In the summer of 1994, I visited Odessa. Once Eastern Europe’s greatest port on the Black Sea, it was reduced by the end of the Soviet Union to an elegant and decaying backwater. The plaster exterior of its famous opera house was cracking and in need of repairs. Street vendors selling cheap post-Soviet goods had set up stalls all along its famous thoroughfares.
Catherine the Great founded Odessa in 1794 as a different kind of Russian city – mercantile, booming and friendly to all nationalities. The city doubled in size every 20 years. It was also the best city in the Russian empire to be Jewish, as the restrictions imposed on Jews elsewhere in the empire were waived here in the name of commerce. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish migrants streamed in to find work. In the early twentieth century, most of them moved on to Soviet Russia, America, later to Israel
The restrictions imposed on Jews elsewhere in the empire were waived here in the name of commerce.
Now, their descendants were coming back, searching for their roots – including me. I was directed to a sage of Odessan Jewish history, Anna Misyuk, a jolly but over-worked curator in the city’s Literature Museum.
