Odesa, Ukraine
The soldier leans through the car window and stares at me. He has the guileless but wary eyes of a child; he can’t be much more than 18. I’ve just crossed the border from Moldova into Ukraine and hit my first checkpoint. The soldier is slim because he is lithe and fit, but also because he hasn’t filled out yet. His chalky white face is flecked with traces of acne. He looks like he should be holding a gaming console, not an AK-47. The overall effect is of innocence hurriedly subsumed by the necessities of conflict.
On Monday evening, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that the second — and likely far worse — phase of the war had started. Here in Odesa, the drawn-out, nasal shriek of air raid sirens is becoming more frequent. The Russians have increased their shelling of Ukraine’s major cities. The body count rises again. The city is dotted with checkpoints and sandbags, manned by twitchy soldiers. Near a central square, a tank smothered in camouflage netting sits idly waiting. Life, though, goes on. We sit in cafes, watching people walk the streets as they do their daily shop. The most obvious sign that life is not normal is the ban on selling booze after 3pm, and the 9pm curfew. Tension mingles with boredom: this is the life of a city at war.
Odesa has always had a large and culturally prominent Jewish community; today, it sits at around 30,000 people. I arrive on the first night of Passover (Pesach), the Jewish festival celebrating the story of the Jews’ escape from captivity in Egypt as told in the Book of Exodus. Very simply: through Moses, God commanded the Israelites to mark their doors with lamb’s blood so the Angel of Death would “pass over” them and kill only the firstborn of the oppressive Egyptians. Finally, the Pharaoh allowed the Israelites to leave for the promised land and off they went.
Passover lasts eight days (a week in Israel) and the first night is celebrated with a ritual feast called the Passover Seder, which tonight is being held by Rabbi Abraham Wolf of the Odesa Chabad, at the Londonskaya hotel near the seafront. Night has fallen. A local synagogue has disgorged its worshippers, who are now spilling into Pushkin Street (Ulitsa Pushkinskaya), a wide, cobbled avenue lined with large trees and a smattering of neoclassical and gothic revival buildings. I fall in with them as we approach a checkpoint of tyres and sandbags on the way to the service.
Pushkinskaya turns into Prymorskyi Blvd, and behind sandbags we can make out Odesa’s famous Potemkin Steps that dominate the entrance to the city from the sea. It’s silent and dark — many of the streetlights are turned off or dimmed to make it more difficult for the Russians to accurately bomb us — and I am surrounded by a phalanx of religious Jews dressed in black. Hebrew and Yiddish echo around me. The effect is surreal: like I’ve been momentarily transported back to the pale of settlement.
The hotel is a collection of right angles and stairs and pillars and marble; the ceiling of the lobby rises high in the air; the room is bloated with darkness. We file into a ballroom that, suitably ensconced within the building, is bathed in light. The room is filled with round tables covered with white cloth, on top of which is a Seder plate. I take my seat while Vladislav Davidzon, author of From Odessa with Love, who has travelled with me from Moldova, flits around talking to various people he knows after living here for four years. To my right sits a dark, wiry man with a scraggly black beard and twinkly expression. To my left, an older, slightly fussy but professional-looking man is examining the carpet.
It’s an orthodox service so I know it’s going to last for hours. I settle in. I first learnt the story at Hebrew school, a period of short but vast boredom that I spent alternatively sulking and gazing longingly at various girls I was too scared to talk to. Today, I have little interest in religion, but Judaism is based around ritual and story and Pesach is all about slavery and freedom, so this year it’s especially apposite. The Haggadah, the text that sets out the order of the Seder, says that “in every generation everyone is obligated to see themselves as if they themselves came out of Egypt”. It is, then, a celebration of the battle to be free.
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SubscribeWhat a thoughtful, illuminating article. In places, humorous as well. Unherd at its best.
Yes! It’s for pieces like these, practically impossible to find anywhere else these days, that I became a member.
A superb dispatch. The holidays are over
What is it about war that brings the best writing out of people? This was both joyous and heart breaking.
Thanks for this excellent article.
I can just about imagine the state of mind of the average Russian person. Likely not much different from those who just recently claimed that a few months worth of data is enough to gauge any and all long-term side effects. The magic word back then was “rolling review”, whereas now it is “nazí”. The power of propaganda is a true shame for humanity.
Odessa – or aren’t we supposed to spell it Odesa now? – has always seemed like one of those exotic places that I’d love to visit, but would probably disappoint me when I finally got there.
Well I guess we’ve all learnt a lot more about the reality of life in Ukraine over the past few weeks, with or without a war. So when Putin has finally retreated – at least to the breakaway Donbas – I’m determined to go for a road trip around this amazing country.