Revolution, Pogroms, and Politics in the “City of Life”
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Odessa’s status as a center of modern Jewish literature and culture unparalleled in the Russian Empire was firmly established, as was its role as an anchor in a network of Jewish culture. This did not stop its reputation for being full of wealth and full of sin. The tensions that were visible after 1881 in Odessa cafés and elsewhere only intensified in these years, when the Russian Empire entered a deep recession. Odessa’s economy suffered a setback due to the decrease in demand for manufactured goods, a drop in the supply of grain available for export, and the drying up of credit. There were flaws in Odessa’s economic infrastructure, and conditions continued to deteriorate, especially following the outbreak of war between Russia and Japan in 1904. All these developments fused together with the political and economic unrest that swept the Russian Empire before the failed 1905 revolution against the tsarist regime; that unrest was especially high in Odessa, in spite of its relative distance from imperial centers and its reputation as a multiethnic, cosmopolitan “city of life.”53
One of the defining moments of that aborted revolution took place in Odessa: the rebellion that erupted on the Russian battleship Potemkin on June 14, 1905, immortalized by Sergei Eisenstein’s film The Battleship Potemkin (1925). A few months after these dramatic events, Tsar Nicholas II issued the October Manifesto, promising political reforms. A large pogrom, a wave of anti-Jewish violence, erupted in Odessa on October 18–22, 1905, in which at least four hundred Jews and one hundred non-Jews were killed and approximately three hundred people, mostly Jews, were injured. Around 1905, a new generation of Russian Jews—some born in Odessa, others who had migrated to the city—came of age and found their place within the city’s cultural life. The October pogrom and several others that followed it thoroughly shaped members of this new generation but did not dim their engagement with the city. Most of them felt thoroughly at home in Russian language, literature, and culture, and they made good literary use of the unique Russian dialect of Odessa, which was tinged with Yiddish and Hebrew and with influences of many other languages spoken in Odessa. Odessa continued to attract young people from the Pale of Settlement who wanted to bask in the light of the “Sages of Odessa,” but many of Odessa’s new writers and cultural figures, as well as its merchants and lower-class workers, were born in the city and proudly considered themselves to be real Odessits. Odessa cafés continued to play an important role in the city and in Jewish culture in the tumultuous and occasionally violent years around the revolution. Much of the writing in and about the café reflected on the changes that took place in Odessa and the tensions that abounded around the aborted revolution and the pogroms.54
The Jewish-Russian writer and journalist Vladimir Jabotinsky was born to an acculturated middle-class family in Odessa in the year 1880. The young Jabotinsky, who later became the leader of the Zionist Revisionist party in Palestine became the chief cultural correspondent for the prestigious Russian daily Odesskie novosti, writing many witty feuilletons. Jabotinsky used to sit in Odessa’s famous cafés, writing, observing, and gathering information about cultural events in the city, as well as in the simple Greek cafés near the port, which he especially liked. Years later, he wrote about the city in his semiautobiographical novel Pyatero (The Five, 1936).55 In the novel, Jabotinsky chronicles the lives of five children in the Milgrom family and their different orientations, choices, and fates. Many of the events in the novel take place in the center of Odessa, where “one could see the trading terraces” of the two most famous institutions, Café Fanconi and Café Robina, which were “noisy as the sea at a massif, filled to overflowing with seated customers, surrounded by those waiting to get in.”56
The narrator’s view of these cafés as sites of “trading” captures well the mixture of business and pleasure, literature and culture, sociability and commodity, in the period before 1905. The changes that occurred in Odessa after the turbulent events of 1905 are also experienced and depicted through the cafés, which according to Jabotinsky suddenly emptied. In fact, for Jabotinsky and his narrator, after 1905, Odessa would never be the same city, and the years of the fin-de-siècle constituted the golden age of Odessa, its cafés, and its other public spaces. Jabotinsky describes in the novel a literary club that met in a building at the center of Odessa in 1903 as an ideal location for cultural mixture: “I think that most interesting of all was the peaceful brotherhood of peoples amongst us at the time. All the eight or ten tribes of old Odessa met in this club, and really it entered no one’s head, even silently to oneself, to notice who was who.”57
Something of the way Jabotinsky experienced the cross-cultural pollination of the years before 1905 can be seen in the memoir of his friend Israel Trivus, one of Odessa’s Zionists. Trivus wrote about his encounters with Jabotinsky in 1904. According to Trivus, Jabotinsky said that in the Greek Café Ambarzaki, “there is an aroma of Asia, … but it creates an ambience that takes you up to the sky, where there is no limit to your thought and imagination.” Playing on the Greek name of the café, Jabotinsky claimed that when he got to know this “lofty institution” well enough, he finally understood “the ancient Olympus, where one could enjoy ambrosia and nectar,” and that “God’s nectar is really a fragrant cup of Turkish-style coffee, and ambrosia is rahat lokum [Turkish delight] and halva.”58 However, it was not just the divine food and drink that Jabotinsky was attracted to but the conversation with the Greek owner of the café. He was enthralled with the visitors’ talk, which, according to Trivus, revolved around Greek and Jewish national movements and the emerging Zionist movement, as well as around the glories of Odessa, Pushkin’s poems (which Jabotinsky recited from memory), the city, and its cafés.59
The cafés that Jabotinsky’s narrator wrote about embody the way he understood the spirit of Odessa before 1905, but things changed drastically after that in Jabotinsky’s novel and in reality. During the year 1905, with the aborted revolution and with the pogroms that followed in the next months, the activity in Odessa’s cafés was very different. Some cafés were even in the line of fire. The most famous of them was Café Libman, the Jewish-owned establishment in the center of Odessa, which was located within the well-known Passage building.60 Café Libman was bombed by a group of socialist-anarchists in December 1905. Their mission was to spread propaganda in the factories and organize revolutionary labor unions as vehicles of class warfare. The bombing was a part of their effort to create “economic terror.” Apparently, the Jewish owner of Café Libman was blackmailed by the anarchists. They did the same thing to other shopkeepers and café owners, whom they described as “bourgeois bloodsuckers.” When Mr. Libman refused to pay them protection money, the café was bombed, which caused much damage to the café, as well as injuries.61
These economic and political tensions were a crucial part of Odessa’s modern Jewish culture. One of the most important aspects of the “economic terror” in this period was that not only were the owner of the café and many of the visitors Jewish, but so too were many of members of the anarchist group. As the historian Anke Hilbrenner claims, Café Libman might have been chosen as a target precisely because the owner of the café was known to the anarchist terrorists. Moreover, Café Libman was not really the café of the “bourgeois bloodsuckers,” as the anarchist sources claimed, but a place where students, liberals, and intellectuals would go. Since many of the guests were Jewish, some of the people injured in the bombing were Jews, including