In Jewish Odesa, Marina Sapritsky-Nahum explores Jewish identity in Odesa over the course of Soviet history, Ukrainian nation-building and global Jewish revivals. Combining oral histories, anthropology and Jewish studies, this vivid work captures a resilient community navigating shifting political, cultural, and transnational dynamics, writes Lucy Lopata-Varkas.
Jewish Odesa: Negotiating Identities and Traditions in Contemporary Ukraine. Marina Sapritsky-Nahum. Indiana University Press. 2024.
Marina Sapritsky-Nahum’s Jewish Odesa is a compelling exploration of Jewishness in Odesa against the backdrop of Soviet history, Ukrainian nation-making, and ongoing European Jewish revivals. Drawing on an abundance of materials from history, oral testimonies, anthropology, and Jewish studies, Sapritsky-Nahum depicts a vibrant community whose connection to the port city never falters, despite waves of emigration to countries like Israel or the US, the changing political status quo, and fluctuating levels of religious observance. Over the course of seven chapters, we learn about various ways of being Jewish in Odesa and different levels of belonging for Jewish Odesans who, negotiate their “cosmopolitanisms” depending on age, experience, or even transnational networks. Odesa’s erstwhile position as a vital port city during the Russian Empire and Soviet Union immersed it within a Russian-speaking sphere of influence, yet, it has been part of Ukraine since that nation gained independence in 1991. This history, combined with the 2014 Euromaidan protests and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, has meant that “Jewish Odesans find themselves to be part of different communities simultaneously: as Jews, as Odesans, as Ukrainians, and as Russians or Russian speakers” (17).
The author draws out the multiplicity of Jewish experiences and how ‘no single interpretation of Jewish lives in the Soviet Union could reveal a complete picture of Odesa’s Jews’.
As a daughter of immigrants from the Soviet Union, the author, much like her interlocutors, was faced with navigating the multifacetedness of her own positionality and identity within the boundaries of modern Russian-speaking Jewry in Ukraine. This engenders a reflexivity within in the writing, adding complexity to the ethnography and subsequent analysis. The book opens with a vignette of Sapritsky-Nahum sitting in an Odesan park with her father who is surprised to see Jewish children wearing kippahs (skullcaps) in public, contrasting with the enforced secularism in the Soviet regime he grew up in. One of the boys who comes up to chat to the author asks why her father, who is Jewish, doesn’t wear a kippah. This innocent encounter begins Sapritsky-Nahum’s discourse on the everchanging nature of Jewishness in Odesa and the difference between forging “new ways of life” rather than “returning” to them (141).
The following two chapters focus primarily on Odesan history, and the narratives told by elderly Odesan Jews, acting as a background to the succeeding reflections on revival and change. The information in chapter one illuminates the cultural significance of Odesa for Jewish intelligentsia who thrived among the liberal environments of the 19th century. Well-known figures such as the author Sholem Aleichem, philosopher Aham Ha’am, or poet Haim Nachman-Bialik, to name a few, were tied to Odesa over the course of their lives, as were prominent leaders of the Zionist movement, like Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Thus, the author points out, Jewish Odesits (Odesans) had adopted the values of the intelligentsia class as Jewish values. This is further explored in chapter two, where Sapritsky-Nahum focuses on the accounts of four elderly Jews who, to varying degrees, identified with Jewishness, Judaism and Odesa; some had strong ties with Israel, others were brought up in strictly secular homes. The author draws out the multiplicity of Jewish experiences and how “no single interpretation of Jewish lives in the Soviet Union could reveal a complete picture of Odesa’s Jews” (83).
The author recounts examples of local Odesans who adopted a religious lifestyle much to the surprise (and sometimes even discontent) of their elderly family members
Within the following chapters of Jewish Odesa, Sapritsky-Nahum turns to discussions concerning Jewish revivals and the effect it has had on Jewish Odesans. Some scholars of Jewish heritage bemoaned the term “a Jewish Europe,” perceiving it as inaccurate or immaterial – a wishful characterisation of the achievements of revival efforts. Ruth Ellen Gruber, too, proposed the term “virtually Jewish” to describe the many non-Jews who not only partook in, but initiated such revivals. Sapritsky-Nahum’s ethnography is a new addition to such reflections with the observation that Jewish Odesans are not so much restoring their lost Jewishness, but reinventing it. According to her, “adopting a religious identity in twenty-first-century Odesa became a way for Jews to define their Jewishness by turning to, rather than returning to, religious practice and faith” (114, italics original). This point is elucidated mainly in chapter four where the author recounts examples of local Odesans who adopted a religious lifestyle much to the surprise (and sometimes even discontent) of their elderly family members who grew up with different understandings of Jewishness – less religious, more value-oriented.
The existence of such rich and varied experiences might be attributed, the author suggests in chapter five, to the influence of Jewish philanthropic missions from Israel and the US. Often perceiving ex-Soviet Jews as “deprived” (174), they exposed and “imported” understandings of Jewishness from other diasporic communities, which differed in their principles and priorities. Thus, perceiving Odesan Jews as in need of “rescue” or of a revival created what the author termed “asymmetrical encounters” (144), magnifying the disparate relationship and value dynamics present within global Jewish communities.
Sapritsky-Nahum considers the ways the war has shaped and altered Jewish Odesan perceptions of nationhood and belonging
In the last two chapters, Sapritsky-Nahum looks beyond the significance of Odesa as a “Jewish place” due to the ways Jews who have shaped local culture, language, and customs to consider the lasting presence of Odesa, along with its networks and values, in the lives of those who emigrated, returned, and remained. Drawing on her interlocutors’ experiences, the author underlines the bond between Odesa and Jewish Odesits, suggesting:
“’home’ and ‘diaspora’ were not ideologically driven constants associated with a center (life in Israel) and a periphery (life outside Israel). Rather, they should be conceptualized as variable locations, infused with memories and attachments that social actors inhabit and relate to through everyday experiences and life circumstances, which in turn shape their imagined reality and senses of attachments” (199).
This is an incisive analysis of the home/diaspora model, sharpened by the inclusion of a short epilogue chapter that considers the ongoing war in Ukraine. Sapritsky-Nahum considers the ways the war has shaped and altered Jewish Odesan perceptions of nationhood and belonging due to their liminal placement between so many categories: Jewish, Odesan, Ukrainian, or Russian-speaking, to name a few.
The author carried out most of her fieldwork in the mid-2000s and shows an awareness of the limitations of her work given the onset of war. Yet, her consecutive excursions to Odesa in 2014 and 2019 gave her a glimpse of the growing tensions and shifting understandings of the entanglements of Jewishness, Ukraine, and Russia, which she notes can “only be further transformed” (250) during the war and are in need of further research. Nonetheless, Sapritsky-Nahum’s Jewish Odesa is an ethnographically vivid addition to the anthropology of Jews and Jewishness. It is sure to interest anybody wishing to broaden their knowledge of the lives of minorities, diaspora groups, or post-Soviet experiences.
Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Main image credit: Solarisys on Shutterstock
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