it's official

I have bought my tickets to Odessa, and there I shall be, from June 10th to August 17th. The thought is unbearably exciting, if terrifying. I will be alone in a city by the sea, one that by all accounts hit its heyday in the nineteen-twenties, but for the time being is full of beaches, nightclubs, and monuments to dead writers. I'm bursting with excitement for the hundred stairs that loom up from the sea, for the stuffy environs of the Jewish museum, for the soft lime buildings, for the black and winsome decrepitude of Babel's infamous Moldovanka neighborhood, the site of Judaism's most colorful criminals. I'm excited to see the old offices of Ha-Shiloah, the first real Hebrew periodical, if they still exist.

I'm excited -- scared, excited-- to write my first novel, which is my plan for the time. I'll be writing the story of Moyshe Berger, Hebrew poet, born, like Xena Warrior Princess, in the heat of battle -- or, at any rate, pogrom. I'll be landing in two thousand eleven and writing my ears off back into the nineteenth century, borne (as Gatsby) ceaselessly back into the past. The waves beating on the port, the bazaar you have to hide your wallet so carefully when you walk through, the mayonnaise-doused food, slippers on your feet when you're a guest, and some apartment I haven't rented yet and can scarcely imagine -- the stuff of lonely and marvelous adventure. I seem to always undertake my adventures alone in the summers--or at any rate with no one I know along. Everything feels slightly unreal, sun-crisped and very un-Cambridge, and I take all the colors back with me to be sorted through at a later date.

Ten days or so after I arrive -- as if to punctuate the foreignness of the endeavor--is the Eve of Ivan Kupala, which I've seen depicted with beauty and nostalgia in the films of Dovzhenko already.

Here's the Wikipedia description:
"Kupala Day (Feast of St. John the Baptist; Russian: Иван-Купала; Belarusian: Купалле; Ukrainian: Іван Купала; Polish: Noc Kupały or Noc Świętojańska) is celebrated in Poland, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine currently on the night of 6/7 July in the Gregorian or New Style calendar, which is 23/24 June in the Julian or Old Style calendar still used by many Orthodox Churches. Calendar-wise, it is opposite to the winter solstice holiday Korochun. The celebration relates to the summer solstice when nights are the shortest.

...

Many of the rites related to this holiday within Slavic religious beliefs, due to the ancient Kupala rites, are connected with the role of water in fertility and ritual purification. Youths would jump over the flames of bonfires. Girls would float wreaths of flowers often lit with candles on rivers and would attempt to gain foresight into their relationship fortunes from the flow patterns of the flowers on the river. Men may attempt to capture the wreaths, in the hope of capturing the interest of the woman who floated the wreath.

There is an ancient Kupala belief, that the eve of Ivan Kupala is the only time of the year when ferns bloom. Prosperity, luck, discernment and power would befall on whoever finds a fern flower. Therefore, on that night village folks would roam through the forests in search of magical herbs and especially the elusive fern flower Chervona Ruta."

Bonfire festivals! Wreaths in the hair of Ukrainian maidens! And me, little chubby dark Jew, catapulting herself into the middle of it. I can hardly wait. Maybe a fern will flower just for me.