Odessa's Oddities & Curiosities | Week of 6/16/2025

Dear friends,

If you know me well, you will know that my parents named me Odessa because they each have a grandparent or great-grandparent who hailed from Odessa, Ukraine.

But “Odessa” has always felt somewhat abstract to me. I never met my great-grandfather George, who escaped from Odessa on the back of a hay truck in the middle of the night, learning years later that his whole family had been murdered in the Holocaust. And especially after Russia invaded Ukraine, I have felt this building weight attached to my name. Some will remember I wrote a poem about this strange feeling of kinship, of homeland as Ukraine was attacked even though I have never been to Odessa.

Why am I named after this place where the streets ran red with Jewish blood?

I still have never been to Odessa, but over these past two weeks, I’ve gotten much closer than ever before. I have just returned from Eastern Europe on a two-week trip to Poland-Hungary with a gaggle (read 46) other Harvard and Yale students. I just barely got off the waitlist for this trip, and I am so unbelievably grateful that I got to go.

We started in Budapest, then Zakopane (and the beautiful Carpathian Mountains), Krakow, Lublin, and Warsaw. We visited Auschwitz, Birkenau, Majdanek, and Treblinka. We also visited Jewish life in each city touched by Jewish death: the Dohány Synagogue in Budapest, the yeshiva in Lublin, JCC Krakow, and Warsaw Hillel.

I have been thinking a lot about my Bubi’s Aunt Manya. Manya studied economics at the University of Warsaw (I wandered the same campus). Seven years later, she was murdered by the Einsatzgruppen (killing squads) in the forest outside of Rovno. At the Warsaw Hillel, I was randomly sorted into a group to meet with someone from Polish Hillel. Her name was Manya — an uncommon name. It felt like a sign.

Knowing my parents, it wouldn’t surprise you to learn I spent a lot of time thinking about the trees. The forest of Treblinka is beautiful in every way you hope it wouldn’t be. The birds are in constant communication, their calls echo through the blasted remains of the death camp where 900,000 Jews were murdered: gassed and burned. I wonder how much the trees remember. If their rings hold memory of all that smoke for the 15 months that the camp operated, where they burned bodies day in and day out. There are so many wildflowers at Treblinka in every possible color. Polish school children ride bikes around the 17,000 upright stones to commemorate each village wiped out by the gas chambers. Their bikes are green and pink and purple.

I spent a long time wandering the stones, talking to my ancestors. I grieve them in sharp, alarming ways. I tell them that I feel safe now, that in a weeks time I will also get to kiss and hug my parents, my sister, like they could not. I tell them I wear a Star of David necklace every day and have never hidden it out of fear.

I tell them my name is Odessa, but also Rovno, Kiev, Bialystok, Yekaterinburg, Cherkasy…and all the places where my ancestors lived and danced and fell in love and read great books and cried and fled and were murdered. And every time someone calls my name, I think of them.

But my main takeaway from this trip was not about me, not about my family, not about the Jews or the Jewish future. But that humanity is capable of many horrors and that these horrors can build slowly and surely till you look back and don’t recognize the person before you.

It is expressly taboo to make any sort of Holocaust comparisons. I understand that the scale of the Holocaust is incomparable. But I also believe that comparison is our best cognitive tool. May we use some of that horror to stand for injustice, for the terrified undocumented people in our own country, for the Palestinians in Gaza and the Israelis in tunnels or bunkers, for Trans people everywhere.

I have many media recommendations for you, as always, but I will hold off until the next newsletter.

In the meantime, I hope you hold your loved ones close. Appreciate the trees in your neighborhood. Commune with your ancestors. Speak out.

With love & curiosity,

Odessa