Odesa, the city and the Black Sea by which it sits, have been imprinted on me in a mix of romance and terror for as long as I can remember.
My great grandfather died in the Odesa pogrom of 1905. My great grandmother escaped with her children — including my grandmother — on a ship they thought was headed for America. Family lore has it that it took them a while to realise they'd actually landed in Glasgow.
Now another generation of refugees is fleeing terror — this time from war and occupation.
It's especially painful to watch for me when there are so many echoes in a city that became familiar just before the pandemic. I visited Odesa in November 2019 in search of my roots, but I discovered much more.
What is it that drives so many of us to find our roots, whether through ancient patterns in our DNA or by walking the streets of a town which was once stamped with ancestors' footprints to find the very house in which they lived?
For me it was a desire for continuity and completeness in a life framed by migrant experiences over three generations from the Jewish Pale of Settlement in Russia, to Glasgow's Gorbals, to Australia.
What could be left after Tsarist pogroms, Stalin and Hitler? Well, it seemed worth finding out.
A city with artists and conmen
Odesa is a Russian speaking city of around a million people. There wasn't much there prior to the 19th century when Catherine the Great, to consolidate her victory over the Turks on the Black Sea, encouraged the building of a warm water port to ship grain from the vast fields of Ukraine.
Like Shanghai in the East, the city grew fast and people flocked from all over the world. Grain was exported and Asian goods imported for transport across Europe, especially to Britain. Greek traders dominated to begin with but Jews came in their tens of thousands because to facilitate development, Catherine loosened restrictions on Jewish occupations and property ownership. Jews were even allowed to participate in governing the municipality.
The limestone to build the city came from specially dug tunnels under the streets and it's said there are at least 2000 kilometres of these latter-day catacombs, which became hiding places for wartime partisans and no doubt right now are being prepared for guerilla warfare.
Odesans built banks, opulent apartments, parks, wide boulevards, churches, synagogues and even an opera house to rival Milan and Vienna. Artists flourished in the city. David Oistrakh the world-famous violinist was born and trained in Odesa. Writers like Pushkin and Isaac Babel lived in the city and several founders of the state of Israel grew up there. Trotsky went to school and was later even jailed in Odesa.
In the 19th and 20th centuries Odesa was colourful, providing a living, like any other port and frontier town, for crooks and conmen. Odesa's restaurants in the 1800s served all tastes from coq au vin to gefilte fish — and still did before Putin's war. Its nightclubs were even more exotic.
A Jewish revival
At the beginning of the 20th century, more than 30 per cent of the city was Jewish. Even prior to World War II, there were still 180,000 Jews.
Stalin extracted about half of them to relative safety because he needed their essential skills. Of the rest, only a few hundred survived Hitler's Romanian brigades and the Einstatzgruppe SS.
Since then though there's been a Jewish revival. About 5 per cent of the city say they're Jewish. There are kosher restaurants, there were direct flights from Tel Aviv and the best hotel in town, the Bristol, is owned by Israelis. At breakfast in the Bristol, downing my blintzes, gefilte fish and Russian sweet and sour rye and rocketing my palate back to my grandmother's kitchen, I realised, looking around the dining room, I was not alone in the search for roots in Odesa. The place was full of fellow Jews on the same mission.
Although Odesa is in the Ukraine, it's a Russian city. They speak Russian and as a tourist one of the first things you notice is that almost every sign is in Cyrillic with no condescension to visitors. So, when you passed a restaurant and looked at the menu you hadn't a clue what was on offer.
In November 2019 it was easy to forget that Ukraine was, even then, a country at war and it was common knowledge that the city teemed with Russian agents. The Ukrainian secret service also had a large presence, headquartered in a large downtown building.
We wanted to hire a car to go into the countryside for an authentic shtetl experience (small Jewish village, think Fiddler on the Roof) but were told in no uncertain terms that it was not a good idea and despite Donbas and Crimea being relatively distant, our security could not have been guaranteed.
From history to sandbags
Our guide was used to root seekers frustrated because the original cemeteries have gone and archival records patchy, even if you knew what the non-Anglicised version of your family name was.
She delayed gratification though by first showing how Jewish the city was. One CBD street is called Hebraica. Old synagogues survived as had the Greek Church where one of the first pogroms began in 1871. Nearby was the courtyard where Babel lived which had a clapped-out Trabant parked on one side, being used as a storage container.
One compulsory stop was the Potemkin Steps leading down from the city plateau to the harbour. Eisenstein made them famous in his 20s movie about the 1905 mutiny on the battleship Potemkin. At the top is a statue of the Duc de Richelieu, Odesa's Prefect in the first decade of the 19th century, who fostered the city's growth. (That was sandbagged last week ago).
The catacombs were extraordinary, not least because we think of such tunnels as ancient whereas these date back just to the 19th century. Ironically a tiny fragment of them was turned over to an underground museum commemorating Soviet partisans who fought the Nazis and generals who became heroes of the Soviet Union.
For Jewish visitors, you didn't go to Odesa to gaze at the Black Sea, even if you were trying to squint Crimea in the distance. The interest was on land behind you.
Near the foot of the steps at the port are old slums where penniless Jews once lived. The fact that my family had enough money to pay for tickets to escape, almost certainly meant that they came from a slightly better off and at-times infamous area called the Moldovanka on the edge of the city. But having deduced that much, our guide was still intent on showing us other things first — including a coincidental brush with the then mayor, oligarch Gennady Trukhanov, shielded by his bodyguards.
The Odesa book market is in a park in the centre of a boulevard and was worth a visit for two reasons. One was that the coffee was good and the second was that for decades the book market was just a front for a large, illegal currency exchange. In fact, they still changed money for you if you liked playing roulette with your hard-earned cash.
The remaining Jewish cemetery was post war and neglected but it contained the memorial to the 1905 pogrom in which my great grandfather died. The neglect added to a sense of loss.
Home, repeated
At last we got to the Moldovanka and it took my breath away.
First was the Holocaust memorial on the street where thousands of Jews were marched to the ghetto and their deaths.
Then the Moldovanka itself. I had the overpowering sense that I'd been there before. I've since shown friends photographs of Moldovanka streetscapes and asked them where they think I took the photos. They all say the same thing: Glasgow. Astoundingly, the Moldovanka was made up of the same tenement blocks that filled the Gorbals where my family landed in Glasgow.
They'd fled pogroms. They'd scraped every kopek for the tickets. They'd sailed across strange seas and unbeknownst to them had been dumped in Glasgow because the Jewish quota for America had been filled.
Only to find that Glasgow looked just like home.
I didn't need to find the exact house or doorway.
I'd seen what I had to.
