ODESA, Ukraine — It wasn’t our first trip to Odesa.
Just over two years ago, my friends and I had paid a nearly identical visit to Ukraine’s Black Sea port city of 1 million people nearly 500 kilometers south of Kyiv. This time, none of us intended to swim or spend time on the beach. We didn’t even have concrete plans.
Yet here we were: racing once again toward Odesa. What was the allure of this city? For me, I suspect, it was the sense that Odesa stands at the intersection of many histories. It is a place where the past and the present, Ukraine and southern Europe mix, creating an intoxicating environment for visitors from near and far.
And those seeking a window in the city’s past will not be disappointed. Odesa’s history is well-documented. The city’s walls are covered in plaques commemorating the people who lived there and the former institutions housed in its buildings. And with just a bit of biographical data, one can easily trace the lives of Odesa’s former residents — both famous and less so.
Intersecting histories
Founded in 1794 on the site of a former Turkish fort, Odesa was the pet project of Russian Empress Catherine the Great. Its name — derived from the nearby Greek settlement of Odessos — aimed to connect the city both to the classical world and broader Orthodox civilization.
It was built with wide streets and buildings representing the latest Western and European architectural trends. Many of the city’s early residents were runaway serfs seeking freedom far from their masters. And as Odesa began to export more of the Russian Empire’s grain in the 1800s, the city attracted foreigners from Europe and the Mediterranean.
Odesa would also soon have a large Jewish community, known for being more secular and better integrated into local society than in many other parts of eastern Europe. By the turn of the 20th century, Jews would be roughly a third of Odesa’s population and they would help to form key aspects of the local culture: humor, Yiddish-inflected Russian, and local cuisine like forshmak, an appetizer made of chopped herring.
In his memoirs, Zionist leader Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who was born and raised in Odesa, wrote that in the city of his youth “everybody was an Odessan and everyone who was literate read the same newspapers and thought about the same Russian problems. And thus the Greek, the Pole, the Jew, and the Russian all developed that same uniform and unique psychology…”
This all makes Odesa a fascinating place to visit.
Modern city
Today, after the Second World War, Holocaust, waves of migration and emigration and much intermarriage, Odesa’s population is hardly as diverse as it once was.
But the culture of “old Odesa” remains a key part of the local identity: the mythology of the city, the locals’ dedication to their history and, perhaps, even the “unique psychology” Jabotinsky speaks of.
And the adventurous visitor can find traces of Odesa’s past simply by walking the streets. Peek into the courtyards of Odesa’s low-slung old buildings for a look at how people there lived — and still live. While the cars will be new, much remains the same: faded walls, shrubs in bloom, semi-stray cats lounging on the tin roofs of sheds, clotheslines strung between apartments. So much of it is reminiscent of the stories of Isaac Babel, the acclaimed early Soviet Jewish writer, who wrote extensively about his hometown.
Head out to Moldavanka, a neighborhood in western Odesa, once known as a high-crime slum famous for its Jewish population. Babel immortalized the neighborhood in his “Odessa Tales,” which focused on the exploits of mobster Benya Krik.
In Moldavanka, one can even see the house and courtyard where the prototype for Krik, the Jewish mobster-turned-revolutionary Mishka Yaponchik, resided in the early 20th century at 23 Bohdana Khmelnytskoho Street. Although he lived only to the age of 27, Mishka Yaponchik is a legendary figure in the mythology of Odesa.
There are endless other sites to see. My friends and I sought out the courtyard of the house at 5 Pokrovsky Provulok, where the Soviet poet Vera Inber was born and raised. More interestingly, her cousin Lev Bronstein — later known as Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky — would live there in 1889–1895 while studying in Odesa.
When we arrived, we peered through the gates of the courtyard. Inside, an African man was hanging what appeared to be trellises for grape vines over a small patio. Noticing us, he approached the gate and asked in Russian what we were looking for. We felt awkward explaining the reason for our visit, but he warmly welcomed us inside the courtyard.
It was an ordinary place: bushes, balconies, clotheslines. But looking around the courtyard, we got the sense that, while history hadn’t stood still, it also hadn’t been erased in Odesa.
The courtyard of a house at 5 Pokrovsky Provulok where Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky lived for several years of his childhood in 1889-1895. (Matthew Kupfer)
Old building, new use
Of particular interest to me in Odesa were sites related to “From Odessa to Jerusalem,” the memoir of Odesa-born Israeli doctor Leon Majaro. Translated from Hebrew to English and published in 2010 by Majaro’s son Simon, the memoir offers a rich window into Odesa at the turn of the 20th century and during the 1917 revolution. The book can also be read in its entirety online.
Born in 1892 as Lev Mojarowsky, Majaro grew up in an upwardly mobile middle-class Jewish family in Odesa. His father ran the printing facilities of the storied Odesskiye Novosti newspaper and was acquainted with another one of Odesa’s most famous sons: Jabotinsky, who wrote for the newspaper.
In the memoir, Majaro describes how, in his early childhood, he lived in an apartment above the Odesskiye Novosti printing press on Katerynynska Street. According to Majaro, it’s entrance was “behind a group of elegant shops, including a very smart coffee house called Cafe Robinat, which was busy day and night and frequently by Odessa’s upper echelons.”
A brief internet search directed me to 8 Katerynynska Street. The “elegant shops” had been replaced by a row of bars and restaurants. But above Bourbon Rock Bar, where we had enjoyed a drink two years ago, I noticed what appeared to be a lone apartment on the building’s second and final floor. I suspect that Majaro had lived there.
After reading “From Odessa to Jerusalem,” I did some additional research about the people described in the memoir. I discovered that, in the 1920s, Majaro’s sister Nadia and his cousins had been members of an amateur theater known as the “Congregation of Knights of Sharp-Witted Theater” — or KROT for short. Another member of the theater was Vera Inber.
KROT helped to launch the careers of many well-known performers, including Soviet theater director and writer Viktor Tipot and actress Rina Zelyonaya, famous for playing landlady Mrs. Hudson in the highly-regarded Soviet Sherlock Holmes films. (She also was briefly married to Majaro’s cousin.)
Another internet search revealed that KROT was located in the basement of the building at 18 Provulok Chaikovskoho, just a block from the former location of the Odesskiye Novosti printing press. Now, the building is occupied by an Obzhora (“Overeater”) supermarket, and the basement likely holds the shop’s wares.
We asked an employee enjoying a cigarette by a side entrance about the KROT theater’s location. She said she’d been asked before but didn’t know.
In some places, history has largely been wiped away.
More to explore
This is only a small sample of the diverse sites a history buff can see in Odesa. The city boasts a museum located in the apartment where Russian national poet Alexander Pushkin lived in 1823, an archaeological museum with ancient relics from the Black Sea region, and a Jewish museum.
It also offers dozens of sites related to Jabotinsky and other important figures in Israeli and Jewish history, plus many other important locations for Ukrainian and Russian history. And with so many houses equipped with historical plaques, a casual walk down the street can lead to a world of discoveries.
In as fun of a place as Odesa, you can learn more about local history and enjoy dinner and a drink at the same time — and maybe all in the same building.
