A Rich Brew. Shachar M. Pinsker
retired Russian cavalry officers content to gamble with Jewish youths, the fat wives of theater owners, and thin cash-register girls. All these people are ultimately bound together by Odessa’s Café Paraskeva, one of the Greek cafés in the port that remained open in spite of wars and revolutions. Babel describes the “aroma” of Odessa as a strange one, which can be best noticed in the cafés and in Odessa’s newspapers and magazines such as the Divertissement (published 1907–1918). “In every issue of Divertissement,” writes Babel, “there are jokes about Odessa Jews, about Café Fanconi, about brokers taking dance classes and Jewesses riding trams.” Babel evokes the Odessan humor, which is tied to the cafés, to the local press, and to its sense of Jewishness. With a sly humor, Babel ends the sketch with the declaration, “Odessa stands strong; she hasn’t lost her astonishing knack for assimilating people.” As an example of this strength of Odessa, Babel tells us about “a proud, cunning Polish Jew” who comes to Odessa, and “before long we’ve turned him into a loud, gesticulating fellow who is as quick to flare up or calm down as the best of us.”96
In the story “The End of the Almshouse” (1932), Babel writes about the days of the famine during the period of the civil war, in a mixture of biting humor and compassion: “In the days of the famine, no one lived better in all Odessa than the almsfolk of the Second Jewish Cemetery. Kofman, the cloth merchant, had built an almshouse for old people by the wall of the cemetery in memory of his wife Isabella, a fact that became the butt of many a joke at Café Fanconi.”97 The joke at Café Fanconi is the foundation of the story, which focuses on a band of elderly poorhouse Jews working in a cemetery amid the general euphoria, confusion, poverty, and wretchedness of the years 1918–1920. The Jews of the almshouse, though, make a pretty good living renting out a single coffin, using it and reusing it for all the funerals.
Babel’s most famous Odessan character is the gangster Benya Krik, the self-proclaimed “king of Odessa.” Benya Krik was based on the real figure of Mishka Yaponchik (Moisey Volfovich Vinnitsky), who operated mostly in the Moldavanka and whom Babel knew well. As is evident from Babel’s play Sunset and the screenplay that Babel wrote for the Benya Krik silent film, the fictional Jewish gangster used to visit Café Fanconi on a regular basis. In Sunset, which takes place in Odessa before the revolution, the conversation in the Krik’s household is about Fanconi, which is “packed like a synagogue on Yom Kippur,” when everybody is “worrying like crazy. One fellow worries because his business is bad, the next worries because business is good for his neighbor.”98 With a typical Odessan speech, inflected with Yiddish, Benya Krik addressed his fellow city dwellers, speaking like Moses and complaining to God about the conditions of the Jews in Russia.99
Leonid Utesov, the Jewish musician from Odessa who invented and popularized “Russian jazz,” also knew Mishka Yaponchik, the Jewish gangster, and used to meet him at Café Fanconi. During the time of the civil war, artists from Petrograd, Moscow, Kiev, Kharkov, and other Russian cities came to Odessa because it was one of the few places in which they could still perform. Still, many actors went hungry. And so Utesov and other popular artists decided to help their colleagues by organizing a gala concert with proceeds going to the starving performers. However, ticket sales were sluggish because the public was afraid to walk through the city at night, when Yaponchik’s bandits were roaming. So in order for the concert to take place, Utesov met Yaponchik at Café Fanconi and asked him to “not touch anyone” the night of the gala, and “The King” agreed. The posters advertising the event had an unusual postscript: “Free movement through the city until 6 a.m.” Odessans apparently understood the implicit text, and the theater was full.100
By the 1920s, the period of the post-revolution New Economic Plan, Odessa’s fame and the stories about its cafés and Jewish gangsters were spread mostly by people who grew up in the city but had moved elsewhere. Most of the famous Odessan writers and artists of the Soviet period abandoned their beloved city for Moscow or Petrograd, which promised more opportunities, or to other cities around the world.101 In this period, one after another, the cafés closed their doors, and some of their owners emigrated from the city. Some cafés still operated, but they were converted into clubs for navy sailors or soldiers. Now, the city itself was declared “Old Odessa” and represented as “Odessa Mama.” “If you want to feel the soul of old Odessa, which is already dying,” a journalist declared in 1924, “visit its old cafés and ancient cemeteries.” Semyon Kirsanov wrote about the folk figure of the “Odessa Mama” who has been chased out of the cafés and trampled to death.102
In the interwar Soviet period, the most prominent “Odessan” writers and cultural figures—Isaac Babel, Leonid Utesov, Ilya Ilf, Evgeny Petrov, and Lev Slavin—who had experienced the heyday of café culture in Odessa, found ways to remember and commemorate that culture in their writings. They were happy to perpetuate the days of “Old Odessa” and write about the city and its cafés, but they also showed, explicitly or implicitly, the radical changes that were taking place. In Babel’s screenplay Benya Krik, rewritten for the silent film that was produced in 1927, Café Fanconi becomes a space identified with the anti-Bolsheviks: “businesswomen with large handbags” and “stockbrokers.” The café is also full of invalid veterans, “wounded war heroes” who are victims of “imperialist war.” Benya Krik, the Jewish gangster, now has some compassion for the soldiers. However, the real hero of Babel’s screenplay (and film) is not Benya but the baker Sobkov, who tries to convince the patrons in Café Fanconi to instigate a proletarian revolution. By the time the film was released in 1927, Fanconi had long been converted into a club for sailors of the Soviet navy, and Odessa’s collective past was under Soviet ideological control.
The Jewish gangster of the café of bygone days was still very much alive and well, revived in the character of Ostap Bender, the hero of the great satirical novel Zolotoy telyonok (The Golden Calf, 1931), written by the duo Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov. In this Soviet masterpiece, they describe Odessa as “Chernomorsk” (literally, “the Black Sea”) and Café Fanconi as “Café Florida,” which becomes, in the Soviet era, “City Diner No. 68.” Ilf and Petrov describe “a crowd of respectable-looking old men, babbling away in front of the covered porch of the City Diner No. 68.” These old men are “odd people, preposterous in this day and age. Nearly all of them wore white pique vests and straw boater hats. Some even sported panamas that had darkened with age. And, of course, they all have yellowed starched collars around their hairy chicken necks.”103 Like many other Odessan writers, poets, journalists, and musicians, Ilf and Petrov describe in their 1931 novel a space of absence, filled with the memory of what existed before: “This spot near Diner No. 68, formerly the fabled Florida Café, was the gathering place for the remnants of long-gone commercial Chernomorsk.” We are told that in the old days, “these people used to gather” in the café to meet each other and “to cut deals.” Now, they come to the same place, compelled by a “long-time habit, combined with a need to exercise their old tongues, that kept bringing them to this sunny street corner.… The legend of porto franco still shone its golden light on the sunny street corner near the Florida Café.”104
On the one hand, it is clear that Ilf and Petrov describe in their satiric novel a handful of antiquated and decrepit old-timers who linger lethargically in a place that does not exist anymore. On the other hand, these fictional characters express a genuine longing for an era of Odessa cafés that was still very much alive and well, albeit in their memories and their cultural imagination.
The longing for the cafés of bygone days was expressed, however, with the wit and humor with which the city was associated and with the literary and cultural imagination of so many former Jewish Odessans, a generation of many who were compelled or forced to leave the city and migrate to other cities. It was a generation of migrants who often tried to re-create the richness and vibrancy of Odessa cafés in the various cities to which they migrated, whether in the Soviet Union or elsewhere in Europe and beyond. Odessa’s cafés were part of an urban modernity that flourished between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was an essential part of the history and the myth of the city and of the network of diasporic modern Jewish culture. The fact that the poet Leon Feinberg and the painter Yefim Ladyzhensky (figure 1.3) remembered these cafés and made them part of their artistic representation of Odessa, even as late as the 1960s and 1970s, when