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Odesa Is Defiant. It’s Also Putin’s Ultimate Target in Ukraine.


Mr. Grudev, the curator of the arts, is Jewish and currently lives in his mother’s apartment. She left for Italy at the start of the war. He moved in to take care of her dog and brought his cat with him. His partner, Bogdan Zinchenko, moved in with him.

They bought plane tickets to Israel, where Grudev’s sister lives, on March 7, but never used them. He couldn’t bear to be away from his books or his paintings. Now when the sirens go off, the couple hides in the bathroom.

The laundry hanging from the wrought-iron balcony across from his mother’s apartment drove Mr. Grudev crazy. At one point he calculated that the pink shirt that caught his eye had been dry for 112 days. Before the epiphany: The laundry was done deliberately to leave the impression the apartment is still occupied and to deter thieves.

According to him, this is a very Odesan ruse; laundry as protection.

Mr. Grudev, a nail in each ear, smiled. Humor is also a survival mechanism. An old joke, in a city popular with them, tells of a barber who insisted on talking politics during Stalin’s terror. Exasperated, his client asked why. “Because your hair is easier to cut when it’s in its final state.”

“Putin wanted to save me – a gay, Jewish, Russian-speaking man living in Odesa – from the Nazis!” Mr. Grudev said. “Please.”

Roman Shvartsman, 85, is a survivor of the Odesan Massacre. He had lost his childhood, lived with the anti-Semitism of the Soviet years, and had hoped for a peaceful old age. Now he fears for his grandchildren.

In his pale blue eyes, one red from recent cataract surgery, were all of Babel’s terrible world and all of humanity’s defiant hopes. “Putin says openly that there is no state like Ukraine and he wants to destroy 40 million Ukrainians. How clearly does the West need him? “



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