Odessa: A Guest Post by Gabrielle Sher

After the death of his daughter, a grief-stricken father turns to dark magic to resurrect her from the grave, but a strange darkness comes back with her in this haunting exploration of death, family and identity. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Gabrielle Sher on writing Odessa.

 

In a powerfully imagined Russia at the height of the pogroms, a grief-stricken family turn to ancient magic to bring their daughter back from the grave. 

The original inspiration for Odessa came decades ago, when I was a child and my grandmother told me stories about her grandmother, Golda, who escaped pogroms in Eastern Europe and emigrated to America on her own.  Golda’s story became a part of me.  It lay dormant for a long time before I was able to start writing it.  I started writing in 2018, when I began my PhD research into the gothic genre, Jewish folklore, and narrative psychology, as well as my own family history and the history of the period.  Odessa was a long time in the making.  It was really the gothic genre that finally helped me give a voice to this story that is so personal and so meaningful for me. 

I recently returned to the place where I finished the first draft of Odessa, and where I got the call that I was finally signing with an agent.  It’s a small town in Northern Ireland where my husband’s family lives, and where I lived for a few years while I completed my PhD during the height of Covid.  All of the memories of writing that first draft came flooding back, and I got to stand in the same spot five years later with the finished novel in my hands, looking out at the same trees I stared at while trying to think of the right words.  Across the ocean at the same moment, Odessa was already on the shelves in Barnes and Noble, and my family was running to their local stores to see it in person.  It was definitely an emotional moment.  I’m proud of myself, proud of my years of hard work, and proud of my relentlessness in my journey to getting published. 

It is definitely surreal to have been working on this book for nearly a decade and to have it finally be published.  It’s something I’ve dreamt of and imagined my whole life, and now that it’s happening I can’t quite believe it.  When I got home from my trip to Northern Ireland, I went right to my local Barnes and Noble and found Odessa.  I opened it to the first page and read my grandmother’s words in the epigraph. I signed my name, our name, and tried to tell myself that this is real.