If the bombing of Café Libman, which was soon renovated and continued to flourish for another decade, was a sign of the occasionally violent class warfare in Odessa, the pogrom in Odessa was a painful reminder that the city was never immune to anti-Semitism. A number of writers described in their fiction the devastation of the anti-Jewish violence in texts that were centered in cafés and similar institutions. The most famous is Alexander Kuprin’s short story “Gambrinus” (1907).63 Kuprin was not Jewish but a major Russian writer who presented a nuanced portrait of the Odessan Jews in his writing. “Gambrinus” is the name of a real establishment in the center of Odessa. It was not a café like Fanconi, Robina, or Libman but an underground establishment, a mix of tavern and café-chantant, in which music was played every night. In the story, the most beloved musician in Gambrinus was Sashka, an Odessan Jewish fiddler who was steeped in the tradition of Jewish (klezmer) music that developed in Odessa. Sailors and workers would flock to see and hear Sashka because he mesmerized audiences with his improvised response to the most varied requests, from Russian folk melody to Viennese waltz to an African chant.
In this period, Jewish musicians, especially fiddlers, began to dominate. The fictional Sashka was based on a real figure, Sender Pevzner, familiar in Odessa for his violin playing. In Kuprin’s story, Sashka volunteers to fight in the tsar’s army during the 1904 war with Japan. After his return, the pogrom in Odessa erupted, and the very same people who enjoyed Sashka’s playing in Gambrinus were suddenly incited against Jews. One day when Sashka was walking in the streets of Odessa, a stonemason wanted to attack him with his chisel. When someone grabbed the hand and said, “Stop, you devil,—why it’s Sashka!”64 the assailant stared and stopped—and smashed the brain of the little dog that was always found in Gambrinus instead. But then Sashka disappeared, nobody knew where; when he returned to Gambrinus, his arm was broken, and the visitors of Gambrinus realized he could not play his fiddle. The story ends with the triumph of art over the force of anti-Semitism and violence, as Sashka takes up a small harmonica and begins to play one of his beloved tunes.65
Thus, the violence of the revolution and the pogroms entered Odessa cafés and became enmeshed in modern Jewish culture in the city. These elements play also a major role in Ya’akov Rabinovitz’s Hebrew novel Neve kayits (A summer retreat, 1934).66 The plot of the novel takes place in the summer of 1905 between a fontan—an Odessa seaside resort—and the city, with its cafés, restaurants, and theaters. It revolves around the life of young Jewish men. All of them are acculturated to Russian culture; some are from bourgeois families, and others belong to revolutionary movements. The tensions between Jews and non-Jews and the threat of anti-Semitism and violence gradually enter their bohemian life. These tensions can be seen, for example, when one of these characters, the highly sensitive Yitzḥak Yonovitz, walks on an Odessa boulevard and sees his friend Volka Wolfman—a man with a “Russian look,” who is active in revolutionary circles—sitting in a café eating watermelon together with a security guard and a few other non-Jews. Yitzḥak stops himself from greeting his friend and joining him at the café because he thinks that it is better not to reveal his Jewishness.67
The end of the novel comes after several acts of violence against Jews and revolutionaries. At this point, the plot moves from the seaside and the boulevards of central Odessa to the suburb of Moldavanka, which had become infamous for its destitute Jewish residents and for poverty and crime. The narrator describes a humble café, with simple food, that is owned by a Jewish family and frequented by Jews. Yitzḥak and his friends and a Jewish merchant who normally would not be seen around go to this Jewish café and talk about the violent events in Odessa. One of the visitors, an owner of a small hotel, complains that “there is no rest, they destroy the city, the commerce, and everything. And we are Jews.”68 It is unclear if Yitzḥak refers to the revolutionary activists or to the perpetrators of the violent pogrom. But the implication in Rabinovitz’s novel is clear: during these turbulent times, Jews of all backgrounds feel more at home and more able to talk about their situation in humble cafés in the Moldavanka or in the Jewish and Zionist self-defense circles than in places such as Cafés Fanconi, Robina, or Libman.
After the devastation of the revolution and the pogroms, Odessa seemed to calm down and return to normal. However, social, religious, ethnic, and especially economic tensions were always simmering just beneath the surface. Odessa became full of anarchist movements, Jewish self-defense groups, and ordinary criminal gangs, with gangster leaders such as the Jewish Mishka Yaponchik. Before the Russian-Jewish writer Isaac Babel wrote his famous “Odessa Stories” in the 1920s and captured these tensions and the contraband activity that took place in the city after 1905, Sholem Aleichem described them in a Yiddish short story, “Dray lukhes” (Three calendars, 1913). The story is a monologue of an unnamed Odessan Jew, a married man with children, who makes a living by selling contraband, namely, smutty “interesting postcards from Paris.”69 The historical context for this monologue, and for the narrator’s unusual occupation, is the tenure of Ivan Nikolaevich Tolmachev as a governor of Odessa between 1907 and 1911, which brought some order to the streets of Odessa but was also heavily repressive. Many Jews considered Tolmachev to be not only counterrevolutionary but also anti-Jewish.
The narrator explains that the fact that he sells smutty postcards has something to do with his interaction with Tolmachev before 1905, when “a Jew could roam around as free as a bird” and sell his Jewish books near Café Fanconi, because “you could always run into Jews there, for that was the area where speculators, agents, and various other Jews hung around waiting for a miracle.” The narrator tries to sell a few calendars that were left in his stock a few weeks after the High Holidays. Looking at the habitués of Café Fanconi, he realizes that he knows “every single one of them even blindfolded.” Then he sees a decorated army general sitting by the front table in the open veranda of the café, accompanied by an assistant, whom he is in the process of sending to his wife at home with an important message. When the general catches a glimpse of the narrator standing in front of him, the narrator asks him in his broken Russian, “Your Excellency, how would you like to buy a calendar?” The general actually buys one from him, apparently to get rid of him.70
The narrator, desperate to sell the last calendars in his stock, remembers Tolmachev’s home address and goes there, selling another calendar to his young, beautiful wife. After this success, the narrator hurries back to Café Fanconi in an attempt to get rid of the very last calendar. He sees what appears to him to be another army general, but then he realizes that he is “just one of the waiters from Café Fanconi, running with a napkin tucked under his arm and wiping the sweat from his face.” When the waiter tells the narrator that the general asks to see him again, he is sure that “his general” likes the Jewish calendar so much that he has sent the waiter to fetch him another one, and he begins to negotiate the price. The story then cuts off abruptly, but we know the end was not good: “We don’t dare show our faces on the streets selling a Yiddish or Hebrew book or a paper. We have to hide it inside our coats like contraband or stolen goods.… So I have to have a sideline business—‘interesting postcards from Paris.’ ”71 Sholem Aleichem’s satire is directed in this story toward the narrator, a simple Jew, a family man, who tries and fails to adjust to the new times. But the bitingly ironic story is multidirectional. It demonstrates that in the years before World War I, Odessa cafés were the sites of political and economic change and also of tense negotiations. The negotiations in the thirdspace of the café occurred between Jews and gentiles, unwanted migrants and the authorities, the poor and the rich. All of these elements represented different versions of Odessa’s cultural identity and of what it meant to be an Odessit in the café.
Middle-Class Respectability, Gender, and Jewish Gangsters
In Sholem Aleichem’s “Three Calendars,” the poor Jewish man who used to sell Jewish calendars around Café Fanconi turns into a dealer in smutty postcards from Paris; other Jews become swindlers and gangsters in and around Odessa cafés. According to Jarrod Tanny, the years before World War I were critical to the development of the Odessa mythography, as writers, journalists, and other myth makers depicted “the thieves and other deviant characters who shaped and were shaped by Odessa.”72 A good example of this mythography is the work of the Jewish-Russian writer Semyon Yushkevich and especially his three-volume novel Leon Drei (1908–1919). The