17. Books

Last time I wrote about where to buy clothes and shoes, home appliances, puppies, or rusty nuts and bolts in Odesa, yet I forgot one product that is important to me but not necessarily to Odesa.

I am talking about books. Although the city of Odesa has an important place in literature, the relationship, at least for the moment, seems one-sided. The larger-than-life Isaac Babel may sit contemplatively opposite his former home, the Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz is allowed to stand on Oleksandrivskyi Avenue, and a bronze chair has been placed in the City Garden to commemorate Ilf and Petrov - yet literature does not seem to play such an important role in Odesa today.

Yes, the city has a legendary book market - but it mainly sells overpriced children’s literature or collections of anecdotes primarily of interest to tourists. More than half of the market’s kiosks either barter with household chemicals, food and alcohol, mobile phones and their accessories, or have become pleasant but completely book-less open-air cafés.

Antiquarian book lovers can go for a weekend stroll to the Italian Boulevard near the railway station, where the street vendors sell mainly Soviet-era literature. Since much of it is in Russian, the salesmen themselves often have no faith in their own wares. One of my friends, showing surprisingly keen interest in the boxes filled with old books, was advised by a salesman to keep her expectations modest because the contents of the cardboard boxes are “not literature but maculature.” This doesn’t mean, of course, that one cannot find anything of interest here.

And, of course, there are also proper or normal book stores in Odesa. In the downtown there are actually ... several. But “several” means they can be counted on the fingers of one hand. On Derybasivska, next to the Hotel Amsterdam, there is a bookstore selling everything from ABC books to Ukrainian sci-fi - but not much more. In other words, the shop, with its Soviet-style interior, has a decent selection of contemporary Ukrainian literature meant for the average consumer, who is either a schoolchild or a middle-aged woman with higher education. So, there is neither anything missing nor is there anything too exciting or special there.

Positioning myself into the demographic group of schoolchildren in terms of language skills, I buy myself a new Ukrainian children’s book - Halyna Tkachuk’s “Blue Notebook” (Галина Ткачук, “Блакитний записник”). I choose it because it is richly illustrated. The booklet is also interesting in other respects: it tells the story of a Ukrainian mother and her children’s flight from Kharkiv to Poland in the spring of 2022 and the difficulties of adjusting to exile. Heartbreak and lightness go hand in hand.

The best bookshop in Odesa is probably the “Knigarnya-кав’ярня Старого Лева” or “Old Lion’s bookshop-café”. Видавництво Старого Лева, or The Old Lion Publishing House, itself was established in Lviv in 2001 and now has bookshop-cafés in Kyiv and Dnipro in addition to Lviv and Odesa. In terms of the number of titles published, it should be Ukraine’s largest publishing house, publishing works by both domestic and translated authors.

The fact that the Old Lion is a Western Ukrainian brand can also be felt in its Odesa bookshop, located on the former Katerynynska Street, now Europe Street. Namely, the bookshop-café is a kind of Ukrainian embassy in the otherwise “Odesan”-speaking city: both the service and the products are in the Ukrainian language. Although there are also a handful of books in English visible - mainly about cookery and some travel books - the shelves are filled exclusively with works in Ukrainian. They are mainly Old Lion’s own, but not exclusively.

The selection of beautiful, well-designed, and well-printed children’s books is impressive. Similarly, the shelf of history books is fascinating, although one theme stands out: it is clear that in recent years Ukrainian historians and memoirists have done a great deal of work to tell the story of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in detail. I also see a new edition of Waffen-SS division “Galicia” veteran Roman Lazurko’s monumental memoirs “On the Roads of Europe” (Роман Лазурко, “На шляхах Европи”), published by Стилет і стилос, a publishing house specializing in classics and military history.

More generally, I cannot fail to notice the speed with which all kinds of Western political literature and essays, especially Polish, but also British, American, and other, are being translated into Ukrainian. Looking at the shelves, I notice names like Witold Szabłowski, Małgorzata Rejmer, or Luke Harding.

Yet translations of works by Pratchett, Rowling, George R.R. Martin, or Travis Baldree, the American fantasy writer and video game screenwriter, are also not missing alongside the heavier works. And there are also comic books in Ukrainian - both by local and foreign authors.

On the whole, the bookshop offers a good selection; despite its small size, the shelves are high, and books are packed tightly on them. The Old Lion calls itself a family publishing house, offering something for everyone, and they really do. And if you’re really not interested in books, you can buy a cup of coffee or some merch - coffee mugs with a cheerful lion on them, bookmarks, or T-shirts saying “Доброго вечора, ми з України” (“Good evening, we are from Ukraine”).

In addition to these, there is a British bookshop in downtown Odesa selling mainly educational and scientific literature, along with the latest international hits, and a manga and comic store called World of Comics. In that sense, the bookstore scene falls short of nothing really, and if one knows where to go and what to search for, it is possible to find it.

However, the overall impression of Odesa’s book trade is that of somewhat of a niche business for a small audience. I don’t know, of course, whether this has always been the case, but at least for the time being, this impression seems to undermine Odesa’s identity as a port and business city that has little to nothing to do with (book) culture.