Nevertheless, the attraction of these places for many people was not just the indulgence in food and drink or even the sociability that cafés facilitated. Like Rabinovich, Smolenskin became a habitué of Odessa cafés when he lived in the city, and they were central to his literary and journalistic activities. In the historical novel Sipur bli giborim (A story without heroes, 1945), the Hebrew writer A. A. Kabak portrayed Odessa’s Jewry during the 1860s.15 Some of the activities in this novel take place in the Greek café owned by Mitri Chirstopulo on Bazarnaya Street, where “penniless Hebrew maskilim, teachers of the Bible and the holy tongue, are spending their free time, together with business clerks who come to bask in the light of the maskilim, young men who ran away from their wives, and others.” In the novel, Smolenskin visits this Greek café because “he likes to be in a place in which he is the center of attention.… They welcome him there, and everybody listens to his discourse and his jokes.”16 Moreover, the character Smolenskin knew everybody in the café, since many of them were Jewish migrants like him: “Almost all visitors hail from Lithuania and Poland, fleeing the darkness and poverty of the Jewish shtetls.… In their pockets, a few coins already shake.… They still think highly of themselves because they escaped the Yeshiva, and they come from time to time to the café to play chess and enjoy the fragrance of the maskilim.”17 Soon after, however, Smolenskin concludes that—in spite of his fondness for the place—in this café, “people bury large parts of their days and nights. If they had a real passion for life, they wouldn’t sit there.”18 As these writings illuminate, the thirdspace of the café was experienced by people who enjoyed its sociability and exchange of ideas, both as a place of production and idleness, a tension that became central in Odessa, as well as in other cities.
Reading these Russian and Hebrew texts, it becomes quite clear that by the 1850s and 1860s, cafés were an important and notable part of Odessa’s urban space, and migrant Jews—maskilim and businessmen—went there to meet each other for business, to play chess, to socialize, and to further their cultural endeavors. It is also evident that these cafés, and the Jewish presence in them, could be understood in two opposite ways: one that equated the cafés with the relative freedom and civility of Odessa’s Jews, and the other with idleness and the danger of sitting around and indulging oneself.
The Blessing and Curse of Odessa Cafés
This double image of Odessa and its cafés was intensified toward the end of the nineteenth century, as Odessa became the fourth-largest city in the Russian Empire and, perhaps more importantly, “an interface between Russia and the outside world.”19 Around that time, Odessa was blessed, or cursed, with many cafés. In 1894, the newspaper Proshloe Odessy reported about 55 cafés and teahouses, 127 bakeries, and 413 restaurants in the city.20 Only a few of these establishments became well known for their food and drink, for their visitors, and for the activity that took place within their walls. German and English guidebooks for tourists in the 1880s and 1890s mention the most established and popular cafés. There was the Italian Café Zambrini, which Anton Chekhov visited; the Swiss-owned Café Fanconi, opened in 1872; and the French-owned Robina (or Robinat) and the Jewish-owned Café Libman (or Liebmann), both opened in the 1880s. Odessa also had many café-chantants (literally “singing cafés”), a kind of cabaret where singers or musicians entertained the patrons and which dotted both the center and the outlying neighborhoods of Odessa.21
“By the end of the nineteenth century,” writes the historian Steven Zipperstein, “little was left … of [Odessa’s] Italians or French influences than a smattering of splendid, popular cafés—Café Fanconi was the best well-known.”22 Many of Odessa’s Jews were attracted to these new cafés, as can be attested by Giuseppe Modrich, an Italian visitor to 1880s Odessa. Modrich wrote that he enjoyed the drinks and a wide variety of newspapers at Café Fanconi but claimed that while Odessa’s Italians are moving to America, the Jewish merchants, who “have absorbed all commercial resources,” are dominating the café and the public spaces of Odessa more generally.23 What was the nature of Odessa cafés that attracted many Jews and non-Jews in the last decades of the nineteenth century? Gubar and Rozenboim write that the famous Swiss-owned Café Fanconi “existed from 1872 … until the last owner immigrated. At first, the café was a hangout for card sharks and shady businessmen, but gradually it became a kind of club for local and visiting writers, artists, actors, and athletes.”24 The memoirs, essays, stories, poems, and plays written by Jewish writers who lived in Odessa during this time show that Fanconi and similar cafés were places of consumption and entertainment that were mixed with business, politics, literature, art, and theater.
The mix of activities in Odessa cafés reflected the diversity of Odessa’s Jews. In 1897, the 138,935 Jews constituted over a third of the city’s total population. Most of the Jews who lived in Odessa at end of the nineteenth century were migrants, from middle-class merchants to poor Jews, who were living and working as small artisans and middlemen in neighborhoods and suburbs such as the Moldavanka. The number of Jewish intellectuals, writers, and thinkers who made Odessa their home was small, but their presence made the city a major center of Jewish high-minded culture, with politics, literature, journalism, and theater. As we have seen, Odessa was an important center of Haskalah and bourgeoning Jewish press and literature since the 1860s, but toward the end of the nineteenth century, an extraordinary group of Jewish writers and intellectuals made their home in the city. The person who emerged in this period as the most important Yiddish and Hebrew writer in the Jewish world, Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh, who wrote under the name Mendele Mokher-Sforim, settled in the city in 1881, when he was invited to direct a new modern school founded by the Jewish community of Odessa. Around the same time, Odessa became the center of Jewish nationalism and proto-Zionism in the Russian Empire. Leon Pinsker, the author of Auto-Emancipation, was active in the city as the head of the Odessa Committee of Hovevy Zion (Lovers of Zion) until 1891. He was joined by the thinker Aḥad Ha‘am (Asher Ginsburg), the historian Simon Dubnow, the poet Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik, and the writers Moshe Leib Lilienblum, Elḥanan Leib Lewinsky, Yehoshu‘a Ḥ. Ravnitsky, and others. These writers, intellectuals, and political figures formed a loose circle that became known as the “Sages of Odessa.”25 They wrote in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian and had followers far and wide.
Some of these “Sages of Odessa” who tried to foster a highbrow sense of Jewish culture and nationalism did not know how to respond to the mixture of consumption, leisure, business, conversation, and intellectual activity that was exhibited in Odessa cafés. Somewhat ironically, this ambivalent attitude can be seen best in a Hebrew feuilleton—that hybrid literary-journalistic form that originated in Paris and became associated with the café and with Jews—titled “ ‘Ir shel ḥaiym” (City of life, 1896), in which Elḥanan Leib Lewinsky reflects on various cultural spaces in Jewish Odessa.26 In his feuilleton, Lewinsky writes that he passed with sadness a building on Langeron Street, a bustling café that only a few years earlier had been a library. After a few years of absence from Odessa, Lewinsky asks the owner of the building why, in a “city full of men of enlightenment and readers of books,” the library could not attract more readers? The proprietor answers that Odessan Jews enjoy “boisterous activity, rich food, and harsh coffee” but not books. The Jews of Odessa, Lewinsky concludes, are happy to pay good money for “the sheer pleasure of having dirty water tossed in their faces.”27
It should be clear that Lewinsky’s feuilleton and his condemnation of Odessa’s Jews’ love of cafés and “harsh coffee” does not mean that he did not frequent some of these cafés himself. However, it is indicative of a certain attitude of Odessa’s Jewish “sages” who were reluctant to frequent these cafés. Reading through their memoirs and what other people wrote about them, it becomes evident that these “sages,” especially those of the older generation, preferred to meet behind closed doors, rather than in the café. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, there were a number of attempts to create Jewish literary and cultural clubs