This is a good example of how Odessa and its cafés became tied, together with the fictional Leon Drei, with swindlers who make appearances in cafés. In the popular and literary imagination, Odessa in the 1910s became a “city of rogues and gangsters,” and this depiction was linked to Jewishness and to Jewish culture and to café culture, implicitly or explicitly. As in Prohibition-era Chicago, crime was central to the city’s identity. William E. Curtis, a traveler from North America, wrote that Odessa was “one of the most immoral communities in Europe,” where the locals are “given to gambling and dissipation of all kinds.” He noted the many cafés in Odessa, where “all night the air is filled with music and laughter, and pleasure-seekers turn night into day,” and he wondered when the people in the cafés “attend to their business.”75
The American journalist Sydney Adamson, in his profile of Odessa in 1912, also perceived the cafés as an essential part of the cultural identity of the city and its citizens.76 He wrote that “everybody in Odessa goes, at some time or other, to Robina[’s], or to Fanconi[’s] across the way.” He noted especially the presence of “ladies,” which was a growing phenomenon in the cafés, and of men of “commercial and official monde.” His impression of Café Fanconi’s “comfortable atmosphere of tea and cakes” reminded him of “Parisian shops in the Place Vendome or Rue de la Paix” and “might even belong to Fifth Avenue” in New York City.77 Apparently, both gangsters and respectability could exist in Odessa cafés side by side in an elusive and potent harmony.
These impressions of Odessa’s famous cafés and their habitués and visitors raise the issue of what the historian Roshanna Sylvester has called “respectability,” which was of utmost importance to many journalists and others who attempted to safeguard Odessa’s reputation and its public space.78 Moreover, the comparisons of Odessa and its cafés to other cities, made by visitors and locals alike, seem to be part of an anxiety about Odessa’s identity and in particular the notion that Odessa was a pale imitation of other, more “authentic” and much larger urban centers. This anxiety can also be seen in a 1913 guide to the city, in which Grigory Moskvich, who composed a series of guides to cities in the Russian Empire, wrote that the dream of the “essential Odessit” was to “transform himself into an impeccable British gentleman or blue-blooded Viennese aristocrat.” Then, “immaculately dressed, with an expensive cigar in his teeth,” the Odessit was ready to meet his public. Whether “getting into a carriage or sitting down in one of the better cafés,” the Odessit was “out to impress by his appearance, aware of his own worth, looking down on everyone and everything below.”79
Not only Russian and American travelers to Odessa were worried about the issue of middle-class respectability and paid much attention to life in its urban cafés. Sylvester has analyzed how Odessa’s Russian newspapers, especially the progressive Odesski listok and the more lurid publication Odesskaia pochta, covered the city and its cafés in their feuilletons and stories. Many of the journalists who wrote in these papers were Jewish, and the dominant culture of the city was marked as Jewish because lower-middle-class Jews were “more responsible than any others for giving texture to the Odessan form of modernity.”80 One of the most prolific and popular journalists who covered Odessa’s urban scene was the Jewish Iakov Osipovich Sirkis, who used the pseudonym Faust. Faust wrote in Odesskaia pochta many feuilletons about the city’s social and cultural landscape and claimed that when Odessa infants start to talk, “the first word they pronounce is [Café] Robina! Especially clever ones utter the phrase, Robina and Fanconi!” he proclaimed. The father rejoices, Faust continued, “As I live and breathe, the baby will be a big merchant!”81
Another feuilletonist in the same paper, with the name Satana (Satan), expressed similar feelings about the importance of the city’s two most prominent cafés: “Every Odessan, regardless of social position, considers it necessary to go to the Robina or Fanconi at least once in their lives,” Satana declared, but especially to the Robina. “To live in Odessa and not go to the Robina is like being in Rome and not seeing the pope.” In a feuilleton penned by Leri, one of Odesski listok’s journalists, in June 1913, the journalist wrote about Odessa’s popular cafés: “It is always the way in Odessa. First, the tasteless smoke-filled mansions of Robina, Libman.… a cup of coffee, and business conversation; then, an assault and battery, breach of the public peace; then, the bleak chamber of the justice of the peace. And the next day small synopses printed in the newspapers. Such are our ways, a kind of Odessan fun-house mirror.”82
Café Robina, mentioned in so many of these feuilletons, was founded in the 1890s, across the way from Café Fanconi on Deribasovskaya Street. The two cafés were competitors but also formed a kind of symbiotic relationship, as visitors used to move from one to the other. In the early 1910s, the local newspapers reported that Café Robina became Odessa’s most fashionable haunt, a main hub of middle-class social life. Among its denizens were some of the city’s most high-profile personalities: politicians, financiers, high-ranking officers, distinguished professionals, and “stars” from the world of entertainment, as well as many journalists and writers, who no doubt made the place more famous and desirable by writing about it. Part of the reason for Café Robina’s popularity was that it served so many purposes. Businessmen and politicians came there to work, negotiating deals or conducting meetings over coffee and sweets. Others came in search of work, hoping to strike up profitable acquaintances with successful entrepreneurs, exporters, merchants, or brokers. Many others, including women, came simply to relax, enjoy the company of friends, and catch up on the news of the day.
Odessa’s middle-class women were a growing public presence on the streets of the city. They were known to “take tea” in the “ladies’ sections”—it is unclear whether these sections were completely segregated or were created more ad hoc with certain tables of the café—that presumably existed in Café Fanconi, Café Robina, and other Odessa cafés. But there was much male anxiety about the growing phenomenon of the modern, independent women sitting in cafés. An Odesski listok piece titled “Ladies Chatter” tried to give readers some insight into what these women do in the café and the content of their half-Russian, half-French conversation: “Yesterday evening we intended to go to the Café Robina.… We got in the carriage and arrived—where do you think—at Ditman’s! … Imaginez vous! … I, of course, was astounded.”83 It was not only the presence of “unrefined” women in the cafés that worried the journalists and writers. Journalists also reported on the fact that Café Robina charged astronomical prices for their food and drink in spite of not-so-perfect sanitary conditions. Odessa’s journalists mounted a critique of the visitors, especially young people who were drawn to the Robina’s “fairy-tale atmosphere.” The columnist Faust declared that when “a bashful youth” wanted to “fix a meeting with a girl,” he would exclaim, “To Robina!” When a “proper” lady wanted to talk with a “proper” gentleman, she would whisper, “To Robina!”84
Figure 1.2. Postcard of Café Robina, early twentieth century
The journalists in Odessa’s local press began to speak about a type: the Robinist, the habitué of Café Robina. The most typical Robinist was presumably a young man, son of the middle class, well bred and well educated, who should have been the pride of polite society but was its nemesis. According to journalists, Robinisti were always immaculately dressed, giving every appearance of gentility, but in fact were devious, cynical men. The journalist Satana pointedly unmasked the young men as social frauds: “Look at them. They have chic visiting cards, collars brilliant and elegant,