Introduction

Odessa, Odessa follows the fates of two sons from a proud lineage of rabbis and cantors in a shtetl near the Black Sea in western Russia.

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Excerpt

Chapter 1: Henya Chanah: Kill the Yids

October 1908/1909

Henya is forty-two in May, when Maryusa Freide is born. They fall into calling her Marya shortly after her birth to go with her diminutive size. The midwife who had delivered all of Henya and Mendel’s children, even Yonkel, the boy who died, calls Marya a change-of-life baby.

“It’s not so unusual. I’ve seen it time and again,” she explains, “even though you’ve stopped bleeding. Who knows how? All I know is it happens. But look, this one seems different from the others. I’m not exactly superstitious,” she says, taking a pinch of salt and throwing it over her shoulder, “but there is something different about her. Her eyes, so blue, and sad and piercing and expressive. Look.”

Henya looks deeply into her child’s eyes—the bluest of blues; like the cobalt waters of the Black Sea—but all she sees is blind trust and unrelenting demands.

“I predict,” the midwife continues, “that she will bring great happiness and, sorry to say, great sorrow into your life. So vulnerable, so innocent, so beautiful.”

Henya sees the inexplicable quality of which the midwife speaks, and she also knows in her kishkas that she is the one to nurse and nourish and keep her warm. And safe. She is the one to bear the bittersweet joy and burden that comes with maternal love.

Marya is quick to laugh but only when Disha or Leib gather around her worn straw sleeping basket waving colorful rags fashioned into dolls, or when they make funny faces, or whirl her round and round in their arms. The older children, bored with yet another dependent infant that curtails their activities, pay her scant attention. Rather, they mostly express disgust with their parent’s behavior as they gossip among themselves.

“Pick up the baby! Change her diapers! Give her some fresh air! How many times must I go through this,” badgers Faigel. “Imagine,” she bitterly protests to Levi, “First she walks around with a belly the size of a mountain, and now she sits nursing her baby with her shriveled breasts hanging down to her pupik like deflated balloons. It’s so disgusting. Better it should be me.”

In time, Mendel shows his disenchantment with, “yet another girl” by simply ignoring her, which is easy for him to do. But Henya, of course, cannot. After the first month or so, she senses that something is not quite right. Marya seems much too placid, too unengaged with her surroundings unless one of the children entertains her. She doesn’t turn her head when a loud noise sounds, nor does she respond to the toomel in their crowded home, or to the constant clank of street noise. Nothing disturbs her sleep.

When Henya finally confides her concern to Mendel, he tries to allay her qualms with stern words of advice and a dismissive flourish of his hand.

“Don’t trouble your head. She eats. She sleeps. She’s a good baby. What do you expect, she should be reciting Torah? Be glad we don’t have another Faigel to talk our ears off with her nagging and dreams of going to America.”

He reassures her that God will take care of their little Marya. And then he turns back to his prayers, or to his books, or to his lesson plans. But when he puts aside those diversions, he too is uneasy. He catches himself thinking that God didn’t watch over his Yonkel, so how can he be so sure He will protect Marya? He has bigger concerns to take care of, doesn’t he?

Marya begins to walk at thirteen months of age. She never crawls, except for a while, backwards. One day, to everyone’s astonishment, she just pulls herself up, tentatively takes a step or two, then, with outstretched arms, she toddles toward her father shrieking with joy in her newfound ability.

“There. You see,” Mendel chides Henya, “nothing to worry about,” as he watches his baby’s accomplishment. “Come to Papa, my shaina maidele!” She falls just short of her destination, but Mendel swoops her up in his arms and dances her around the room. Henya experiences a warm contentment creeping to her extremities; her previous doubts about Mendel’s love for his daughter disappear like the melting snow when spring arrives.

Several weeks later, a new worry appeared. “Yes, it’s late for her to talk,” Faigel says to her mother, “but didn’t some of the others talk late? First, it’s crawling, and now you’re carrying on that she’s not talking. Mama, what will you find to worry about next? Leib talked late and Avram didn’t make a sound until he was two and a half. And he should only shut his mouth now.” She pauses and then continues, “So tell me Mama, do you remember how old I was when I talked or walked? Probably not. Who pays attention to me anyway? I’m just the old doormat who’s been here forever.”

Henya’s agitation has increased with each passing month without the words she longs to hear from Marya’s mouth. Once again, she voices her concern to Faigel. “She doesn’t talk, not a word. No ma-ma, no pa-pa. Only those sounds, like she is gargling.”

“Mama, this is the way I think about it. Everyone talks for her so she doesn’t have to say bupkis to get what she wants. With the rest of us, we had to talk or go without. She whines and you’re there with your breast, or food, or a clean rag when she goes kaki. Do you ever worry about me? So let me tell you right now that before winter begins, this time for real, I’m going to America with Yosef; and Papa had better start making plans too. He keeps delaying, but every day there’s another death, or beating, or rape. Can’t you see there are warning signs all around us? Please Mama, for once, listen to me. And with Easter coming, you know what happens. The Goys favorite time for pogroms.”

“Faygela, Faygela,” Henya cajoles, employing the Yiddish diminutive for “little bird.”

When she feels compassion for her oldest child, she reverts to Faigel’s childhood name, although she is anything but a little bird. More like a raucous crow. “Who does she take after? Not me,” she thinks, “or her father. Maybe Mendel’s brother, Shimshon, who was disowned by his father. Dead, gone, never heard from again, like he never lived.” What she is thankful for is knowing that no matter what, sparrow, crow, or eagle, her little bird will survive and thrive.

Left alone, Henya tries to convince herself that Faigel is right. She reasons that she is smart, maybe too smart for her own good. Almost nineteen, and she’s already making plans. But she has a good head on her shoulders. And she’s right—I do dwell on things too much.

When her apprehension about Marya comes back—and it always does— she confides in Shmuel, the most sensitive of her children. Unlike Faigel who scolds, or sullen Avram who rattles the delicate walls when he slams the door on his way out, or Levi who, like his father, reassures her and then returns to his books, Shmuel takes her in his arms and dances her around the small boundaries of the front room until they are both dizzy and bumping into the walls. Whether he is making somersaults on the floor and crashing into furniture, or doubling the size of his kinky mass of black curls running his fingers through his hair as he leaps up and down, arms flailing, whooping, monkeylike, his antics always lighten her mood. With him, she forgets her anguish and remembers how to laugh.

“What would I do without my Shmuel?” Henya muses.

On Easter Sunday, after supper, as Henya is bathing Marya in the tin tub, the Cossacks turn up without warning. The neighing of horses announces their arrival. In their bedroom, Mendel had wrapped himself in his tallis in preparation for his nightly prayer. Henya stands petrified, like a statue, barely breathing, so to translate the commotion coming from the streets. She hears the shouting of gruff male voices speaking Russian, the screams of women, the menace of barking dogs. She hears the blast of a musket. She hears doors being smashed. She commands her paralyzed body to move. She lifts Marya from the pan of hot, soapy water and wraps her in a towel. She gives her a sugar stick to suck.

“Sha. Sha still my little one. Mendel! Mendel, come quick. God almighty, there’s trouble! Bolt the door.” She shouts orders like a general. Mendel obeys and then pushes the couch in front of the door.

When she hears the shrieks coming closer, she hollers, “Get Disha and Leib out of bed! Hide them under the floorboards. Where is Faigel? Gottenu, another pogrom.”

The thump of heavy-booted footsteps, the cries of terror, the thunder of horses’ hoofs close in. She shushes Marya again despite her silence.

“We’re going to play a little game, Mamela. Mama is going to play peek-a-boo and you must be very, very quiet. Quiet mine kinde,” she gestures, putting her finger to her mouth.

Outside, the Cossacks drunkenly shatter windows and furniture, and send kerosene lamps with its scalding liquid airborne; they set dwellings on fire with the toss of a match. Homes turn into gray, powder rubble in minutes. They drag men, mostly the old and feeble, barefooted and in nightshirts, out of their homes. They tug at the young men’s beards and side locks; they snigger as they rip yarmulkes off the heads of their victims, who try in vain to cover their bare skulls with their hands. They fire their muskets in the air for fun. They laugh as old ladies cower in the corners of their dwellings.

They throttle any one bold enough to protest, or anyone who dares to try to protect their families. With their knives they butcher the few castaway dogs that wander in the neighborhood. They rape young girls and old women alike, toss children to the ground, and burn Siddurs, all the while chanting their mantra, “Kill the God damn kikes! Kill the Yids! They killed our Savior.”

Shmuel and Avram escape detection by hiding in a potato bin, but the soldiers pummel Levi as he walks home from Cheder, head in the holy book. They heave Mendel to the floor and kick him in the ribs when he bars their way to his home. He holds them off long enough for Henya to hide sleeping Marya under a pile of dirty laundry and then collapses to the floor in agony, holding his bruised ribs. He tries to retrieve the yarmulke that has fallen from his head. A Cossack steps on Mendel’s wrist with his heavy boots.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” he moans.

The screams and cries of terror, the stench of smoke and the burning of sacred prayer books, the river of blood, the barricaded doors and windows caving in to the invader’s powerful fists and clubs bring confusion and dread to all but Marya, who sleeps peacefully in her little wicker basket, concealed beneath a pile of dirty laundry and still sucking her sugar stick.

Henya knows now, without a doubt, that her baby girl is deaf. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. Prior to reading Odessa, Odessa, had you heard of the Pale of Jewish Settlement in the Russian Empire and the violent Cossack attacks and Pogroms that went on there?

2. What do the women in the novel, Henya in the first generation, Dora in the second, and Roberta in the third, have in common, if anything?

3. How do the issues confronting women of today replicate the issues that Henya or Dora confronted?

4. Why do you think Dora refused to speak to Roberta of her life in Odessa? Was it the trauma of her childhood, or did she just not want to relive it?

5. Roberta and Hannah diverge in their political beliefs? Do you have siblings, or other family members with different viewpoints? How do you handle differences that arise?

6. The novel culminates with Mendel’s long lost brother’s journal. What were your feelings after reading his journal at the end of the book?

7. How did the chapter in the Palestinian Refugee Camp affect you?

8. Has the reading of this book about the difficulties immigrants must confront affected your perspective of what is going on in today’s world?

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