ODESSA, UKRAINE (A GLIMPSE BACK TO 2011)
It’s a cool cloudy morning! Makes me feel like writing instead of despairing of the heat and the sun.
A good morning to declare my two biggest accomplishments in life: 1) My parenting wasn’t so slaphappy as to prevent my sons from becoming worthwhile human beings. It’s best not to brag since I suppose they could still end up in the penitentiary but, since they are neither corporate nor political, they’ll probably just keep on being decent men.
See how relatively unscathed they seem.
And that other big accomplishment: 2) I really did visit much of the world. And perhaps extolling the virtues of travel is okay…if I acknowledge it’s partially a series of sad tales.
I have been blogging about my travels for sixteen years and even wrote a travel memoir (Window Seat: The Story of a Traveling Life). But, the unfortunate truth is that the security of and conditions for the planet and for humanity have only worsened. Every day news from the world’s ‘newspapers’/reliable media sites is full of double-dealing and disasters (affecting the natural and/or human environment). So, to return to a spot on the globe in which I found pleasure and discovered new history, art, and food, and which is now suffering displacement, starvation, and bombs, feels like ‘disaster tourism’, even if the visit is virtual. Still, revisiting offers me a regretful kind of joy in remembering and a chance to add to warnings about the damage we do over and over and over to our world.
Today, I’m going back to 2011 and a Balkan journey that included Moldova and Odessa, Ukraine. At the time, neither place was threatened, in a state of disruption, or at war. I’ve been thinking about that visit to Odessa off and on for years now, attempting to track the pathways of war in Ukraine, with a silly little personal hope that at least the friendly, lively, and beautiful Odessa which I found so fascinating wasn’t obliterated. Odessa was a notable spot on that Balkan journey then and it remains so now. Not only because of the bus ride across a corner of Ukraine to reach the historic port of Odessa, but because of a book I will mention again and again, The Story of a Life by Konstantin Paustovsky (more about that later in this post). And now there’s also the heartbreaking David and Goliath/Ukraine and Russia story to ponder.
Which brings me to my annoyingly constant plug for a bit of wandering around the world. Do It. Go There. To places of peace and lingering beauty. To places in danger of losing whatever they now have. Because the political world changes in a minute and now the natural world is not so far behind.
Anyway, here’s what I wrote in Window Seat about that carelessly innocent visit to Odessa in 2011. I use the word ‘carelessly’ because of assumption that what I’m experiencing at any given moment in time will somehow always be there much as it was. That I could return for a tasty bowl of borscht at that same restaurant or visit that same monument. Instead, in this greedy, power-mad world of ours, we can take bets on how greatly that very place will soon be altered. Not for the better most likely.
But then…it was like this: Odessa, Ukraine, is technically not part of the Balkans but, by my logic, was close enough to drop by. I stayed near a square where a larger-than-life Duc de Richelieu, who once had ruled Odessa, took center stage, surrounded by the awe-inspiring buildings of the old, beautiful Europe we revere—the creamy yellows, mint greens, and rosy reds glowing in the morning sun. For the next two days, I walked. I went down the Potemkin Steps and then up through a huge park that led me to the beach, where, among the froth of condoms and potato chip wrappers, I stuck my toes in the Black Sea. It was a friendly, sitting-about, reading, card-playing, family-game kind of beach. The seafront stretched from the Potemkin Steps to the working port. In the other direction was a long cobblestone tourist street with all the requisite chic shops and cafés, leading to a grand fountain, where marriages were being celebrated with fine Ukrainian and Turkic traditions, complete with snow-white puppies and doves, falcons, and swords. I had a perfect meal in Odessa: beet-red borscht glowing in a bowl in the sun by the sea, with rough brown bread to be spread from the pot of pork fat retaining tiny slivers of yesterday’s roast and with a healthy shot of vodka decorated with a slim green scallion—quite yummy to lick. It was sunny then, but I know I would love Odessa in the rain and snow as well. It has the sense of layers and layers of cultures mixing in battle and in bed, leading to the element all great cities have: a bit of each of us in their DNA. Pushkin called Odessa the city where “the air is filled with all Europe.” I imagine myself. … I’m young, a writer, living in a warm attic with my lover, the poet. We eat endless loaves of brown bread slathered with that salty fat and downed with the vodka we keep chilled on the fire escape. It snows and snows. The heat’s turned off. We stare out to sea, talking about our novels and poems, and we get chilly and damp as we dream. Then we get pneumonia and die. But back in my real travel world—my endless quest for directions sometimes sparks conversations, and the best one in Odessa was with a young man, surely his grandmother’s favorite—polite, curious, charming—who wanted to know how I could be traveling by myself. “How old are you? How come you are by yourself? Aren’t you tired? My grandmother cannot travel, because her pension is too small. Where will you go next?” Young men must favor their grandmothers—they’re always the ones who want to talk to me about their lives
Odessa was unusually appealing to me for reasons uncertain. It had a romantic air about it (imagined or otherwise), it was imminently walkable, and my mind’s eye could see layer upon layer of history all around me. There’s always just the right book for every stop on any journey. In this case, a Russian/Ukrainian story, my major literary discovery of the past year: The Story of a Life by Konstantin Paustovsky in six volumes (the first three recently translated by Douglas Smith and the last three by previous translators in the ’60s). Volume 4, Years of Hope, could, as one reviewer states, be titled Years of Odessa, where nearly the entire book is set. If only I’d known about this beautiful and astoundingly evocative book before my small journey there. In Years of Hope, it is 1920; Russia is in the middle of a revolution and civil war; and, while Ukraine generally considers itself a sovereign nation, Russia, or the Soviet Union, considers some or most of the country as Russian. Odessa, at the time, is a half-destroyed city without food—or hope, for that matter. But Paustovsky manages to convey not only the cold and hunger but also the sea, nature, architecture, and a cast of war-worn characters never to be forgotten. Anyone interested in Russian and Ukrainian history and the ties therein, or in one of the most perfect masterworks of memoir, history, and literature ever written must read The Story of a Life, which is “a grand, novelistic memoir of a life spent on the ravaged frontier of Russian history. … Paustovsky imbued Soviet literature with tender curiosity about ordinary people and loving care for the natural world. He captured all the beauty, turbulence and injustice of his youth, and the strange blend of horrific violence and intoxicating hope that arrived with the revolution,” according to a Washington Post review. Paustovsky’s grand tableau is as important to me as any book I’ve ever read, ranking right up there with Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.
Looking back to that 2011 trip and Ukraine’s recent history, at least from the Orange Revolution of 2004/05 to today, I regret not spending more time traveling in and reading about Ukraine, but wanderers almost never get time-in-place just right. And besides there are always bombs to change things.
But back then I could eat, drink and be merry….
Enjoy these photos from back then (best photos are in the blog, address below)and should you wish to see and read just a little more on my blog post about the visit: Go to mneset.me and