Odesa as a Site of Jewish Utopian Dreams

What is your personal relationship with Jewish Odesa?

I was born in Odesa in 1953, just after Stalin’s death. That was my happy beginning. I grew up in contact with the Jewish community, with the synagogue, with rabbis. I took special lessons with other students at Jewish religious schools, spent time at the Jewish cultural center, and so on, for more than thirty years. 
 

I spent my childhood and teenage years in Odesa and graduated from high school. Then I enrolled at Tartu University in Estonia. That was also fortuitous because my professor Juri Lotmann was a real genius and the leading figure in philology, not only in the Soviet Union. He was a rare person, and his ideas about semiotics and literary structure were present throughout the world. I then returned to Odesa and graduated from Odesa University, and in 1979 I started working for the Odesa Literary Museum.

Can you tell us more about the Odesa Literary Museum?

It was a very new institution with the brand-new idea of establishing a museum of local culture, local literature. Now there are many museums of local literature, but Odesa was a pioneer with this idea. 
 

It was very difficult to assert Odesa’s right to organize such a museum. There was a very long discussion with Soviet authorities at different levels, but at last the museum was opened, and then I began to work there together with a little group of young girls. I don’t know how it is in Germany, but in the countries of the former Soviet Union, even now, museum work is women’s work. However, our museum’s founding director said: this is a new museum, so I want to invite younger people who have no experience of needing to fear the authorities.

Does the museum showcase Jewish authors?

In Odesa, three branches of Jewish literature flourished. The first branch was led by Osip Rabinovich, a very interesting and talented figure, who in the early 1850s followed the ideas of Moses Mendelssohn. Rabinovich’s idea was to reform Judaism, to reform Odesa’s Jewish life and Jewish traditions, but to acculturate rather than assimilate. First and foremost, he said that we must tell our stories and talk about our lives and ideas using language that our compatriots from other ethnic groups could understand. He founded the first Russian-language Jewish newspaper in Odesa, and he began to write excellent novels in brilliant Russian. Other authors who belonged to this branch of Jewish literature in Odesa were Semyon Yushkevich, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the symbolist David Aizman, and some others who are lesser-known.

The second branch of Jewish literature in Odesa was in Yiddish, which was commonly spoken there. Some major names in the history of Yiddish culture and literature, such as Sholem Aleichem and Mendele Mocher Sforim, settled in Odesa. It was in Odesa where Sholem Aleichem developed his wonderful humorous style. Odesa has a special brand of humor, and like many others, I would say Odesa humor and Jewish humor are twins. Finally, the third branch comprised literature in Hebrew. 
 

I enjoyed my job at the museum and working with my colleagues. However, it was a strange moment when we wanted to include Jewish authors in our exhibitions. There was a monumental problem.

Of course many of Odesa’s famous writers were of Jewish origin but they were famous as Soviet writers, such as Isaac Babel, Eduard Bagrizki, Ilja Ilf, and many others. But with Jewish authors within the tradition of Jewish literature, it was more difficult. For example, we could not incorporate books by Osip Rabinovich into the exhibition until the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.