Kulthum Odeh

Kulthum Odeh was born in Nazareth on 2 April 1892, to an Orthodox Christian family. Her father was Nasr Odeh and her husband was Ivan Vasiliev. She was known in Russia as Klavdia Ode-Vasilieva. She had three daughters: Larissa, Valeria, and Ludmilla.

Kulthum was the fifth daughter born to parents expecting the first boy, so her birth was a disappointment to the family. She was not considered to be good looking, so the thin dark girl grew up unable to remember any parental affection. Indeed, she recalled that her mother would often make fun of her looks.

She had no avenue of escape except study. Her mother opposed this strongly, but her father insisted on her education and sent her first to an elementary school run by the [Russian] Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society. The young girl worked hard and her grades placed her at the top of her class. Regulations at that time gave the top female student the chance to complete her education, for free, in a boarding school. So she moved in September 1900 to the Russian Female Teachers' Training College in Beit Jala where she studied geometry, physics, chemistry, Russian language, history of the Arab world and history of Arabic literature, as well as cooking and sewing, until graduation in 1908. She was particularly proud of the fact that Khalil al-Sakakini was her Arabic teacher.

She returned to Nazareth where she taught at the schools of the Imperoal Orthodox Palestine Society which played an important role in spreading knowledge in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon. She also began to publish articles in magazines like al-Nafa’is al-‘asriyya in Haifa, al-Hilal in Cairo, and al-Hasna’ in Beirut.

In 1910, while teaching in Nazareth, she met the Russian orientalist Ignati Kratchkovski, who would later have a major impact on her scientific life.

In 1913, she met and fell in love with a Russian doctor, Ivan Vasiliev, who was head of the outpatient clinic at the Russian Sergei’s Courtyard and was in charge of the female students’ health. Her parents would not permit this marriage. However, a relative and a wise Nazareth figure, Najib Odeh, accompanied her and the doctor to Jerusalem where the couple were married in the church in the Russian Quarter and then returned with the married couple to Nazareth. Her family accepted the fait accompli.

The couple sailed to Russia in 1914 and World War I broke out while we were at sea on the Bosporus. She suffered greatly from the war and the intense cold. She quickly joined the Red Cross, studied nursing, and worked as a nurse in Serbia and Montenegro. She then moved with her husband to the Ukraine to combat the typhus epidemic. In 1919, her husband fell ill and soon died, leaving her to care for three daughters, the eldest 5 years old and the youngest an infant.

The years following her husband’s death in Ukraine were hard, but she faced them with immense courage and determination. She not only overcame these difficulties but came to feel happy that she had succeeded in caring well for her young daughters and extending her care to others too, a source of even greater happiness. She became a regional organizer for the Department for Work among Women of the Communist Party (However, there is no record that she was a member of the Communist Party). She described that period of her life when she participated in a competition announced by the Egyptian al-Hilal magazine in 1927, the subject of which was “How to Live Joyfully in This Life?” The judges included some of Egypt’s most prominent writers and men of letters.

She won first prize in that competition even though her life was not happy in the conventional sense of the term. She described how her happiness manifested when she sought to alleviate the suffering of wounded soldiers during the war or when she undertook the hardest of tasks in order to support her young daughters. She had sown the land and followed the harvesters to gather the bales of wheat and fueled the threshing machines. She felt that her life was happy because she and her daughters never suffered from hunger or want, adding: “I did not experience material or psychological need in my life, even during that great hunger and the horrible civil wars.” True contentment came to her only when she had overcome obstacles, but the real cause of her happiness was her love for all people.

From the Ukraine she moved to Leningrad in 1924 where she once again met the prominent Russian orientalist Ignati Krachkovski. She had first met him when he visited her school in Nazareth; he was impressed by her talent as a teacher. He thus arranged for her to join Leningrad University where, in 1928, she obtained a doctorate for a thesis on Arabic dialects. She continued to advance in academic rank until she attained the title of Professor, becoming the first Arab woman to reach that rank.

In 1926 the Soviet authorities gave her a hard choice: either to return to Palestine or to remain in the Soviet Union. If she chose to leave, she could not take her daughters with her since they were by law Soviet citizens. Otherwise she could stay and be granted Soviet citizenship. She decided to stay though she did visit Palestine in 1928, saw family and friends and was warmly received in every city she visited. During her stay in Palestine, Odeh conducted ethnographic research on Palestinian folk customs, mainly birthing practices and peasant rituals in times of drought. Both practices were associated with  the place and role of Palestinian women at home and in social life, and doing research on them reflected a concern inherited from the discrimination she passed through in her childhood. This led her to condemn practices that showed preference for male children in Arab societies and more broadly to strongly express a feminist viewpoint. She also thought that only a socialist system would liberate women in Palestine. In an article devoted to how women’s daily life are described in the Arab novel, she expressed her extreme disappointment that Palestinian women were not as politically engaged as women in Syria and Egypt.

In March1938, during the Stalinist era, she was arrested for attempting to defend Alexander Shami and Sofia Roginskaya, two renowned historians and Arabists who were arrested by the Soviet police the previous month. She spent several months in prison without any charges being brought against her. She soon became the subject of great admiration by various Soviet groups, especially the political class. Thus, when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, she was among those transported to the interior in order to protect their lives.

Odeh lectured at the Faculty of Oriental Languages, University of Leningrad, and was a member of the Arabic Department of the Institute of Philosophy, the Arts and History. Following the opening of the Orientalism Institute in Moscow, she moved from Leningrad to Moscow to work at that Institute and also lectured at the Institute for International Relations and the Higher Diplomatic School.

She was the first woman member of the Society of Soviet Cultural Relations with the Arab countries.

She was a firm believer in the ability of literature to reach all human hearts and so began to translate Soviet literature into Arabic before the end of World War II and then translated Arabic literature into Russian. She was a major contributor in the building of cultural bridges between Russia and the Arab world and in introducing Russian culture to the Arabs. She published scores of articles and short stories in Russian journals and newspapers.

On her seventieth birthday she was awarded the Medal of Honor and the Medal of Friendship Among Nations, the highest awards that Soviet authorities granted to individuals who contributed to friendship between the Soviet and foreign peoples.

The PLO posthumously awarded her the Jerusalem Medal for Culture, Arts and Literature in January 1990 in recognition of her cultural and political role in Russia.

She died on 24 April 1965. Her funeral was attended by a large crowd of academics, scientists, students, and peasants and also by ministers and officials who were her former students. She was buried in a cemetery near Moscow reserved for men of letters and scientists.

Selected Works

In Arabic:

"كيف يعيش المرء هنيئاً في هذه الحياة؟". "الهلال". العدد 9 (1 سبتمبر 1927)، ص 1043-1046.

[How to Live Joyfully in This Life]

"المنتخبات العصرية لدرس الآداب العربية". مع مقدمة لأغناطيوس كراتشكوفسكي. ليننغراد: 1928 ـ 1929، جزءان.

[Modern Selections for the Study of Arabic Literature]

"27000 عربي في جوار بلاد الصين: رحلة في آسيا الوسطى". "الهلال". العدد 3 (1 يناير 1937)، ص 285-288.

[In the Vicinity of China: An Account of Travel to Central Asia]

In Russian:

"Reflection of the Daily Life of Contemporary Arab Women in the Novel". Zapiski kollegi vostokovedov [Notes of Orientalist Colleagues]. Leningrad S (1930).

"Palestinian Arab Customs Connected with Drought". Sovetskaya etnografya [Soviet Ethnography] no. 1 (1936).

"Customs Associated with Births and the New Born Among the Northern Palestinian Arabs". Sovetskaya Etnografya [Soviet Ethnography] no. 3 (1936).

Translations

To Arabic:

كراتشكوفسكي، أغناطيوس. "حياة الشيخ محمد عياد الطنطاوي". ترجمته من الروسية كلثوم عودة. القاهرة: المجلس الأعلى لرعاية الفنون والآداب، 1964.

[Ignati Krachkovski. The Life of Shaykh Muhammad Ayyad al-Tantawi]. 

To Russian:

Land, Hand and Water by the Iraqi writer Dhu’l Nun Ayyub; and the collections Stories of Arab Authors (1955), Egyptian Tales (1956), Stories of Syrian Authors (1958), Stories of Lebanese Authors (1958), and The Contemporary Arab Novel.

Sources

Khayat, Nicole and Maria Vologzhanina (Introduction). “From Nazareth to Moscow: Kulthum 'Awda-Vasilieva's 'Happy Life' in Russia (1927, 1937, 1965).” In Eileen Kane , Masha Kirasirova and Margaret Litvin(editors). Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. (includes translation into English of Odeh's aforementioned articles: "How to Live Joyfully in This Life"; "In the Vicinity of China: An Account of Travel to Central Asia".)

Menicucci, Garay. “Kulthum Auda: The Forgotten Palestinian Ethnographer.” In: Mary Ann Fay, Auto/Biography and the Construction of Identity and Community in the Middle East. New York : Palgrave, 2002.

الخطيب، حسام. "حركة الترجمة في القرن العشرين حتى عام 1985". "الموسوعة الفلسطينية"، القسم الثاني - الدراسات الخاصة، المجلد الرابع،  دراسات الحضارة. بيروت: هيئة الموسوعة الفلسطينية، 1990.

طوبي، أسمى. "عبير ومجد".  بيروت: مطبعة قلفاط ، 1966.

"كلثوم عودة فاسيليفا.. أول أكاديمية فلسطينية وعربية في الاتحاد السوفياتي"، "الجزيرة نت"، 7 تشرين الثاني/ نوفمبر 2024.

https://www.aljazeera.net/encyclopedia/2024/11/7/كلثوم-عودة-فاسيليفا-أول-أكاديمية

لوباني، حسين علي. "معجم أعلام فلسطين في العلوم والفنون والآداب". بيروت: مكتبة لبنان ناشرون، 2012.

محاميد، عمر. "كلثوم عودة من الناصرة الى سانت بطرسبورغ (في الوثائق المحفوظة في أرشيف أكاديمية العلوم الروسية). بيت بيرل: مركز أبحاث حوار الحضارات، 2004.