Odesa Is More Than a Grain Port. It’s a Symbol of Freedom

T he circumstances during the time I spent in the city of Odesa could not have been more different from those of today. And not only because no bombs were falling on the port where ships bound for Istanbul and beyond were docked on the Black Sea.

Some 20 years ago, when Communism and the Soviet Union were still a fresh and painful memory, there was a palpable sense of optimism among the group of academics and potential democratic leaders gathered under the rubric of Kyiv’s Innovation and Development Centre and Harvard’s school of government. The idea was to discuss the dilemmas that come with democratic governance, not just in Ukraine but in bordering former Soviet “republics.” We drank regional Champagne and toasted to hope. Loving couples, enjoying the resort atmosphere, walked on the city’s boardwalk, among cafés and souvenir shops.

It was not lost on any of the participants — who had mainly come overland from Chisinau (Moldova), Baku (Azerbaijan), Crimea, and Kyiv — that there could not have been a more appropriate place to meet than Odesa. To understand why, one must appreciate the fact that the Pearl of the Black Sea is much, much more than the grain-export port now in the war news, as Russia mines its harbor to block exports from the breadbasket of Europe. Odesa’s history is that of a beacon of liberty — its fruits, its loss, and perhaps its return.

Odesa has shared a type of magic with the great city-states of history that combine tolerance and enterprise to create trade and prosperity. Think here of Athens and Venice, Trieste and Genoa, Hamburg and the Hanseatic League, and not long ago, Shanghai and Hong Kong. Although probably dating to an ancient Greek settlement, thanks to its propitious location, modern Odesa was founded and funded in 1794 by Catherine the Great — after Russia wrested the location from the Ottoman Empire — and shortly thereafter designated it a free port. In the ensuing century-plus before its absorption into the Soviet Union, it drew that sort of polyglot stew of humanity that thrives on freedom and builds wealth. It drew together so many ethnic minorities that it was hardly an ethnic Russian city at all.

To call it diverse is an understatement. Its population included not only Ukrainians but Azeris, Poles, Armenians, French, Italians — and at the turn of the 20th century one of the most significant populations of Jews in the world; a third of the population in 1900 is estimated to have spoken Yiddish. Its concentration of writers and intellectuals included Isaac Babel (Odessa Stories) and Sholem Aleichem, whose Tevye stories inspired Fiddler on the Roof. Its key Zionist thinkers included Vladimir Jabotinsky, the inspiration for the views of Benjamin Netanyahu (and friend of his father). As committed a Zionist as was Jabotinsky, he nonetheless channeled his love for Odesa through the narrator of his 1935 book The Five: “I’ll probably never get to see Odessa again. It’s a pity. I love the place. I was indifferent to Russia even in my youth . . . but Odessa is a different matter. . . . [My love for it] has never passed and it won’t.”

Jews always seem to be a symbol of those who prosper in times of tolerance — and suffer as it ends. And so it would be in Odesa. Its Jewish community would be scattered and ultimately murdered by the combination of pogroms and the Holocaust — the Nazis deported 80,000 Odesa Jews. The 1904 pogrom in nearby Kishinev drove my grandfather’s family to the U.S., just as Soviet oppression and antisemitism drove the remaining Jews, in the 1970s, to Israel and to Brooklyn, where Brighton Beach became known as “Little Odessa.”

What remains in Odesa is poignant: I visited a synagogue that had been converted by the Soviets into a gymnasium.

But before all that tragedy came both great art and the great fortunes that supported great art. The Ephrussi family, whose art collecting in Paris became the focus of Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes, built its fortune in Odesa — as grain buyers and exporters. Theirs and other fortunes — including investment, particularly from France — supported French-inspired public buildings and chateaus that still stand, alongside the low-rise communal apartments from the Soviet era known as Khrushchyovka, for the one-time Soviet premier Nikita Krushchev.

As Russian bombs and mines maim and blockade the city, it is important to remember that this is not the first time Odesa has been on the front line of a fight for freedom. It was immortalized in Sergei Eisenstein’s film masterpiece, Battleship Potemkin. The 1905 revolt of the crew of the ship of that name against czarist officers inspired Eisenstein’s legendary scene of Russian soldiers shooting Odesa civilians on the city’s long, steep stairway from the city to the sea — known ever after and today as the Potemkin Steps. The Soviets appropriated the story for their own purposes (with Eisenstein their naïve if brilliant propagandist) but would go on to strangle Odesa’s liberty and vibrancy. And now Russians literally take the place of the czar’s soldiers in the drama, as a Jewish president of Ukraine leads the resistance.

Those who love cities — their vibrance, their tolerance, their architectural beauty — must love and hope for Odesa.