Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams

by King, Charles

  Further waves of Jewish immigration followed: one after the Holocaust, when survivors found Brighton Beach both a haven and a melting pot for Jews from across Europe, and another after the end of the Soviet Union, when Jewish and non-Jewish immigrants from Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, and other former Soviet states were able to re-create, on a smaller scale, something of the societies they had left behind. Russian replaced Yiddish on the avenues and connecting streets. New York cops were soon sitting in voluntary Russian-language classes at the local YMCA.2

  By one estimate, about three-quarters of Brighton Beach’s new immigrants came from Ukraine, mainly from Odessa and other Black Sea cities.3 Already in the late 1970s, journalists were calling the place “Little Odessa,” and like its namesake it became a font of intellectuals who looked back with mixed emotions on their hometown. Neil Simon’s play Brighton Beach Memoirs is the most famous of the products of Engeman’s old neighborhood, but the local Abraham Lincoln High School educated other makers of culture, both high and low, from Arthur Miller and Joseph Heller to Mel Brooks and Neil Diamond. “They send us their Jews from Odessa,” the violinist Isaac Stern reportedly remarked about immigration and cultural exchange with the Soviets, “and we send them our Jews from Odessa”—in the form of American-trained musicians, writers, and artists with distant (even imagined) Odessan roots.4

  Achievement and weirdness were as much a part of Brighton Beach’s identity as they were of the original Odessa’s. In the early twentieth century, the summer crowds that followed the newly extended train tracks to the coast found a place of mud and dust, with unpaved streets but plenty of people still pouring through Brooklyn to take in the sea air and a show. Seaside evangelists set up shop to rescue the beachgoers from themselves. The Brooklyn Eagle reported solemnly in the late summer of 1916 that a total of 379 people had accepted Christ and another 762,352 had heard the gospel in the last four years as a result of open-air proselytizing by a team featuring “Miss Marion Bushnell, cornetist.”5 (The low rate of return did not seem to discourage Miss Bushnell and her associates.) Even through the peaks and troughs of the neighborhood’s development—the flourishing Yiddish culture of the 1920s, the population growth at mid-century, the urban blight and out-migration of the 1960s and 1970s, and the Russian invasion of the perestroika years and after—the mixed and colorful street life remained. Even the crack-addled eccentrics and performers who roamed Brighton Beach Avenue in the 1980s—known to some locals as the mishe goyim, or the “crazy gentiles”—were said to speak at least a little Yiddish.

  Pedestrians walk along a street beneath the elevated train tracks in “Little Odessa,” the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, 1994. Stephen Ferry/Liaison/Getty Images.

  Today Brighton Beach resembles Odessa even more than its marketers might realize. It is still a place of loud voices and too much food, where the freezing mist of a January stroll along the empty boardwalk is as much a part of city life as the crowds of beachgoers on a July afternoon. The smells of knishes, khinkali, and a dozen other combinations of meat, dough, and root vegetables waft down the avenue, just as on Deribasovskaya. But it is also a place perched between reality and memory. It is mainly a retirement neighborhood, at least in the off-season, with perhaps the largest collection of walkers and scooter chairs outside Florida. All old seaside towns live partly in twilight, always on the far side of some golden age, but on the crowded or empty boardwalk, with the lights of Coney Island flickering through the sea breeze, the shadows of Little Odessa’s forebear appear in stark relief.

  ODESSA, TOO, is now in many ways a twilight town, sitting uneasily inside a new country and more comfortable marketing its distant past than presenting itself as a city of the future. But over the last two centuries, Odessa managed to produce a local culture woven from uneasiness, a way of living that may hold lessons about the creative and destructive power of being in-between. Richelieu and Vorontsov saw in Odessa a plain palette on which they could realize their enlightened visions of modernity and culture. Pushkin found the scent of the exotic. Jabotinsky and Babel sought both to escape their origins and to reshape them. The likes of Alexianu worked to erase the landscape altogether, to possess a desirable city while conveniently ridding it of many of the people who happened to live there. Mark Bernes, Leonid Utesov, and countless lesser comics and musicians raised nostalgia to an art form. Frontiers are places that get reshaped, again and again, according to the ideals, both laudable and terrible, of those who seek to control them. But there is something about such places that remains steadfastly resistant to the best-laid plans for their reengineering.

  Odessa is now undergoing yet another transformation. It is the most important passenger port of a relatively new country, Ukraine, which emerged from the rubble of the Soviet Union in 1991. The city’s administrators are far more benign than those of earlier ages. In many ways, they embrace the city’s multifarious past rather than seek to cleanse it. They have discovered, like their Soviet predecessors, that nostalgia sells. But the old impulses are still there. School textbooks, even in this quintessentially mixed city, tell a story of straight lines and definite end points, of the emergence of a distinct Ukrainian people since antiquity, its oppression by Russians and Soviets, and its glorious reemergence with its own independent country at the end of the twentieth century.

  Odessa, true to form, has resisted. Russian-speakers prefer to use their own language rather than learn the official language of state, Ukrainian. Museums still portray a decidedly local vision of the past that is at odds with the more triumphal, more national, versions found in the capital. When the people of Kiev rose up against corrupt politicians and rigged elections in 2004—a peaceful change of government now termed the “Orange Revolution” (after the colored scarves and T-shirts worn by the protestors)—Odessans remained noticeably quiet. It wasn’t that they didn’t support the protestors—although plenty of Odessans were skeptical. It was just that they had never paid much attention to what was going on in Kiev anyway.

  Yet Odessans have just as frequently chosen to trade the challenges of cosmopolitanism for the easier charms of nostalgia. They still apply as much energy to re-creating their past as they once gave to pulling their city out of the nothingness of the coastal prairie. Citizens have a natural affinity for, even an obsession with, what in Russian is called kraevedeniye, a combination of local history, just-so stories, and assiduous antiquarianism.

  No city can best the volume of small-print-run historical guides, joke books, and memoirs on particular streets, buildings, neighborhoods, families, businesses, famous visitors, and obscure historical figures. On summer weekends along Deribasovskaya and in the dusty park that surrounds the rebuilt and renamed Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral you can find local poets selling their self-published odes to the city, kraeveds flogging their latest collection of essays on nineteenth-century grain production or the city’s first water collection system, and booksellers offering several different dictionaries of a notional “Odessan language”—Russian with a smattering of Ukrainian words, Yiddish intonation, and gangster argot. One publishing house, Optimum, has made its reputation by reprinting scores of out-of-print works such as the memoirs of de Ribas’s associate, the architect Franz de Voland, and an almanac from 1894, alongside breezy reference books like 100 Great Odessans, which includes everyone from Wassily Kandinsky and the violinist David Oistrakh (both of whom spent their childhoods there) to Pushkin, Catherine the Great, and the British spy Sidney Reilly.

  Odessa gobbles up famous personages like an enthusiastic camp counselor rattling off lists of Jewish movie stars or notable athletes from Cleveland. With enough research and imagination, lots of geniuses can be discovered to have had Odessa connections of some sort. In the past twenty years, however, the state has gotten into this memory game as well, with results that are by turns ridiculous and disturbing.

  Dig down deep enough into the city’s past, the logic goes, and Odessa’s true origins will reveal themselv
es. In 2005 the remains of the Vorontsov family were dug up from their suburban cemetery—where the count and countess had been relegated by the Soviets—and, after a solemn procession through the city, were reinterred in the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral. Three years later local archaeologists opened a permanent exhibit on Primorsky Boulevard above the harbor. A glass canopy covers the remains of a stone wall, a ship’s anchor, the jawbone of a cow, some scattered pottery sherds and broken amphorae, and the skull of a dog. According to the accompanying sign in Ukrainian and English, these are remnants of the ancient culture that flourished there from the fifth to third centuries BCE—Greek or Roman perhaps, or Greco-Scythian, or perhaps proto-Cossack. The viewer is left to decide. But it is a whole-cloth invention: not an actual open-air dig but a mock-up of an archaeological site, an imagined and frozen scene meant to connect the present-day city with a real and non-Russian past. Being rooted, however imaginatively, still competes with the rootless cosmopolitanism that both built Odessa and helped to unmake it.

  Odessa has been mainly Ukrainian in demographic terms since the late 1970s. At the time of the 1979 census, Ukrainians were on the cusp of becoming an absolute majority, at 49.97 percent of the population in the Odessa region as a whole. But until very recently, that fact said little about the feel of the city in cultural terms. Even after the Second World War, the city remained a confusing space to Soviet demographers and social engineers. By 1959 it was the most linguistically mixed place in all of Ukraine. More people considered their native language to be different from the language of their self-reported ethnic group than anywhere else in the republic. Most Jews and more than half the ethnic Ukrainians in the city spoke Russian as their everyday language. Nearly a third of ethnic Moldovans spoke Ukrainian. The smaller communities of Bulgarians, Belorussians, and others got along by using Russian, Ukrainian, or another language entirely.6 The Soviet system was based on the faith that modernity would cause the dividing lines among peoples to fade into insignificance. But in Odessa those lines became indecipherable squiggles as the main markers of ethnicity, language, and even religion combined and overlapped in unpredictable ways.

  The Jewish population has remained tiny. There were just under 70,000 Jews in the entire Odessa district in 1989, the time of the last Soviet census; most were living in the city of Odessa proper. Their share of the population—under 4 percent at the time—declined even further once Jews, as well as their neighbors, were free to emigrate after the fall of Communism. Today, no one knows exactly how many Jews make up the small community in a city of 1.2 million people; some estimates put the figure at 36,000, although that is probably too high since the last Ukranian census, in 2001, recorded only around 13,000 Jews in the entire Odessa district.7 Still, the main synagogue, the Glavnaya, has been restored to some of its old magnificence, with a kosher restaurant in the expansive basement. There is enough of a Jewish presence—or popular memory—for travel agencies to offer tours of “Jewish Odessa,” including a stop at the hypermodern Jewish community center.

  Ukrainians—at least those who claim that ethnic label in censuses—are now an absolute majority, forming close to two-thirds of the total population. But with a sizable ethnic Russian minority and nearly complete agreement on Russian as the city’s lingua franca, political factions have spent the past two decades waging a struggle over public memory on literally a monumental scale. A block away from the Odessa steps, the city administration removed a Soviet-era statue that commemorated the Potemkin mutiny. In its place went a restored statue of the city’s founder, Catherine the Great, which had itself been removed by the Bolsheviks (who had substituted a huge bust of Karl Marx). Catherine’s left hand now points not only toward the port but also toward the north, to Russia, which many Odessans, regardless of their ethnic provenance, still see as their cultural and spiritual home. Predictably, demonstrations—both pro and contra—accompanied the unveiling.

  Elsewhere, Ukrainians were fighting a rear-guard action. Up went a statue to the poet Ivan Franko, a Ukrainian nationalist icon with tenuous connections to the city, and a memorial to Anton Holovaty, an eighteenth-century Cossack leader and, as such, a proto-Ukrainian hero. A faux-antique street sign was placed at the top of Deribasovskaya, announcing that its name would now become, officially at least, Derybasivs’ka—a ukrainianized version that few Odessans have ever been heard to utter. Since the end of the Soviet Union, the city government has reportedly removed 148 public monuments (104 of them to Lenin) and rechristened 179 streets with either their old Russian imperial names—usually spelled the Ukrainian way—or newly created ones.8 “My nationality is Odessan!” goes a slogan often repeated in tourist brochures and local guidebooks. But in the midst of Odessa’s internal struggles over community, identity, and memory, the city is still grasping awkwardly for a foundational myth that will make it something more legitimate than itself.

  In the end, Odessa’s past—honestly viewed and properly understood—could be an asset to both its new ruler and its older one, Ukraine and Russia. For Ukraine, Odessa could turn out to be an advantage as the young country seeks membership, down the road, in the European Union and full recognition as a geographically, culturally, and politically European state. Europe was, for a good part of the last century, the world’s central battleground in serial conflicts over land, power, and identity. Today, the ideal of religious and ethnic communities managing to live together through the shock of war, scarcity, nationalism, and failed imperial ambitions, despite the siren calls of mutual loathing and convenient blame, is the European response to the reality of the recent past. Europeans now imagine themselves as humane, tolerant, and cosmopolitan precisely because their grandparents spent so much of the last century perfecting exactly the opposite values. If Ukrainians can will themselves to engage with the past in the same way—resurrecting older talents for living together while staring bravely at the horrors of the Second World War—the old vision of Odessa as an entryway to Europe may still have some life in it.

  For Russia, Odessa offers a model of development that prizes the odd and the unusual, an ability to laugh at oneself, and a skepticism about grand narratives of national greatness—values that Russia, like its Soviet precursor, seems to have forsaken. During the Communist era, Odessa lost its previous position as Russia’s ante-chamber. It became a quaint regional city, no longer the global port that it had been earlier in its imperial history. But Russia also lost one of its best hopes for defining itself as multinational, modest, and secure in its own sense of self. For a country now rediscovering its regional and even global influence—flexing its muscle as an oil and gas producer, naval power, and alternative pole to the West—Odessa stands as a reminder that the decline of the old port meant the decline of a certain way of being Russian.

  Many cities balance on a thin boundary between the everyday collisions that spark real genius and the periodic explosions that leave windows smashed and communities divided. Many others, especially in eastern Europe, actively rewrite their pasts, seeking to cover up the times when the basic covenant of urban civility fell victim to the stresses of cultural difference. That Athens once had a substantial Muslim presence, Thessaloniki a Jewish plurality, and Tbilisi an Armenian core are now historical footnotes at best, understated in museums and left out of popular memory. The same purifying impulses are there in Odessa, despite its rebellious and multicultural reputation. After the Second World War, a city that had represented a hundred different ways of being Jewish or Christian or neither traded the burden of multiple lifeways for the easier virtues of memory and nostalgia.

  It takes a special effort to memorialize, not just look past, the times when the urge to self-destruction won out over human achievement. Visiting Odessa today, you can feel and smell a place that, in the middle of the twentieth century, became practiced in the art of devouring itself—consumed by some aspects of its own past but painfully ignorant of others. Yet an identity that embraces people who speak with an accent, talk too loudly, and ar
e somehow your neighbors is still there in Odessa’s streets, even amid post-Soviet kitsch, Ukraine’s preoccupation with national mythology, and Russia’s new fascination with its old imperial vocation. With attention to the dark times as well as the golden ages, Odessans might again figure out how to make a grounded kind of patriotism out of the leftovers of empire. After all, the children and grandchildren of Ukrainians, Russians, and others who settled in the city after the Second World War—along with new migrants from Turkey, the Caucasus, the Middle East, and East Asia—now have the chance to construct their own visions of “Odessa-Mama,” different from but no less complex than those of the past two centuries. Like Parisians, Berliners, Viennese, and New Yorkers, they might even be able to convince themselves of something that vanished generations of Odessans knew instinctively: that with the right combination of neighborliness and mayhem, cities really can be the highest species of patria.