Szalom bonjour Odessa

The history of this area goes back to antiquity, but the city of Odesa itself has only existed a short while: since 1794, when it was founded by the Tsarina Catherine the Great according to a design by the renowned Flemish engineer François Sainte de Wollant. Odesa was once one of four main points on the map of the Russian Empire, alongside Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Warsaw. In the first hundred years of its existence, it became a port and trade city throbbing with life. Sailors, merchants, Jews, speculators, petty artisans, thieves and bandits rubbed shoulders on the crowded Odesa streets. Odesa is still nicknamed “mama”, because it took in everyone seeking their fortune in this remarkable city on the Black Sea. It had its own local legends – like the famous thief Gold Sonka or the head of the Odesa mafia, Mishka Yaponchik. The Odesa Steps, which form the entrance to the city from the sea, were put into Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film Battleship Potemkin, making them into an icon of a bygone culture. 

Both world wars and post-war communism affected Odesa’s economic and social significance. It became a port city marked by neglected historical buildings, a city of lost hopes, although during the war in Ukraine, Odesa has become hugely symbolic. For the author of Shalom Bonjour Odesa, who spent two years living in the city until the outbreak of war in February 2022, the city also signifies the search for identity. Wandering the backstreets of this erstwhile seaside resort, Majdzińska searches for traces of her late father. She walks the sunny boulevards and noisy marketplaces, pages through the local newspapers, and notes down what the people of Odesa have to say in the second decade of the twenty-first century. This lyrical work of reportage sensitively eavesdrops on a city whose mystique is intertwined with the history taking place here and now. 

This book received the 2023 Marek Nowakowski Literary Prize, as well as the 2023 Archer’s Arrow Bydgoszcz Literary Prize.