An Album of Memories
A Few Words Before You Enter the Courtyard
What lay behind the arches of old Odessa houses? Discover a courtyard where neighbors knew one another by name, Lydia grapevines climbed the walls, and every last name on a mailbox told its own story.
An Odessa courtyard was far more than a place to live. It was a world of its own, with its own rules, humor, unforgettable characters, and shared memories. This introduction opens a series of stories about old Odessa, its people, the life of its courtyards, and the ordinary residents who gradually became part of the city’s legend.
👉 Odessa is a historic port city on the Black Sea, founded in 1794 during the reign of Catherine the Great. From its earliest years, it attracted merchants, sailors, craftsmen, architects, and immigrants from across Europe and the Mediterranean, becoming one of the most multicultural cities in the region.
If you’re reading this in America, there’s a fair chance you’ve already seen the name Odessa on a highway sign. Perhaps you drove right past it without giving it a second thought. This book is about the original Odessa located in Ukraine that gave many of those places their name.
Odessa is famous for its harbor, the Potemkin Stairs, its architecture, literature, and distinctive sense of humor. But the Odessa you are about to enter lies beyond the familiar landmarks—in hidden courtyards, beneath grapevines, around shared tables, and among neighbors who knew one another by name.
Step through the archway. The courtyard has been waiting for you.
Chapter 1. Introduction
If you happen to be standing on the street side of the archway, don’t hurry away just yet. Pause for a moment. Listen. Take in the smells. Push open the old, weathered door and step inside.
Don’t worry, this isn’t a museum, and there’s no tour guide waiting to recite dates and facts without taking a breath. There are no signs saying “Do Not Touch” or “Please Keep Quiet.” In fact, very little here has ever been perfectly orderly. Truth be told, it never was.
You’re about to enter an ordinary Odessa courtyard in the mid-1970s and early 1980s.
Odessa was a great courtyard by the sea. And this courtyard was a little Odessa
Courtyards like this once filled the older neighborhoods near the Black Sea. Hidden behind heavy gates and modest archways draped with grapevines, they seemed reluctant to reveal their secrets to anyone simply passing by. From the street, all you could see was the building’s facade—often faded, weathered, and buried beneath decades of peeling paint.
But step inside, and an entirely different world opened before you. A world where people lived far closer to one another than most of us do today.
Here, neighbors knew far more than one another’s last names. They knew every child’s birthday, who had fallen ill, whose son had been drafted into the army, whose daughter was getting married, who was expecting a baby, and who was quietly struggling through hard times. They borrowed salt, matches, ladders, and sometimes a few rubles “just until payday.” They argued, made peace, celebrated weddings, welcomed sailors home from long voyages, greeted newborns, and stood together to say goodbye to the elderly.
Take a look around.
Lydia grapevines—an old American hybrid that became a beloved resident of Odessa courtyards—climb patiently over walls and fences, as if keeping watch over everything that happens below. Beneath their shade stand a large wooden table, weathered chairs, and long benches where neighbors gather on warm evenings. An old bicycle leans against the wall, having witnessed more stories than many of the people who still live here. Somewhere deeper in the courtyard are the communal outdoor water tap and the inevitable shared courtyard toilet. Clotheslines stretch from balcony to balcony, always carrying someone’s freshly washed laundry.
A cat naps lazily on a sunny windowsill. From an open second-floor window drifts the irresistible aroma of fried fish. Then, from somewhere above, a familiar voice calls out:
— Who took our ladder again?
And life simply goes on.
This courtyard was never wealthy.
Great historical events rarely happened here.
Yet places like this quietly shaped the real life of the city for decades.
Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, Greeks, Moldovans, and dozens of other peoples lived side by side here. They spoke with different accents, argued about politics, soccer, and fish prices at Odessa’s famous Privoz Market, yet somehow managed to remain neighbors.
In many ways, Odessa itself was one great courtyard by the sea
And this courtyard was a little Odessa
The stories that follow are not a novel in the traditional sense. There is no single hero and no continuous plot. Think of this book instead as an album of memories. You can open it almost anywhere and wander forward or backward through its pages. Here you’ll meet people, everyday objects, jokes, family stories, pets, quiet moments, and memories gathered from different years.
Open it at any page. There are no major or minor stories here. Everyone was a neighbour
The courtyard was, in many ways, an extension of every apartment. In fact, much of everyday life unfolded not behind closed doors but here, in the shared space between them.
Some of the people you will meet were real.
Others were shaped by memory, imagination, and the way time quietly transforms every story.
But the courtyard itself is real.
For the sake of the story, we’ve given this courtyard an address—10 Sadovaya (Garden) Street. Whether such a courtyard ever stood at that exact location is beside the point. It could just as easily have been found on dozens of other streets in old Odessa. Almost everything that happens here could have happened in any Odessa courtyard during the second half of the twentieth century.
A courtyard like this is a capsule of human memory
Time never stood still here. It simply settled in layers—like dust on an old bicycle, peeling paint on a weathered wall, or the growth rings inside the trunk of a tree.
People came and went. New names appeared on the mailboxes while old ones disappeared. Generations changed.
Yet somehow, the courtyard remembered them all.
And now, one by one, those layers will begin to reveal themselves.
— So don’t just stand there like a schlimazel. Come on in. We’ve been expecting you. There’s always room for one more at the table.
— I just didn’t want to interrupt…
— You haven’t even started yet.
The world beyond the arch was always changing. The courtyard tried to preserve what mattered
👉 Lydia Grapevine
Lydia is an old American hybrid grape variety that found an unexpected second home in southern Ukraine and many other parts of the former Russian Empire and, later, the Soviet Union. Hardy, vigorous, and remarkably adaptable, it climbed walls, fences, sheds, and pergolas with little encouragement.
Its pink grapes, with their distinctive strawberry-like aroma, were rarely used for fine winemaking. Instead, they became the grape of everyday life. Families turned Lydia into homemade wine, juice, preserves, and compotes. Professional winemakers often dismissed it, but generations of homeowners cherished it for one simple reason—it almost never failed them.
In Odessa, Lydia became more than just a grapevine. It was part of the courtyard itself. It shaded benches and tables, covered walls with dense green leaves, witnessed generations of neighbors come and go, and every autumn quietly found its way into countless bottles of homemade wine—sometimes excellent, sometimes merely drinkable, but almost always shared in good company.
👉 Schlimazel
Schlimazel (Yiddish: שלימזל) is a classic character in Jewish humor—a person who seems permanently followed by bad luck. No matter how hard they try, life somehow manages to play another small trick on them.
As Odessa liked to joke:
— A schlimazel is someone who finds money lying in the street—only to discover it fell out of his own pocket.
The word became part of everyday Odessa speech and is still one of the city’s best-known expressions.
👉 Why Did Odessa Become So International?
Odessa became an international city because it was built not by the descendants of a single people who had lived there for centuries, but by newcomers who arrived searching for opportunity.
Many old European cities grew gradually over hundreds of years: first a village, then a fortress, and eventually a city. Their populations were largely local.
Odessa followed a different path.
After these lands became part of the Russian Empire at the end of the eighteenth century, the government set out to build a major Black Sea port and commercial center as quickly as possible. To make that happen, people with skills were invited from across Europe and the Mediterranean.
• Greeks came because they knew the sea and international trade.
• Italians helped design and build the new city. In fact, several of Odessa’s earliest architects were Italian.
• Jews became merchants, craftsmen, bankers, and entrepreneurs.
Then came Russians, Ukrainians, Moldovans, Bulgarians, Armenians, Germans, French, Poles, and many others.
None of these communities formed an overwhelming majority for very long.
In many cities, one dominant culture gradually absorbs the others. Odessa was different. For much of its history, almost everyone was, in one way or another, descended from newcomers.
The city resembled a great ship anchored beside the Black Sea. On a ship, what matters most is not where you came from, but what you can do. Can you sail? Can you build? Can you trade? Can you solve problems? If you can, you belong.
That is one of the reasons Odessa developed its famous sense of humor.
When people with different languages and traditions live side by side, they learn to understand one another through wit, self-irony, and compromise.
There was another reason as well.
A port is never just a place. It is a constant exchange of goods, money, sailors, languages, news, fashions, and ideas. Ports change people.
If Saint Petersburg has often been called Russia’s “window to Europe,” Odessa was something different.
It was a door through which the world walked in
Perhaps that is why the city produced so many stories. Too many different people lived too close together for them not to begin telling stories about one another.
► Does Odessa Have Any Counterparts Around the World?
No two cities are ever truly alike.
Still, if you were looking for places that share something of Odessa’s spirit, these would be good places to begin.
⚓ Marseille, France
Perhaps Odessa’s closest European relative. A great port city shaped by waves of immigrants, a blend of cultures, its own unmistakable accent, a reputation for smugglers and adventurers, and a relationship with the rest of the country that mixes affection with a healthy dose of suspicion.
⚓ New Orleans, Louisiana
If Odessa and Marseille had an American cousin, it would probably be New Orleans. French, Spanish, African, Caribbean, and American influences all came together there to create something entirely unique. Like Odessa, it developed its own music, cuisine, humor, and unmistakable way of looking at life.
⚓ Naples, Italy
Another city where the sea has always been part of everyday life. Trade, migration, and centuries of cultural exchange shaped a strong local identity. Like Odessans, Neapolitans often speak of their city not simply as a place to live, but as a world of its own.
⚓ Istanbul, Türkiye
On a far larger scale, yet built on a similar principle. For centuries, Istanbul stood at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, Christianity and Islam, East and West. It became a meeting place for merchants, travelers, languages, and ideas—and developed a character found nowhere else.
⚓ New York City
Especially neighborhoods such as Brooklyn and the Lower East Side during the great immigration waves of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Entire worlds grew within a single city, each with its own traditions, accents, humor, and neighborhood legends. It is no coincidence that many immigrants from Odessa later felt surprisingly at home on Brighton Beach.
But Odessa Had Something All Its Own
Nearly every great port city leaves behind remarkable architecture, memorable food, local traditions, and distinctive music.
Odessa did all of that.
But it also created something far less tangible: a unique way of talking about life.
In Odessa, people often discussed serious things as though they were jokes—and joked about important things as though they were perfectly serious.
Perhaps Odessa’s closest relatives are not cities at all, but literary worlds:
- Mark Twain’s Mississippi
- James Joyce’s Dublin
- Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Jewish Warsaw
- Mikhail Zhvanetsky’s Odessa
Places where the city itself becomes one of the main characters in every story.
👉 Mikhail Zhvanetsky (1934–2020) was one of Odessa’s most beloved writers and satirists. His sharp, observant monologues captured the city’s unique humor, language, and way of thinking with remarkable accuracy. For many Russian-speaking readers, his works remain inseparable from the image of Odessa itself.
👉 The Language of Odessa
People often speak of an “Odessa language,” although it is not a separate language in the linguistic sense.
It most likely was not born on Deribasovskaya Street (the city’s main historic street) or even in the busy harbor.
It was born in the courtyards.
For decades, people from different cultures lived side by side there. Greek families lived next to Jewish families. Russian, Ukrainian, Moldovan, Bulgarian, Armenian, Polish, and many others shared the same gates, the same stairways, the same water pump, and often the same everyday problems.
In such close quarters, it was almost impossible for any community to preserve its own language unchanged. Little by little, neighbors borrowed one another’s words, expressions, intonations, turns of phrase, and sense of humor.
The result was something entirely unique. The “Odessa language” is neither a dialect of Russian nor Ukrainian, nor a form of Yiddish.
It is the language of people who spent so many years living together in one crowded courtyard that, sooner or later, everyone’s words became everyone else’s. Perhaps that is why it proved so enduring.
It was not created by writers, scholars, or government officials. It was created by neighbors. While arguing, bargaining, making peace after arguments, exchanging gossip around the courtyard’s only water pump. While debating fish prices at the famous Privoz Market. Or while spending long summer evenings beneath the thick shade of a Lydia grapevine.
Russian and Ukrainian tend to favor direct statements:
— I know.
— I think.
— I’ve decided.
Yiddish, by contrast, has a strong tradition of answering one question with another—of doubting, clarifying, and looking at a situation from an unexpected angle.
That is how a typically Odessa-style exchange might sound:
— What time is it?
— Do you have somewhere to be?
From the standpoint of formal logic, this is not an answer at all. From the standpoint of Odessa, it makes perfect sense.
Or:
— Why is it so expensive?
— So, have you already decided you’re buying it?
Again, the speaker has not answered the question. He has answered the intention behind it.
Odessa speech often favored questions like these:
— And who told you that?
— And why not?
— Do you really have to know?
This may be the central secret of the “Odessa language.” It is less interested in the words a person says than in why that person is saying them in the first place. A conversation can therefore resemble a small psychological duel.
— How much is the fish?
— For you—is that to buy, or just to ask?
According to a language textbook, this is hardly a conversation at all. In Odessa, it is perfectly good communication—conducted through hints, omissions, self-irony, exaggeration, and questions offered in place of answers.
Odessa was a city of trade, and trade requires negotiation. Negotiation, in turn, requires flexibility with language. A direct answer was often considered less useful—and certainly less interesting—than a clever indirect one.
Conversation became a small performance.
That is the language you will occasionally hear in these stories.
👉 Can Odessa Humor Be Translated?
Not completely.
Like the humor of Mark Twain, James Joyce, or P. G. Wodehouse, some of its flavor is rooted in the original language. Wordplay, rhythm, and cultural references inevitably change in translation.
Our goal is not to reproduce every joke word for word, but to preserve the spirit of the conversation, the warmth of the people, and the distinctive voice of Odessa.
Many of those voices have long since fallen silent. Their stories, however, remain. They are the pages of this album of memories.
So come in and turn its pages.
We’ve been waiting for you for a long time
Everyone who opens this door becomes part of the story.
To be continued…
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