The very first words of my novel Odessa are my grandmother Lynn’s. Her Yahrzeit is approaching, the first anniversary of her death. It’s a strange Spring. Memories of her are layering over the days leading up to the novel’s publication, and they are so strongly woven together that excitement and grief have become inextricable. In my grandmother’s final months, during her moments of lucidity, I would remind her about the book (and her face would light up with pride, the news new and wonderful every time) and I would ask her again about Golda. Lynn’s quote, which opens Odessa, are some of the last words she said to me about her grandmother, who was the inspiration for this book.
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I have inherited, along with her stories, the photograph of my great-great-grandmother Golda on her journey to America in the beginning of the 20th century. The photograph now hangs on my wall beside the book cover. It had been missing for years as my grandmother moved from my father’s childhood home to independent living to assisted living to hospice, to the point where I had forgotten what it looked like and considered it to be lost forever.
In the gothic, the dead have agency. They can speak, they can take up space, they can demand to be seen and remembered.
In my memory of the photograph that I had seen as a child, Golda wore a large, black wool coat that looked like it had belonged to a man, and at her feet was her luggage, which was a long wooden box that looked suspiciously like a coffin. Now that I have the real thing, I can see that my imagination ran wild. Her coat is tailored to fit a woman’s curves, and she holds her luggage on her arm, a heavy bag, but one that could never hide a body. The story of Odessa grew out of this lack of evidence of her, a lack of something to hold and say that she existed, a void that felt like hunger to my ravenous imagination. It grew from the stories my grandmother told me decades ago (the adventurous Golda, crossing the world on her own, how I wanted to be her!), and it was fed, finally, by my research of what Jewish women like Golda actually lived through.
Even as a child, my grandmother made it clear that Golda had endured hardship, and had escaped Eastern Europe because of the danger of growing antisemitic hate. I could tell there were things she was holding back, but wasn’t until much later, during my PhD, that I finally understood. The reality of the pogroms, especially women’s experience of sexual violence, is research that was incredibly difficult for me to do. The stigma of this experience meant that women often didn’t share their experiences. They were stories that were silenced, buried, but passed down in secret, like a cursed object, through generations of women.
The gothic genre is well suited to repressed stories. It gives a voice to buried histories, hidden wrongs. It’s these stories that haunt us, that come back from the grave, screaming to be told. Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a perfect example of this. In the gothic, the dead have agency. They can speak, they can take up space, they can demand to be seen and remembered.
Within the horror genre, one of my favorite things to write is the idea of the grotesque feminine. Let women be monstrous, disgusting, angry, feral creatures! Screaming, being terrifying and monstrous—it’s cathartic, it’s a release of every repressed rage and hurt. It gets the pain out of our bodies and out into the world. It’s also fun, and I find that demanding joy, in whatever strange way, spits in the face of those who would hurt us or rob us of our agency. I wanted, in the midst of some of the most upsetting research, to have a spooky good time, to revel in the dark places, don the horrors like a long wool coat or creepy nightgown, and maybe frighten the townsfolk.
The gothic became the perfect vehicle for me to tell a story of such horrors, because it allowed me to embrace the darkness and show these brave women in their complexities. It was also important to me, amidst this darkness, to weave a golden thread of hope into the story. My family is resilient, strong, and hopeful. Without hope, Golda never would have made her journey. She had to believe that somewhere, there was a better life for her and her family.
All of our lives are strung together in a tapestry that depicts not only the horrors but also the hope and, most of all, the will to survive and pass something down to the next generation.
In the first pages of Odessa, Yetta’s mother Frieda recites the Shechechiyanu prayer to herself while immersed in the mikvah, a ritual bath in a freshwater spring. “Blessed are You, Adonai our God, King of the Universe, who has granted us life, sustained us, and allowed us to reach this day.” Judaism has an overwhelming amount of prayers surrounding gratitude. We have a prayer to say thank you for waking up, (for going to the bathroom), for eating bread and drinking wine, for smelling a lovely perfume, for hearing thunder, seeing a rainbow, the ocean, the first blossom in spring, a strange creature. When I go to Synagogue, I am reminded to look at the world with wonder.
There is no one way to be Jewish. We have split apart, spread across the globe, left things behind and taken things with us, morphed and changed and lost and gained. I believe that’s what my grandmother was trying to say about Golda, and the difficult choice she made to leave one home behind for another. I lost her picture, and then I found it again. I hunted down crumbs left behind of her existence. I pieced together fragments of a story. I chose to bring all these fragments together to create Odessa because I wanted it to not just reflect Golda’s story, or my grandmother’s, but mine, too. All of our lives are strung together in a tapestry that depicts not only the horrors but also the hope and, most of all, the will to survive and pass something down to the next generation.
Writing Odessa was a very Jewish act, because telling stories to preserve our heritage is part of who we are. When I wrote this story, I was talking to my ancestors, I was talking to God, I was talking to myself. I began with nothing but my imagination, shreds of evidence, and so many questions. Now, this is what I have: a photograph of Golda on her journey, a needlepoint of the Shechecheyanu that my aunt stitched, a picture of a waterfall pouring into a freshwater spring that my grandmother painted, and a book that I wrote. They’re not answers, but they’re not nothing; we made them, and they tell our story.
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Odessa by Gabrielle Sher is available from Little, Brown and Company, an imprint of Hachette Book Group.
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