America--where our roots intertwine

I was looking at an old map with my late friend, Dennis. It was of the city of Odessa on the Black Sea, then part of the Russian Empire. Both of our grandfathers came from Odessa. His was Jewish. Mine was Christian.

Ukraine’s largest seaport, Odessa today is struggling, as is the country, to survive Putin’s brutal war. In 1914, when the map was drawn, things were also not so good. The Great War, World War I, had started and the government was clamping down on minorities and dissidents.

In December my grandfather was arrested. The police came to his boarding house room after midnight and escorted him, along with other political and religious dissidents, to jail. The next day he was sentenced to exile in Siberia, from which he would later escape and come, via China, to San Francisco.

Dennis’ grandfather left Odessa for New York in 1904. “He got married and they got on the boat,” a granddaughter recalls. He may have been avoiding military conscription, a "sentence" of 15 to 25 years. There were also state-sanctioned pogroms, anti-Jewish riots that destroyed lives and livelihoods throughout Jewish settlements.

The 1914 map shows a city of 630,000, about the size of Boston today. Odessa was founded by Catherine the Great in 1794 on land taken from the Ottoman Empire. It was, and is, a beautiful city. Leading up from the harbor are the famous Potemkin Stairs, opening on Nikolaevsky Boulevard and Vorontsovsky Palace.

Spreading the map out on the kitchen table, Dennis and I traced its streets with our fingers. Odessa was known for its diverse cultures, which included a thriving Jewish community, approximately a third of the city’s population. We found three synagogues, the Chief, Karaite and New. We found 14 churches, not only Orthodox, but Catholic, Lutheran, Armenian and Reformed. We also found the Opera House, the Greek Bazaar, the Circus and the Yacht Club.

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Dennis and Karen visited Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. Learning that Dennis’s grandparents were from Odessa, and remarking on his penchant for stories and humor, his hosts dubbed him, “the Odessa Man.”

Dennis has since passed on, but I recall the good times we and our wives spent together, sharing meals, excursions, hobbies and holidays. We fished together, although we rarely caught anything, and we toured New England roads in his ’74 Triumph. I have often thought about our backgrounds—why our ancestors came to America in the first place. Certainly, it was to find a place of safety and opportunity. Was it for something more?

I like to think they were also looking for a new way of living, a place where you could speak your mind, a place where race, ethnicity, religion or gender did not restrict your advancement or whom you associated with. A place where people of diverse backgrounds could partner in building a free society, where people unlike each other could become friends.

Dennis and I shared roots in Odessa. In some ways our roots are similar. In other ways they are different. But in Stoneham, our roots became intertwined.

God bless America! Happy Hanukkah! Merry Christmas!