However, Odessa cafés were important for many other, mostly younger Jewish writers and intellectuals, as well as for the development of Jewish theater in the city. The modern Yiddish theater was born in Romania in the middle of the 1870s and was consolidated in Odessa in the late 1870s and 1880s, before migrating and spreading to Warsaw, London, New York, and other cities around the world. As in the case of Jewish journalism and literature, in the realm of theater, Odessa cafés were part of a cultural network of Jewish creativity in transit. Avrom Goldfaden, the leading pioneer of Yiddish theater, settled in Odessa in 1878, after some years spent in Romania, and established a theater troupe that met, rehearsed, and sometimes performed in Odessa’s cafés and taverns. The Yiddish actor Jacob (Yankl) Adler was born in 1855 to a family of migrants to Odessa and began his acting career in the city. The playwright and director Jacob Gordin also began his journalistic and literary activities in Odessa in the 1880s, before he moved to New York City and its cafés. In 1882, the Yiddish popular writer and dramatist Nokhem Meyer Shaykevitch, known as Shomer, opened a Yiddish theater in Odessa in partnership with Goldfaden. Peretz Hirshbein, who arrived in Odessa in 1908, established his own art theater troupe there. Although all these playwrights, directors, and actors migrated elsewhere—mostly to New York City—because of frequent tsarist bans on Yiddish productions, Odessa was crucial for the growth and maturity of the Yiddish theater.30
In Odessa, local café-chantants staged Yiddish plays, and both cafés and taverns influenced the creation and diffusion of music that was closely related to these theatrical performances.31 Jacob Adler wrote about his stormy youth in Odessa and how he roamed between cafés, taverns, and the Russian city theater.32 When he returned from serving as a solider in the Russian army during the 1877 war with Turkey, he started to work as a journalist at the Russian newspaper Odesski vestnik (Odessa messenger), but he spent the evenings at café-chantants and wine cellars, as well as in Café Fanconi, where he met with other actors and began his theatrical career.33 Adler soon became more involved in the theater, and his acting friends met at Café Fanconi, as well as in the Jewish-owned Akiva’s café on Rivnoya Street, where theatrical rehearsals and performances also took place.34 When Avrom Goldfaden came to Odessa the following year, there was much excitement at Café Fanconi, where “everybody already gathered, all talking about Goldfaden and the sensation his arrival made.”35 Eventually, Adler acted with Goldfaden’s troupe in Odessa and other cities in the Russian Empire, before he migrated to London and to New York City.
The role of Odessa cafés as part of a growing network of Jewish culture can also be seen in the activities of Jacob Gordin, the most important Yiddish playwright of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Gordin was born in Mirgorod, a small town in Ukraine, and traveled far and wide in the Russian Empire. He lived in Odessa and, like Adler, published essays in Russian, in the local liberal newspaper Odesski vestnik.36 In the 1880s, Gordin frequented Odessa cafés and knew them very well. Although he started writing Yiddish plays only after his migration to New York City, many of his plays depict Odessa and are infused with Odessa’s society. A case in point is Gordin play’s Saffo (Sappho), produced in New York in 1900.37 The entire play takes place in Odessa and is based on Gordin’s familiarity with the city and its social and cultural life.
The main figure of the play is Sofia Fingerhut—dubbed “The Jewish Sappho”—a figure of a “New (Jewish) Woman,” who works in an office to support herself. At the beginning of the play, Sofia is about to get married to Boris, a modern Jewish photographer. Matias Fingerhut, the father of the bride-to-be, is torn between his happiness about the marriage and his fear of the new values that his daughter and Boris share. Mr. Fingerhut declares to his daughter and wife that he is “going to treat himself to tea in the terrace of Café Paris—perhaps the French-owned Café Robina—so everybody will know what sort of man [he] is.”38 In this case, Matias, a migrant to Odessa and a merchant, is clearly torn between his notion of masculinity, Jewishness, and middle-class respectability and his daughter’s newfound independence. Soon after, Sofia finds out that Boris really loves her sister, Lisa, and refuses to marry her, in spite of the fact that she has a baby with him. In act 2 of the play, which takes place a few years later, Sofia continues to live and work as a single woman. Boris and his friend Samuel Tseiner discuss match-making in Café Fanconi, and Mr. Fingerhut also visits the café, where he receives much information about the relationships between his daughters and the men in their lives. He finds out that a young Jewish pianist, with the nickname Apolon, fell in love with Sofia/Sappho, but she resisted him. The play ends with Sofia moving out of Odessa with her little daughter.
Although Gordin wrote the play for an American Jewish audience in New York, where it was very successful, it was clear to viewers that modern Russian Jewish figures (Boris, Sofia, and Apolon) were likely to be found in Odessa. These young Jews, as well as their merchant father, could flaunt their modernity in Cafés Fanconi and Paris. But Gordin’s play also highlighted an important gender element of Odessa’s cafés. Sofia, the modern Jewish woman, only hears about what is going on in the cafés but never participates in their social life. Throughout the nineteenth century, Odessa cafés were developed as homosocial, masculine spaces, where “respectable” women were not to be seen. Thus, Sofia’s relative independence as a working, single woman could not be sustained in Odessa’s cafés.
Gordin’s play is a good example of the importance of Odessa cafés in modern Jewish life, but it also highlights the conflicts and tensions around gender and around the changing contours of what it meant to be “Jewish” in the modern urban environment of Odessa. Indeed, during the final decades of the nineteenth century, Odessa cafés were very popular, but they were also spaces of various conflicts and tensions, not just between traditional and more modern Jews but also between men and women, businesspeople and intellectuals, Jews and gentiles. The vigorous Jewish presence in these cafés attracted much attention, for better or worse. After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, when there were waves of anti-Jewish violence in the Russian Empire (even in Odessa), the reaction to the Jewish presence in cafés was sometimes marked with anti-Semitism, real or perceived, as well.39 On August 10, 1887, Ha-melits reported about a story published in Novorossiysk telegraph, a regional Odessa newspaper that was known as instigating Judeophobia:
The Jewish community of Odessa decreed a boycott on the tavern of Mr. Fanconi and made it forbidden to all Jews to step inside the house, because he printed in the journal a letter and cursed the Jews who made it a communal space. On both sides of the coffeehouse Jews stood up and announced this boycott; they took note of anyone who did not obey them and entered the café. Mr. Fanconi is very happy with this boycott because now the huge crowd of Jews, who used to do business there, stopped visiting; instead many Christians continued to frequent it, to drink and eat there to their heart’s content.40
Less than two weeks after the report, in the same Hebrew newspaper, Ravnitsky, who used the pseudonym Bar-Katsin, wrote a story in order to better explain what happened and to further report on the latest outcome of this affair in Café Fanconi. Ravnitsky wrote,
For the sake of the readers who are far from Odessa, I would like to explain the meaning of this event, which became a topic of conversation for everybody in our city. Fanconi is not a tavern but the largest café and pastry shop in the city of Odessa. This is the meeting place of many not-so-small merchants, the elite of Odessa who do not care much about money. The establishment, which stands proudly in the center of the business district, became a meeting place of every respectable merchant. And when one merchant looks for another, he knows that he would find him in Fanconi and converse with him over a cup of coffee and sweet pastries. It is easily noticeable that almost all the habitués of the café are our Jewish brothers.… In the checkbook of every Jew in our town … you would find a nice sum that was