The result was a palpable sense of Jewish freedom in the Russian Empire, although a freedom represented in highly ambivalent ways in the popular and literary imagination. People hoped to “live like God in Odessa,” as one Yiddish dictum declares, but it was also imagined as the place where “the fires of hell burn for seven miles around it,” because it was understood as a city of sin, vice, and temptations. This double image of Odessa soon became an essential component of the mythography of the city. The city was experienced both as a cosmopolitan place of enlightenment and culture and as El Dorado, a place in which one might get rich but that was also full of corruption and sin. Midway through the nineteenth century, these conflicting images of Odessa were crystallized around a number of urban cafés. Coffeehouses were not commonplace in the cities and towns of the Russian Empire. Odessa was different. People in Odessa liked calling their city “Little Paris”; the city was often compared to others in Europe and America but rarely to Moscow or other Russian cities. As Oleg Gubar and Alexander Rozenboim write in their survey of daily life in Odessa, one of the similarities between Odessa and Paris was “the presence of cafés, colorful and festive, with graceful verandas or tables simply placed under … acacias on shady, picturesque streets.”7
Odessa’s first cafés, like those in other European cities, were Turkish, Greek, and Armenian, regions that were the chief importers of coffee to the city through the Black Sea from the Ottoman Empire.8 Alexander Pushkin, the great Russian poet of the nineteenth century, lived a short period of political exile in Odessa in 1823–1824 and visited these cafés. He immortalized the city in his verse novel Eugene Onegin, in which he wrote, “like a Muslim in his paradise, I drank coffee with Oriental grounds.”9 Later, cafés in Odessa were owned also by Italians, French, Swiss, Germans, and Jews, and their food and drinks, as well as their appearance and ambience, were influenced by all the different places from which the owners came. The warm weather of Odessa encouraged many of these places to be open to the tree-lined boulevards and streets, with verandas that let people enjoy the weather and the sea air and enabled cafés to be experienced as a thirdspace, located between the inside and the outside, the private and the public.
Jewish presence in these multiethnic cafés was first recorded in the mid-nineteenth century. The 1855 Robert Sears’s guide to the Russian Empire declared that “there is perhaps no town in the world in which so many different tongues may be heard as in the streets and coffeehouses of Odessa, the motley population consisting of Russians, Tartars, Greeks, Jews, Poles, Italians, Germans, French, etc.”10 Local Jews and Jewish travelers from other parts of the Russian Empire noted the confluence of Odessa cafés and Jewish culture in the 1860s. It was an age of relative tolerance in Russia and a time of growth and maturity for Odessa’s Jewish community, which constituted a sixth of the population of the city. In a published letter from November 2, 1861, Z., a traveler from Vilna (Vilnius, Lithuania), wrote about his experience in Odessa, which he called “the capital of Jews” in the Russian Empire. “In the days after I returned from Odessa, I hastened to relate to you,” he wrote to a friend, “the impressions I had.… I won’t tell you about the beauty, the princely life, the freedom and the wealth, which is already more or less familiar to all; I will tell only that I, at least, have never seen a comparable city.… But all this is of secondary importance for Jews, as there are many beautiful cities in the empire. I want to dwell only on the situation of our coreligionists there.” As an example of what he found so attractive and exceptional in Odessa, Z. gave the city cafés: “When I stopped by Café Richelieu,” Z. observed, “I saw that almost all of the customers were Jews, who argued, read, reasoned, and played; eventually I realized that this was something in the way of a Jewish club.” What caught his attention more than anything else was that in the cafés, Jews “felt absolutely at home.”11
The attraction of Jews to Odessa’s cafés and the sense of ease and being “at home” in them, without being watched and judged, was seen as a sign of freedom and progress to some and as a threat to others. This ambivalent attitude can be seen in memoirs, letters, and newspapers, as well as in fiction written by Jewish writers. The Russian-Jewish writer, journalist, and editor Osip Rabinovich came from the small town of Kobelyaki and studied at Kharkov University before becoming a notary in Odessa. Being a notary did not stop Rabinovich from visiting and enjoying Odessa’s cafés. He also became very interested in the world of journalism and Russian literature and began to publish feuilletons and stories in Odessa’s Russian newspapers. In 1860, Rabinovich established the first Russian-Jewish periodical in Odessa, Rassvet (Dawn). In a short story published in 1865, Rabinovich described a traditional character named Reb Khaim-Shulim, a watchmaker who has troubles supporting a large family in the city of Kishinev. When he wins a lottery ticket, his appetite for business and wealth grows. Lured by stories he had heard about Odessa and the possibilities of getting rich there, Khaim-Shulim sets out not only to retrieve his lottery winnings but to move to the city on the Black Sea. “I’m going to Odessa for the money,” he declares to his good friend Reb Khatskl (Yehezkel), but Khatskl warns Khaim-Shulim’s wife, Meni-Kroyna, just as her husband enters the room, that Odessa is a dangerous place, a city of sin: “Temptations for your husband will be legion: in the café, in the theater.… It’s better, you see, that he has the Book of Psalms with him, so that in his free time he will sit and read. It’s edifying and free.”12 Khaim-Shulim does not listen to the warning of his friend, and he ends up losing all his money, returning to Kishinev with almost nothing. Thus, even if Rabinovich himself sat in cafés, for Khaim-Shulim, cafés were also a place of temptation and risk, both financial and spiritual.
We find a similar warning—that Odessa cafés were full of “sinful Jews”—in a novella by the Hebrew writer Peretz Smolenskin. Smolenskin was born in a small town in the Mogilev district, was influenced by the ideas of the Haskalah, and migrated to Odessa. He lived in Odessa from 1862 to 1867, before moving to Vienna, where we will encounter him again. Smolenskin made his debut as a writer in Ha-melits, Odessa’s Hebrew newspaper. He wrote in and about the city in his first novella, Simḥat ḥanef (The hypocrite’s joy, 1872). The novella tells the story of twenty-three-year-old David, who lived in Warsaw, participated in the Polish uprising against the Russian Empire (1863), and ran away to live anonymously in Odessa, which Smolenskin’s narrator calls Ashadot (Waterfalls). David earns a living by teaching Hebrew, as many maskilim did. The narrative unfolds in the relationship between David and his friend Shimon, another Hebrew teacher, who scolds him about his “sinful life.” When David protests these accusations, Shimon admonishes his friend, “You still ask me what sin you committed! You are hanging out with lighthearted people who indulge in gluttony, who spend their days in cafés, in places of eating and drinking, with laughter and debauchery all day long. Isn’t this a sin? To spend days and nights in folly and to waste the money you earn with the sweat of your brow; isn’t that an evil, foolishness, and a great sin?”13
Thus, the image of Odessa as “a city of sin” was bound up with cafés, as spaces of eating, drinking, and loitering that attracted Jewish men. This link between cafés and sin or folly in this period