Visiting Odessa, the city where I grew up, I learned how Isaac Babel turned my great-great-grandmother into an iconic character
By Misha Galperin for Tablet Magazine
These
days, Odessa is all over the news. But it is a specific Odessa—one of
chaos and street clashes; one where children may be evacuated for
protection; one with low wages, zero-based production demand, and rising
unemployment; one with over a million citizens, some of whose embattled
photos dominate the front-page news during Ukraine’s intense struggle
for self-definition.Last summer I took my older daughter, Anna, to see a different Odessa—the one where her father grew up. It was the Odessa that was supposed to be a “porto franco”—a free city that would attract talent and wealth to benefit this “New Russia” that enabled German Jews like my grandfather’s ancestors to bring with them European culture and Reform Judaism and start a new life there. That is how Odessa became a cradle of modern Russian culture, in large measure because of the Jews.
The current Russian-Ukrainian conflict is not about Jews, though it may put an end to that piece of Jewish history—which will be a loss for everyone. But before Jewish Odessa disintegrates, it had one more unexpected gift for me: a literary pedigree.
***
The basis for our trip was a visit undertaken by a delegation of the World Zionist Organization. I took the visitors on a tour of the Jewish Odessa of my family, who were contemporaries and comrades of Pinsker and Jabotinsky.
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