Sitting in a cab at four in the morning, stuck behind an eternal red traffic light without another car in sight did not feel to me like the right moment for an epiphany. And yet, as I stared at the dark, silent streets, the empty roads and still windows, I realised that London was an unconquered city that did not carry the burden of denied grief. Even William the Conqueror came friendly to London and allowed the city to keep its language, laws and customs. The dull green domes of disused bingo halls stood tall in the darkness. My heart was full of gratitude to the city of my birth.
On the Essex Road I noticed that the old Mecca building had been rebranded as “Gracepoint”. The meaning eluded me and yet it seemed profound. One of the features of London was not only that its name was uncontested, but that it stuck with all its place names long after their reference had been lost in time. Crystal Palace, Blackfriars, Burnt Oak, Henley’s Corner, Whitechapel. I was on my way to Odessa, now Odesa, to speak at a conference on its “economic revival” and I wondered if the renaming would follow me there. The dawn over the Westway felt holy, the sleepy city woken by a golden kiss as we drove towards London Luton Airport.
I remember being dumbfounded by Pope John Paul II kissing the tarmac of Gatwick Airport when he arrived on his papal visit in 1982. Arriving at Luton Airport I understood it better: at 5am, it looked like a point of pilgrimage, lines of people walking towards their destination with a resolute devotion through the mist and rain.
The journey to Ukraine is aways long. This is my tenth trip since the war started two and half years ago. There are no flights to Ukraine. If I am going to Kyiv or Lviv, I go to Poland and make a car journey. Sometimes the wait at the border takes five or six hours. My experience tells me that the relationship between Poland and Ukraine is far from friendly. The Hungarian border crossing is even worse. Brexit has created an eternal bond between Ukrainians and Brits trying to cross the border. EU citizens go right through but we have to wait for hours, have our nail scissors confiscated and are generally treated as criminals. I exchanged glances with a Polish border guard when the wait had been excruciating and he just said one word, “Brexit”.
The best route to Odesa is through Moldova. The city I am flying to was known to me as Kishinev, but now it is called Chișinău. The slogan plastered over all the walls and spaces of the airport is “Chișinău – Dream, Fly, Grow”. I was humble enough to acknowledge I had entered an alternative reality. Each airport announcement was preceded by the first seven notes of the song “Go West”, a triumphal way to announce a three-hour delay, and there is a fantastic modernist statue of a pilot and two air stewardesses brimming with optimism and joy in the dividing line between arrivals and departures.
Although it lurks in a dark valley of empty fields, the city of Kishinev/Chișinău was the midwife of 20th-century Europe. It was the sight of the Kishinev pogrom in which 49 Jews were lynched on Easter Sunday 1903. It was the dawn of the century and the massacre lit the way ahead. It was immortalised by Hayim Nahman Bialik in his poem “In the City of Slaughter”, which was translated by Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, the author of Iron Wall and the founder of the tradition of Zionism now embodied by Benjamin Netanyahu.
The poem decried the cowardly Jews who did not fight and allowed their wives to be raped and children to be killed. It was in response to this that Theodor Herzl suggested Uganda as a Jewish national home and Jabotinsky founded his armed “self-defence units” in Odesa. And it was from there that the Zionist leader Meir Dizengoff sailed to found Tel Aviv.
We still live inside the forcefield of the Kishinev pogrom. The subterranean thud of explosions in Gaza, Beirut, Tehran and Haifa that formed the distant soundtrack to my trip were all primed in Kishinev in which “never again” morphed into “forever”.
It was after the Kishinev pogrom that the heresy that had not been uttered for 2,000 years, that arms nor God would protect Jews from slaughter, took hold. A “national home” became the objective. And there Jews would be safe. Hamas put paid to that idea on 7 October 2023, killing 30 times the number of those killed in the Kishinev pogrom on a righteous rampage of murder, rape and mayhem. And 40 times that number of Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since then. The “red massacre” of the poem is still being enacted.
Get up and walk through the City of Slaughter
And with your hand touch and lock your eyes
On the cold brains and clots of blood
Dried on the tree trunks, roofs and fences. It is they.
I stood in Chișinău but my heart was in Palestine and I could see clearly the tracks linking the two. And this was where the train left the station.
Chișinău was the capital of Transnistria under the Nazis, an autonomous Romanian enclave, and it was the Transistrian army that organised the slaughter of 30,00 Odesa Jews on 22 and 23 October 1941, all shot in the town square, under the red sliver of a new moon. I filed “Dream, Fly, Grow” along with “things can only get better” as slogans I could never understand.
I was driven from Chișinău to Odesa on a stern September sunlit day. I could make no sense of what I saw. Sometimes Moldova reminded me of France profonde with its faded yellow fields and a subdued green rolling for miles, and then it looked like Sicily, with dry rocky hills and olive trees. And sometimes it looked like Russia – long, wide black fields that could have been covered with ice.
We drove on. Watermelons were stacked high in cages under trees, pigeons flew from dovecots on the second floor of houses with corrugated iron roofs and with a thin line of weather-beaten trees in the distance. We drove past stunted vineyards and trees that looked like bushes and as we approached the border with Ukraine, fields and fields of dead sunflowers, turning their back on the sun, heads drooping, ready to die.
Winter was coming, and winter meant that death was warming up.
We drove through a village called Tudor, which had an electricity generator that looked more like a chapel. As we waited for hours to cross the border, I had time to admire the new road full of lorries, large signs declaring their commitment to the environment and the scale and range of tattoos. Now I understood what medieval postmodernism looked like – a poor version of postwar Austria. The name of the border crossing to Ukraine is Palanca. To the north is a Russian puppet state called Transnistria, which climbs up the Moldovan border as Chile does to Argentina. Russia hopes to push all the way through Odesa and control the entire northern Black Sea coast. Nothing I saw in Moldova indicated that they would fight to stop this happening.
Once the border is crossed Odesa is an hour away. Founded as the only free city in the Tzarist empire, Odesa astounded the world. The people there pioneered the tunnel as the fundamental form of smuggling long before the Sinaloa cartel and Hamas. The “catacombs” run for miles underground and served as the haven of the Red Army during Nazi occupation.
The memory of Mishka Yaponchik, a Jewish gangster of a Robin Hood reputation, is still cherished in the city. His legend was immortalised by Isaac Babel in his “How It Was Done in Odessa” stories. Odesa was a city that built its opera house before it had clean running water. It was a city of dockers and violinists, poets and prostitutes, of illusionists, tricksters and swindlers. A Potemkin city and the home of the Potemkin Stairs.
The fastest-growing city in Europe, Odesa became the greatest port of the Black Sea, the gateway to that enormous land mass of Eurasia that spread far to the east. The most south-western point of the great Russian empire. As a deep-water port, big ships would arrive in Odesa, where their cargo was broken down into smaller ships, which would sail up the Don where the tea, tobacco, sugar, wine, fruit and cloth would disappear at Rostov into the dark, cold expanse of Russia.
Odesa attracted Italians, Greeks, Turks and Russians. Pushkin wrote some of his finest poems in the city. Above all it attracted Jews escaping their religion, in a free city. Jews were the largest single community in Odesa and fully engaged in creating the music, writing, politics, food and crime that gave the city its reputation. That was until they were all killed in a town square by the Romanians. But they couldn’t kill the memory of Mishka Yaponchik. In the heart of Odesa, he still lives. When it is my turn to raise a toast, I offer it to his memory. It is always greeted with affection.
I had returned to speak at a conference on the economic renewal of Odesa during a war with a country that was the principle reason for its economic existence. Its restoration as a free city made complete sense. But how could that be reconciled with support for Ukraine?
I was thinking about this as I sat on the balcony of my hotel on Pushkin Street, where the domed corners, the high windows, the neo-classical art-deco buildings shimmer under the tall plane trees. It was a sublime moment of repose that was interrupted by the wail of sirens from the four corners of the city. Clouds covered the moon as the sirens reached towards the purity of their note, and then the rain fell in torrents and the thunder rolled and echoed. Standing on the balcony with the five sirens proclaiming their dissonant symphony, I found it hard to tell if it was lightning or Russian rockets that lit the sky. The streetlights went out and all I could feel were the pinpricks of hard rain and all I could hear were sirens and the sound of thunder.
The darkness of the city was interrupted only by momentary streaks of white light. As the intensity of the sirens wound down at different rates, I heard the midnight church bells as well as the very different sirens of ambulances and fire engines. Three missiles had got through and, I discovered, had laid to waste buildings on the “outskirts” of town. Lightning and missiles, thunder and explosion; the fate of Odesa was unresolved.
The next morning as I entered the conference hall, I was met by the mayor of Odesa, Gennadiy Trukhanov, and what looked like an official delegation, some of whom I knew. They were quite agitated.
“Have you heard?” the mayor said. “They want to rename the streets of our city, to abolish Pushkin Street, Catherine Street, Babel’s statue and garden.”
Gracepoint was just the beginning of my journey. Trukhanov walked me indignantly to a plywood box in the middle of the street. The statue of Pushkin was firmly entombed within it, marked with an “X”. In the statue that cannot be seen, he looks remarkably like a gangster rapper, or Johnny Guitar Watson from the Seventies, wearing a top hat and a mauve suit. The limousines and Land Rovers parked outside the Hotel Bristol provide a suitable backdrop, but now Pushkin was in a box. He was an unwanted remnant of Russian imperialism.
“We are a multicultural city,” said Trukhanov. “They are attacking our identity.”
What are they changing the name of the street to?
“Italian Street,” he said.
I mumbled about being a foreigner and it not being my battle. But I felt deep anger, not because of Pushkin, who has long been weaponised by Putin as a symbol of Russian superiority. My concern was with Isaac Babel. His Odesa stories and his “Red Cavalry” are close to the Bible and Shakespeare in my heart.
The Red Cavalry is an account of the invasion of west Ukraine and Poland by “Bolshevik” Cossacks in 1919. It is unrivalled in the genre of war reporting and fiction. Babel was murdered on the personal orders of Stalin in 1940; his unpublished writing was also destroyed. His books were banned and he fell down the memory hole. People used to say purged but now they say cancelled. His “rehabilitation’” was one of the glories of Glasnost and then Ukrainian independence.
In Odesa they put up a statue to Babel and named a café after him outside the flats he grew up in. But, because he wrote in Russian and was a member of the Communist Party, he is again consigned to the dustbin of history.
The Ukraine-Russia war is not only about borders and territory, but also about memory and identity. I did not meet one person who agreed with the renaming of Babel Gardens. I did not meet one person who was prepared to speak out against it. There are no longer any statues of Marx in Odesa, nor of Pushkin, but someone needs to be able to say that, “Everything solid melts into air, and everything holy is profaned.”
Note: This article was amended on 28 October 2024. The article initially said that the Russian language had been banned in all public places in Odesa, which is not the case.
[See also: Moldova’s referendum result is a disaster for the EU]
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This article appears in the 23 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The crisis candidate