Talking Location With Sally McGrane – ODESA

13th October 2022

#TalkingLocationWith… Sally McGrane, author of Odesa at Dawn – ODESA.

“May Odesa wake up tomorrow in a free and self-determined Ukraine.”

I first visited Odesa in 2002 with a childhood friend of mine from San Francisco who was born there. We visited with her mother and mother-in-law – both Odesites – and stayed in a Brezhnev-era high-rise on the French Boulevard with the coast’s only ‘elevator to the sea’. We spent a sun-baked week there, wandering from the beach to the city centre, or through the halls of the sanatorium – a place of faded glamour, where all the rock stars stayed in the ’80s. When I moved to Berlin a few years later, Odesa drew me back. Sometime in the oughts, when I needed a place to write, I boarded a night train with red velvet bunks and woke up, two days later, in Odesa. Over the years, I visited again and again, writing about poets, politicians, and the Odesa Literary Museum for publications like The New Yorker Magazine, The New York Times and Monocle. Over those years, I also wrote a novella about the sanatorium – which has since been torn down and the main drafts of two spy novels while I was in Odesa.

As I was struggling through Moscow at Midnight, my first novel, I rented a studio apartment on Gogol Street, which some say, and I agree, is the most beautiful street in the city centre. Up the road from my place, Gogol had rented an apartment for two years and wrote a second half of Dead Souls, which he immediately burned in its entirety on his return to Moscow. One afternoon, I was sitting outside at a sidewalk café, and three or four cats were lounging nearby. All of a sudden, Mr. Smiley, the cat mafia boss, appeared in my head, talking. I immediately wrote down everything he said. I’m glad, too, because he was the real animus for Odesa at Dawn. The next summer, 2016, I went back, interviewed a lot of people and, starting with Mr Smiley, wrote the book.

Now every day I watch the news with horror and disbelief. On Twitter we see that Odesites are sunbathing behind sandbag barricades; on Facebook I read that in Odesa, they use French champagne bottles for their Molotov cocktails. But every day that this criminal war goes on is too long. May Odesa wake up tomorrow in a free and self-determined Ukraine.

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