
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