rituals continued in homes. A city which once had 78 synagogues (a dozen or so of these were major buildings) serving a Jewish population estimated at 200,000-300,000 – around 50 percent (estimates vary)of the prewar population of Odessa – the Odessan Jewish community now has only two. Estimates of the number of remaining Jews in the city run about 30,000. We saw four churches – too few for such a large population. It is impossible to get precise estimates of how many Jews emigrated, how many were deported or transported and how many were killed. Who knows how many assimilated?

Now, just three percent of Odessa’s one million inhabitants are Jewish. They are mostly orthodox Jews, and remain divided into sects (Brody, Ashkenazi, Lubavitchers, Hasidic, Or Sameah and so on). The Palestinian (later Zionist) movement began in Odessa, and since the 1980s, when Jewish Ukrainians were allowed to emigrate to Israel, many did so, from villages and towns, as well as from Odessa. As one guidebook notes, the fact that the Jewish population predominated in Odessa during the early decades of the 20th century means that the city’s tone of tolerance and piety, music and literature, as well as business and family, were influenced by Jewish culture of that time. That influence seems to continue today. Certain street scenes, where older women are sure of things, and smiling older men lean their faces together to hold intimate discussions, transported us to memories of the Bronx, or Brooklyn, or New Jersey, or Brighton Beach.

Long limestone tunnels – 2,000 kilometers of catacombs – run under the entire city and extend out 20 kilometers to the suburbs, providing safe havens for smugglers, the persecuted, and, during WWII, for partisans who resisted the occupation of Odessa by Nazis and their Romanian enforcers. The great open Black Sea provides a stunning contrast to the dank, dark cool tunnels, and gazing at Odessa’s Opera House and lighthouse from the stern of a passenger ship was the last vision many émigrés held of European landscape and culture.

“Why didn’t I die in 1910?” Behind this Odessan lament is an irrepressible life force, quite similar to Sholom-Aleichem’s Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof”: “La chaim”. Odessa’s trouble with Russia accelerated in her 1905 workers’ rebellion, immortalized in black and white in the film, “Battleship Potemkin”. Yes, we walked down the stairs. Two thousand protesters were murdered on and around the steps by Russian troops.

Sholom-Aleichem, Yiddish author, was born in central Ukraine, and the village on which he based his story can still be found there. But his daughter lived in Odessa after her marriage, and he visited Odessa many times and lived there for three years, one of hundreds of writers, playwrights, poets, philosophers, musicians, dancers, actors and artists whose lives enriched the city. His daughter had a daughter who remembers these visitors to their home, and who emigrated with her parents to the United States and took the name of Bel Kaufman when she wrote Up the Down Staircase.

Lunches where we languished over delectable food with Mary and Bob Belenky were the highlights of this incredible visit. We still can’t quite get Odessa out of our minds – and why would we want to?

LBG

Ukraine Bulletin #13

May 31, 2007

Khmelnetsky

I was invited to speak at the Khmelnetsky National University by Angela Rozova, a Fulbright alum herself (she taught in Iowa a few years ago). On the day we traveled to Khmelnetsky we had time between trains to meet briefly with Ella Reznikova, husband Bill and wonderful friend Temo in Kiev – right in the main square from where television news cameras broadcast pictures of bored flag- drooping “protestors” who smile as they try to look angry. They are paid; it is hot.

The day we were in Kiev we did not see any protestors. It was the day that police (controlled by Yanukovich and the Rada) entered the Prosecutor General’s office to protect him from the president, Yushchenko, who had fired him (are you still with me?) because he refused to investigate three constitutional court judges for misconduct/fraud, and because he never resigned his seat in the Rada when he was appointed Prosecutor General.

There was no sign of any trouble at all in Kiev. People ate ice cream, the market boomed, children carried balloons, young men and women supped on warmish beer, heat melted the asphalt, we dashed for shade, sweating buckets. After querying everyone we know, we can comfortably assert that Ukrainians are more worried about this unseasonable three weeks of unrelenting heat (95 degrees in the shade, but who’s counting?) than they are about the constitutional “crisis”. Troops were mobilized as “partisans” for both sides in this gritty standoff. On Saturday, President Yushchenko ordered 3,500 of his most loyal new police toward Kiev. They were stopped outside of Kiev by their colleagues, who remained loyal to Yanukovich (their boss’s boss just 48 hours earlier) – the traffic police.

I’m not a lawyer, but since no lawyers or judges are willing to come to firm decisions on these events, I’ll hazard that mobilizing troops and police for political purposes, as well as the President’s takeover of the Interior Ministry last week (which gave him the police and KGB/CIA-types, not all of whom were willing to switch their loyalty to him) are illegal acts. They are the most recent in a long pattern of questionable maneuvers that threaten to bore the Ukrainian voters into a stupor, if the heat doesn’t get them first.

The general opinion here is that these machinations have nothing – and I do mean nothing – to do with the people of Ukraine. The politicians are enriching themselves, making closed door deals, coddled by a complacent press and being childish. With Shakespeare, most here are of the opinion, “A pox on both their houses”.

We did see a fire in the outdoor market at the railroad station – the heat, perhaps aided by a careless smoker, ignited the insulation around a large pipe (propane?) – two firemen with tiny house-sized fire extinguishers managed to extinguish the 10- foot high flames as vendors quaffed Kbac (pronounced “k-vass”, a sweet non-alcoholic yeast drink) and fanned themselves in the heat barely 20 feet away. The flames probably created a welcome breeze.

Our own adventure was not yet over. We took an evening fast train to Khmelnetsky in western Ukraine, in the Podillya region – an area that is losing population as Ukraine’s emigration (particularly of young people) increases. Angela met us and took us to a lovely apartment in a dormitory. We even had a refrigerator, dishes, large windows and a porch! The next day was full – with meetings with faculty, I then taught two classes (one on creative writing, and one on the Constitution) as events swirled in Kiev – though none of us knew it yet. I gave the faculty and students a copy of the Ukrainian constitution, which none had read yet. This is common; it is not a well known or understood document.

After lunch in the faculty room of the school’s snack bar, we toured Khmelnetsky with six students. They practiced their English, showed us beautiful new glass malls, enormous yellow regional administration center in this capital city of about 140,000, fountains (with happy wet young men who agreed to let us take their photos) and quaint cobblestoned café- lined pedestrian walkways. We saw war memorials and an eternal flame, children’s playground and a bride. I almost bought a blouse. But the most surprising visit was to two small art galleries which feature regional painters. We bought two small oil paintings, one of a village (by E. Miller, a Ukrainian art professor in L’viv) and one of a cottage in autumn (by a Ukrainian artist named Demko). We both love both of these (which is good, since I did the final choice sans David).

The girls were charming, and were eager to meet us on Saturday morning for another tour. Alla and Marina had lunch with us and strolled through the parks – David’s solo tour the previous evening had netted a fine pub and a public band concert. The city sits on a lovely river (Buh) which Angela took us to later in the afternoon for a cool drink and a long talk. We so enjoyed all the people we met, and I hope to revisit the university if possible.

While on e-mail Friday night, David learned from a friend in America that there was trouble in Kiev. “Should I be worried?” David wrote? “Well the president has called in the troops”. Linda was already watching television footage when David returned. We watched TV for four hours, learning much Ukrainian as we attempted to understand the repeating images and decipher the reporters’ interpretations. However, the fact that the “breaking news” did not change for four hours led us to believe that events had stalled for the evening. They had: key figures met all night and all the following night to agree not to agree on a date for the next elections, then announced they had agreed. The press was happy, most people were mollified, and still, there is no official, clear, set in law and unchangeable DATE for an election. Life goes on in Ukraine as usual, and the politicians proceed apace.

This trip demonstrated once again how truly productive David and I can both be in difficult circumstances. We continued to work and write and network on trains and in cafes. I taught in 100 degree rooms where to turn on a light would be a huge mistake because of the heat it would generate. David jumped from pillar to post to grab e-mail connections, as he worked on several proposals for Stone Environmental, and I began the long awaited reading of the memoirs of Catherine the Great. We each wrote abstracts for a conference in L’viv (the conference begins on June 11, David’s first full day of being “shhhh-sixty”) and I planned my last class with my best students in Dnipropetrovsk.

We have taken three young students under our wings. They will spend the summer on a “work-travel” program at a shirt store in Provincetown – they fly on June 5. So we communicated with them from afar, planning yet another meeting to go over logistics (just how does one get from JFK to Provincetown with no money and little English?) before they leave. Our friend Olga is also planning a summer work sojourn – stay tuned for details.

We continue to swelter here. The entire day must be planned around survival in the heat. I’m about to find one of those polluted rivers and jump right in.

LBG