“An Album of Memories”
🍇 Chapter 4
Aron Botvinnik, the Tailor
Part 1
Departure
Aron Moiseyevich Botvinnik was thirty when, in the mid-1970s, he became the first resident of the courtyard to emigrate. The entire courtyard came out to see him off.
…September 1975. Odessa, 10 Sadovaya Street.
It was rare for everyone in the courtyard to gather in one place at the same time. Someone was always at work, someone at the market, someone at home. But that morning, for some reason, almost everyone had gathered by the archway.
Two battered Soviet suitcases were already standing at Aron Moiseyevich’s feet. One by one, the neighbors came up to say goodbye.
— Aron, if you see some good fabric over there, send us a sample,” — someone said with a smile.
— Better yet, send us a whole suit, — came a voice from somewhere in the courtyard.
Everyone laughed.
The women discreetly wiped away tears. The men tried to talk only about the journey, the weather, how many hours it would take to reach Chop station in western Ukraine, where one of the official border crossings out of the Soviet Union was located—as though discussing the route could somehow make the parting a little easier.
Sometimes emigration begins not at the border, but in the courtyard, where neighbors wave goodbye for the first time, hoping that one day you will walk once more beneath the old archway
Someone slipped a small bag of roasted sunflower seeds into his things for the journey. Someone else gave him a bar of Alyonushka chocolate.
His neighbor Spiridon shook his hand for a long time and kept repeating the same thing:
— Write to us. We want to know what it’s really like over there, ‘on the other side.’ After all, we know nothing except what they tell us on television. And according to television, there’s nothing good over there—just militarists, Zionists, and renegades.
Even the grapevine above the courtyard stirred quietly in the morning breeze, as though it, too, was saying goodbye to an old acquaintance.
Just before leaving, Aron Moiseyevich slowly looked around the courtyard one last time. The windows, the balconies, the clotheslines, the water pump, the communal toilet, the familiar faces, the unmistakable atmosphere of the city and the courtyard…
His heart tightened. He understood perfectly well that he was seeing all of this for the last time. In those days, there was no possibility of coming back. It was a one-way ticket. (A decade and a half later, things would change dramatically, but in the mid-1970s, leaving meant saying goodbye forever.)
No one knew then that, decades later, some of the people now standing by the archway to see Aron off would themselves leave with almost identical suitcases, carrying photographs, family recipes, and memories of this old Odessa courtyard.
Only Aron Moiseyevich knew that tucked between his neatly folded shirts, a few sewing patterns, lengths of fabric, and the tailor’s shears passed down through his family was one more thing—something he intended to describe on his customs declaration simply as a “glass bottle.”
Inside was wine made from the courtyard’s Lydia grapevine, setting off with him on a journey halfway around the world.
He had no intention of opening it. This wine was not meant for drinking. It was meant as a keepsake—a memory of the old vine, the courtyard on Sadovaya Street, the people he might never see again, and the home to which, for the rest of his life, he would return in his thoughts.
He told his neighbors that he was leaving for Israel, his historic homeland, although privately he hoped to make it to America. A taxi took him to Odessa’s railway station, where he boarded the Odessa–Chernivtsi train, which stopped at the border town of Chop.
A New City
A little more than fifty years earlier…
🚶 …The outskirts of Odessa. Early 1922. Near the Khadzhibey Estuary.
Aron Moiseyevich’s grandparents saw the unfamiliar city of Odessa for the first time from a low hill. Beyond the roofs of the one-story houses, church domes gleamed in the sunlight, and they could make out streets descending toward the sea—a sea so vast that neither of them had ever seen anything like it before. In the harbor, they could distinguish large ships with tall masts and sails.
Sometimes a family’s story begins with a single suitcase, a child’s hand held tightly in a father’s, and an unfamiliar city on the horizon
They were also struck by the damp air, the salty breeze blowing in from the estuary, and the cries of the seagulls.
Aron’s grandfather had only one suitcase in his hand. His grandmother clutched a small bundle containing their few essential belongings.
Beside them stood their little son—the future father of Aron Moiseyevich. He held tightly to his father’s hand and could not take his eyes off the sea. It seemed strange to him that water could stretch so far that there was no end in sight. He did not yet know that many years later he would think of this city as home and would tell his own son about the first time he saw the Black Sea.
But his grandfather was looking not so much at the sea as at the city. Somewhere down there he would have to find work, rent a room for his family, and begin life all over again. He did not know whether Odessa would accept them. He had heard that in this city it was possible to open a tailor’s shop—or, failing that, to find work at the port. The city drew people with its opportunities.
Above all, he wanted to believe that his son would have a more peaceful life here than the generations of the family that had come before him.
His grandmother was thinking about something else entirely. Where would they sleep that night? Would their money last for the next few days? Would they find kind people willing to help the family settle into an unfamiliar city?
She was afraid. But going back was even more frightening.
They were not standing before an ancient capital or the ancestral city of their forefathers. For many, Odessa was a city of first chances and hope. Some arrived from Ukrainian villages, others from villages in Bessarabia, still others from Greek colonies. There were people from Germany, Italy, and central Russia. And there were many from the Jewish towns and shtetls—the small Jewish towns of the Pale of Settlement.
Dozens of different roads converged here, each carrying its own story, yet all of them had eventually brought people to the same city.
And almost everyone began again from scratch.
On that day, no one in the Botvinnik family could have imagined that Odessa would become their family’s city for many decades to come.
To understand why this family had one day found itself at the gates of a southern port city with a single suitcase and the hope of a new life, we need to turn the clock back a few generations.
The Jewish Diaspora: A Historical Overview
► Jewish Migration Across Roman Territory
The large-scale Jewish presence in Europe was not the result of a single event, but of nearly two thousand years of gradual migration and dispersal. After the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70, and especially after the Bar Kokhba revolt of AD 132–135, many Jews left Judea or were resettled in different parts of the Roman Empire.
History has a fondness for paradoxes: the Jewish state disappeared under the blows of Rome, yet it was the roads and cities of the Roman Empire that became the first great home of the Jewish diaspora.
Jewish communities gradually appeared throughout the Mediterranean in Italy, southern France, the Balkans, Spain, and later farther north.
► Poland, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth
During the Middle Ages, many Jews moved to places where rulers offered them protection and the right to engage in trade, crafts, and moneylending. This was particularly true of the German lands and, beginning roughly in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, where Polish rulers at various times granted Jews protection and certain legal rights.
It was there that the largest historical group of European Jews—the Ashkenazim—took shape. By the eighteenth century, most Ashkenazi Jews lived within the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, a vast state encompassing present-day Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and much of Ukraine.
Jews often settled in small towns and shtetls situated between landed estates, villages, and major marketplaces. Over time, a dense network of Jewish communities developed, with their own schools, courts, charitable organizations, and institutions of self-government known as kahals.
► The Russian Empire
At the end of the eighteenth century, the vast Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was partitioned three times—by the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Prussia, and the Habsburg Monarchy (Austria)—in 1772, 1793, and 1795. Its eastern territories, together with hundreds of thousands of Jews who lived there, became part of the Russian Empire, which until then had had only a relatively small Jewish population.
These new subjects differed markedly from the population of Russia’s interior provinces in religion, language, traditions, communal organization, and economic life.
It was not the Jews who came to the Russian Empire. The Russian Empire came to them
They had not moved to Russia—the empire’s border had moved across their homes.
Many families in Eastern Europe experienced something similar: they did not choose a new state; the new state simply absorbed the land on which they lived. This happened to Poles, Lithuanians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and other peoples as well, although the particular circumstances differed in each case.
Aron’s grandfather would sometimes say that their ancestors had come from somewhere near Lublin.
His grandmother insisted it had already been Volhynia.
And his father would laugh:
— The important thing is that they all kept living on the same street while the countries around them changed faster than the signs at the railway station.
👉 Historical Note
• Lublin—from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, Lublin was one of the major cities of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and home to one of the best-known Jewish communities in Europe.
• Volhynia—at the end of the eighteenth century, Volhynia became part of the Russian Empire. The Volhynian Governorate was established, with its administrative center first in Izyaslav and later in Zhytomyr. Today, the historical region of Volhynia is divided by national borders: most of it lies in northwestern Ukraine (the Volyn and Rivne regions), while a smaller western part lies in eastern Poland. For centuries, Ukrainians, Poles, and large Jewish communities lived there side by side.
For the first time, the Russian Empire faced the need to develop a policy toward a large Jewish population that had traditionally lived within the Polish–Lithuanian legal and social system.
At first, Jews were formally promised that their existing rights would be preserved. Gradually, however, a separate body of legislation began to emerge, regulating where they could live, which occupations they could pursue, which social estates they could belong to, and what taxes they were required to pay.
The first major turning point is generally considered to have been Catherine II’s decree of 1791, which restricted the territories where Jewish merchants could permanently reside and conduct business. The rules were subsequently revised and expanded many times. The official concept of the “Pale of Settlement” became firmly established later, particularly in the legislation of 1835.
Jews were generally permitted to live within this vast zone, but they were not free to move permanently into the interior provinces of the Russian Empire. Even within the Pale itself, certain cities were excluded and additional restrictions applied.
People were therefore limited in their choice of where to live. Generations remained in roughly the same region not because they had dreamed of staying there, but because the law severely restricted their freedom to move.
The Pale of Settlement finally disappeared after the February Revolution of 1917, when the Provisional Government abolished restrictions on where Jews could reside.
► The Door Opened
After the two revolutions of 1917, the last nationwide restrictions on freedom of residence disappeared. Many families began moving to places where they hoped to find work and start a new life. Odessa, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Moscow, Petrograd, and other large cities became new centers of attraction.
Odessa would become a particularly powerful magnet because it was a relatively young, rapidly growing port city in the south of the former empire. It offered greater economic opportunities, a more diverse population, and a somewhat freer social atmosphere than many of the old shtetls within the Pale.
And that was why the Botvinnik family found itself in Odessa in early 1922.
👉 Jewish history was, in many ways, a history of diaspora. After the destruction of the Second Temple, a large part of the Jewish people lived outside their historical homeland for many centuries. In different countries, there were periods of relative prosperity, but also expulsions, pogroms, restrictions on civil rights, and new waves of migration. For many Jewish families, therefore, personal safety and the possibility of living and working in peace became crucial factors when deciding where to settle.
1920s–1941
Gradually, the Botvinnik family found its footing. The tailor’s shop was doing well and provided for the whole family. Aron’s father grew up learning the trade from his own father, getting to know the customers, and trying his hand at simple sewing jobs himself.
Sometimes family traditions are passed down without words. They live on in an old Singer sewing machine, a pair of heavy tailor’s shears, and the small hands of a child helping his father at the workbench for the very first time
👉 Historical Note: Why were there so many Jewish tailors?
► Restrictions on Land Ownership
For most Jews in the Russian Empire, particularly those living within the Pale of Settlement, opportunities to engage in agriculture were severely restricted. They therefore had to find occupations that required no land, could be practiced in a town or shtetl, and whose skills could be passed down to their children.
Tailoring was ideally suited to these circumstances.
► Little Start-up Capital
To become a blacksmith, a miller, or the owner of a distillery required premises, heavy equipment, and considerable investment.
A tailor needed little more than scissors, needles, an iron—and later, a sewing machine. For a poor family, this was within reach.
It was no coincidence that for many nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigrants, a sewing machine became one of the most valuable possessions they owned.
► A Profession You Could Always Take With You
A tailor was not tied to one place. If a family moved from a shtetl to Odessa, from Odessa to Warsaw, or from Warsaw to New York, the trade moved with them. For communities whose history had involved repeated migration, this portability was particularly important.
► Learning Within the Family
Tailoring skills could easily be passed down from one generation to the next. From childhood, a son might sweep the workshop floor, sort buttons, learn how to hold a needle, and later how to cut fabric. By the age of sixteen or eighteen, he could already be a fully trained craftsman. In this way, the same profession could remain within a family for several generations.
► Steady Demand
People always tore and wore out their clothes, outgrew them, got married and needed wedding clothes, or simply wanted to look respectable and well dressed. A tailor rarely became rich. But he was also rarely left completely without work. It was a trade that offered a relatively steady income.
► A Tradition of Literacy
Jewish culture placed a high value on literacy, particularly because reading was essential to the study of the Torah. Even a craftsman would generally know how to read. And a good tailor constantly worked with measurements, calculations, patterns, orders, and customers’ debts. The profession demanded precision, a good memory, and close attention to detail.
► Why Odessa?
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Odessa had become one of the largest centers of the tailoring trade in the southern Russian Empire. The city had workshops, fabric shops, wholesale warehouses, import and export trade through its port, and wealthy customers. For a young Jewish tailor, it was a city of opportunity. He could begin by mending trousers and, ten years later, own a profitable workshop of his own.
A typical small tailor’s workshop in early twentieth-century Odessa. For many Jewish families, tailoring was not only a means of earning a living but also a craft passed down from father to son over several generations
אַ קליינע שנײַדערײַ אין אָדעס אין אָנהייב פֿונעם צוואַנציקסטן יאָרהונדערט. פֿאַר אַ סך ייִדישע
משפּחות איז דאָס שנײַדער־האַנדווערק געווען נישט בלויז אַ מיטל זיך צו פֿאַרדינען, נאָר אויך אַ
פאַך וואָס איז אַריבער פֿון פֿאָטער צו זון במשך פֿון עטלעכע דורות
The family was not particularly religious. Aron’s father attended an ordinary state school. At home, his parents often spoke Yiddish, but he himself gradually shifted toward a peculiar mixture of Ukrainian, Russian, and Yiddish. Almost without his noticing it, the distinctive Odessa way of speaking became the language of his everyday life.
He wore a kippah mainly on the major Jewish holidays. Occasionally, he went to the synagogue with his father. Families they knew would gather there, the adults would spend a long time talking and discussing things, while what he remembered most vividly was the gefilte fish usually served after the holiday service.
To them, it was simply a festive family meal. They did not yet know that, together with their favorite fish, they were passing on their family’s memory to the next generation—a memory that one day their grandson would carry with him across the ocean
🐟🍽️ Gefilte Fish
…Overheard at Odessa’s Privoz Market, at no particular time…
—Is your fish kosher?
— What else could it possibly be?
— But what if it was caught by fishermen who didn’t observe the Sabbath?
— The fish doesn’t know that. And even if it does, it won’t tell anyone. God didn’t give it a voice.
— How can anyone spend an entire life opening their mouth without saying a single word? I can’t keep quiet for two minutes.
— Why don’t you try?
— Try what?
— Keeping quiet for two minutes.
— Why?
— Purely as an experiment.
— I’m not that curious.
Sometimes family traditions began not in the kitchen, but at the fish stalls of Odessa’s famous Privoz Market
— 🐟—
— Listen, young man, your carp is priced as if, while it was still alive, it spoke five languages and knew how to dance the tango and the foxtrot.
— No, it did none of those things.
— Then why is it so expensive?
— Because you’ve already decided to buy it, right here and right now.
— And how do you know that?
— Because a person who has no intention of buying a carp doesn’t stare into its eyes for quite this long.
— What if I simply feel sorry for it?
— Then you should definitely buy it. Don’t leave it alone with such a sad fate. In your hands and in your kitchen it still has a chance to serve humanity deliciously.
— 🐟 —
👉 Historical Note
According to the laws of kashrut, what kind of fish may be eaten?A fish must have both of the following:
• Scales that can be removed without damaging the underlying skin.
• Fins.
If both characteristics are present, the fish is kosher. If either one is absent, it is not.
Jewish tradition also holds that if a fish has scales, there is no need to check separately for fins—it is understood that a fish with the required scales will also have fins. In practice, therefore, a housewife buying fish would often look primarily at the scales.
► Why These Particular Requirements?
From the standpoint of Judaism, the answer is very simple. The Book of Leviticus, and later Deuteronomy, states that among creatures living in the water, those with fins and scales may be eaten. And that is all. There is no explanation beginning with “Because…” The rule is simply given.
Because that is what the Torah prescribes.
But over the centuries, people have naturally tried to understand the meaning behind the requirement.
► A Practical Explanation
One of the most common explanations is that the kosher signs made it easy to distinguish permitted fish from potentially dangerous or questionable aquatic creatures, of which there were many. In ancient times, no one performed biological analyses. Fins and scales provided a simple visible sign: if you saw them, the fish could be eaten. If you did not, it was better not to take the risk.
This, however, is only one hypothesis—the Torah itself gives no such explanation.
► A Symbolic Explanation
Some rabbis have pointed to the fact that scales cover the outside of a fish and, in a sense, protect it. They can be seen as resembling the moral restraints that protect a person from being completely ruled by instinct.
This is not religious law, however, but a philosophical interpretation.
In the Kabbalistic tradition, scales may be viewed as a symbol of spiritual protection, while fins represent the ability to move forward and rise higher.
► The “Odessa View”
Now imagine an old Odessa housewife at the Privoz Market. She is unlikely to be pondering the Kabbalah. Her reasoning is much simpler:
— Rosa Markovna, why don’t we buy this beautiful eel?
— Because it has no scales.
— But what if I really want it?
— Then want it quietly and stop distracting me while I bargain.
And that settles the matter.
Odessa quickly became a largely secular city. Many families no longer observed kashrut in full, yet certain food traditions survived for a long time. People might no longer remember the precise religious reason behind a custom, but they knew perfectly well that carp was the best fish for gefilte fish. Why?
— Because that’s how Grandma made it.
— And why did Grandma make it that way?
— Because that’s how her grandma made it.
Behind that chain of answers stood centuries of religious tradition. Religion gradually became family memory, and family memory became culinary tradition. Sometimes people could no longer explain a rule, yet continued to observe it through habits, recipes, and the tastes they remembered from childhood.
Under the laws of kashrut, carp, pike, pike-perch, herring, salmon, and many other fish are considered kosher. Eels, catfish, sharks, rays, mollusks, and shellfish do not meet the requirements.
For an Odessa housewife, a typical scene at the Privoz Market might go something like this:
— Young man, are you sure this is carp?
— Madam, may I live as surely as this is a carp.
— Don’t live like that. Just show me the scales.
— You don’t trust me?
— I trust only my own eyes and bad news.
And then the traditional Odessa bargaining begins.
— 🐟 —
👉 Surprisingly, the “Odessa” version of gefilte fish was traditionally made with freshwater fish rather than sea fish, even though the city stands on the Black Sea coast.
And here we encounter a very Odessa paradox. The sea is right there, full of fish. Yet one of the great festive dishes of Jewish Odessa is made from carp—a respectable, well-fed freshwater fish that has never seen the sea in its life and has absolutely no desire to live there.
The reason is simple: gefilte fish came to Odessa with Jewish families from the shtetls of Podolia, Bessarabia, Volhynia, and other parts of Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine, where sea fish simply was not available.
But Odessans have always been practical people. If good carp was difficult or expensive to find and the sea was right outside your door, why not experiment? So there were versions made with mullet, pilengas (especially later in the twentieth century), large gobies, and sometimes even flounder. But these were more Odessa improvisations than canonical gefilte fish.
Throughout the history of gefilte fish in Odessa, there was one eternal argument among housewives:
— Who makes the best gefilte fish? Whose is the most ‘authentic’?
Because in the kitchen, this was a question of almost sacred importance.
Every family had its own secrets: more onion or less, slightly sweet or not, carrots or no carrots, carp only, or perhaps some pike as well?
And every housewife was absolutely certain that her recipe had been handed down from the one grandmother who knew how gefilte fish was truly supposed to be made. The others were, of course, perfectly nice people—but they had absolutely no idea how to make proper gefilte fish.
There was no point in arguing.
— 🐟 —
Years passed. The family became increasingly settled in Odessa, putting down roots and gradually becoming part of the city. Their small tailor’s shop gained a steady clientele. At first, customers came mainly from the courtyard, then from the surrounding streets, and eventually from farther away—people who had heard about the shop through recommendations from friends and acquaintances.
Aron’s father grew up surrounded by the sewing machine, rolls of fabric, and large tailor’s shears. At first, he simply watched his father’s work. Then he began helping him and eventually started learning the family trade himself. It seemed that the family’s life had finally settled into a calm and familiar rhythm.
But in the summer of 1941, that rhythm was abruptly broken.
War began.
The family faced evacuation far to the east, long years away from Odessa, and a difficult return home. Aron’s grandfather went to the front and never came back.
The family had lost its breadwinner, but the craft to which he had devoted his life did not disappear. Aron’s father carried it on, preserving not only his skills but also the family memory that would one day be passed down to his own son.
To be continued…
Leave a Reply