Adolf takes Esther and her sister Hanna for a walk in the boulevards of Odessa, and in no time, they arrive at Café Fanconi. Seen through the eyes of the poor migrant Esther, from whom the author keeps an ironic distance, the café, as the city itself, is a complex thirdspace of appearances and mirrors that needs to be deciphered: “When the doormen opened the doors of the café, it seemed to Esther for a moment that the doors of new life had opened.” Esther recognizes that “all the smiles, politeness and gentility were, of course, a matter of transaction, and yet the sham was not too jarring to her heart,” for “in the café the deceit was elevated here to the level of truth.” Unused to café life, for Esther, “the mundane is transformed and elevated into a holy day.” This passage highlights the considerable currency of bourgeois appearance in Odessa and its cafés. Fashionable clothing, traveling in a carriage, shopping at an expensive boutique, and going out to a chic café were part and parcel of the city’s “respectable” lifestyle. And yet, as Esther notices, the café was also a place of social transactions: “Surely there was some order here, but the hierarchies were fluid. Each person here was a guest but also owner. Everything was different.”88 As a Jewish woman in Odessa, Esther learns that in the mirror house of the café, the social order can be, to some degree, suspended, though it is unlikely to be completely upended.
The second part of the novel, in which the two sisters, Hanna and Esther, wander through the streets of Odessa, suggests how the fluidity of social order in the café may enable, at least on the imaginary level, an indeterminacy of gender identities and hierarchies. The sisters, having become wary of the men they know, imagine themselves to be “Cavalier” and “Dame”: “Let’s walk around Deribasovskaya Blvd. without any men; leave them alone. Later we’ll walk to Café Fanconi and catch a table. I will smoke a cigarette … and invite ‘the dame of my heart,’ feed her with pastry and chocolate … just like a man.” As female flâneuses, the two sisters, who imagine themselves as a couple, make their way to Café Fanconi, drink hot chocolate, and read the newspapers, which are full of sensational stories about strange events and adventures in Odessa. But when they leave the café, the potential narrative energy of their imaginative release is immediately restituted when they meet a new man, a medical student, who invites them to his “regular table” in the more fashionable and more “exclusive” Café Robina.89
On the one hand, Steinman seems to articulate a critique—very common in the journalistic and literary writings of Odessa in this period—of the “ladies’ chatter” that ridicules their attempts to appear “cultured.” On the other hand, the femininity and the provincial Jewishness of Esther and her sister, which the narrator never lets the protagonists or the readers forget, also act as a double-edged sword. If the café is chiefly a masculine, bourgeois domain, to which urban men can chivalrously invite their “ladies,” it also enables the two sisters to enact a performance of gender that exposes its social conventions. The space of the café becomes, by the 1910s, a site in which the identity of the “New Jewish Woman” is enacted and examined. It is a mirror that reflects and sometime distorts her social, personal, and gender identity, her passions and desires, which are both real and imaginary, public and private.
World War I, Sovietization, and the Cafés of “Good Old Odessa”
When World War I was declared in 1914, Odessa was far away from the major battlefields. There was an attempt by the Ottoman Empire, which joined forces with Germany, to attack Odessa’s port, but it was not successful. During the war, the city lay near the geographical intersection of the Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian Empires, and business was continually interrupted; but the city itself was unperturbed. Ya’akov Fichman, a Hebrew poet who lived in Odessa during the first years of the 1900s, came back to the city in 1915 and observed that Odessa during the Great War was “calmer and quieter than the day it was established”: “The deserted port seemed as if it stretched to the eastern horizon.… The city itself was full of life. The cafés were full of people.… The War years—I am afraid to say—were the most carefree years in our life.”90
Even amid the war and during the 1917 revolution and the civil war that erupted in Russia, Odessa did not experience the widespread violence that convulsed much of Ukraine and the Russian Empire more generally. However, the city passed back and forth nine times between Russian “Whites,” Ukrainian nationalists, the French, and the Communists. Soviet control was consolidated in 1920. Between 1917 and 1919, it seemed like a Jewish renaissance was about to take place in Soviet Russia; Odessa, which, as we have seen, was always a stronghold of Hebraists, produced 60 percent of all Hebrew books published in Russia. However, the situation changed rapidly. Soon Jewish schools, synagogues, and other religious groups, including nearly all non-Bolshevik cultural institutions, were closed. The Evsektsiya (Jewish section of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) waged campaigns against persistent ritual customs such as circumcision, as well as against Hebraists. Almost all Hebrew and some Yiddish writers left Odessa in 1921, after Hebrew was declared a “reactionary” Zionist language in the Soviet Union. Many of them found new homes in Berlin, New York, and Tel Aviv.91
However, Jewish creativity in Russian and Yiddish did not come to a halt, nor did the world of the Jewish café culture disappear immediately. During these tumultuous years, an extraordinary group of Jewish Odessan writers and cultural figures who wrote in Russian appeared on the horizon. They became, for the first time, a dominant force in the Russian literary and cultural sphere. Many of these young Russian writers, Jews and gentiles, created the Kollektiv poetov (Poets’ collective), an informal club that met in the cafés, as well as in private apartments. Among its members were Lev Slavin, Eduard Bagritsky, Valentin Kataev, Yuri Olesha, Semyon Gekht, Ilya Ilf, and Evgeny Petrov. The young Isaac Babel, who was associated with the group, boldly declared in his 1916 sketch “Odessa” that “this town has the material conditions needed to nurture, say, a Maupassant talent.”92 Babel and his friends fulfilled the promise. The important Russian critic Victor Shklovsky called this group of writers “the Southwestern School” of Russian literature. Some of them were Jewish by birth and upbringing, and some were not; some lived in Odessa, and others left it for Moscow or St. Petersburg (renamed Petrograd). But they all absorbed a common Odessan atmosphere, which included strong Jewish undertones.93
The most prominent articulations of Odessa’s café culture during the chaos of war and revolution are found in the writings of Babel, who was doubtless Odessa’s most important Russian modernist writer. Babel was born in the Moldavanka in 1894, but soon after his birth, the family moved to the nearby town of Nikolayev. In 1905, they returned to live in the center of Odessa. Much of Babel’s writings, including the famous “Odessa Stories,” are based on his experience of the city between 1905 and 1915. Babel lovingly evoked the city and its cafés in an Odessan-Jewish style that constantly made use of Yiddish and Hebrew expressions and “types,” such as the luftmensh, the rabbi, and the good-hearted swindler.94 Babel wrote about the humor of Odessa that developed in the city’s cafés, as well as the characters he saw and met in them—from Benya Krik, the Jewish gangster, to middle-class merchants, aspiring writers, fashionable women, and such people as cross-dressers—who constantly traversed the social and cultural borders.
In 1918, Babel published in Petrograd’s newspaper two feuilletons with the title Listki ob Odesse (Odessa dispatches), in which he describes Odessa in the period of the 1917 revolution and civil war.95 In spite of the chaos of these years, and Babel’s living away from his city, his feuilletons manage to capture something of Odessa cafés in times of turbulence. In one of the sketches, Babel longs for the speedy revival of the city’s port and wishes to see its