A Rich Brew. Shachar M. Pinsker

      Figure 1.1. Postcard of Café Fanconi, Odessa

      Mr. Fanconi noted that nobody could accuse him of anti-Semitism and that he warmly welcomed everybody (“and their deep pockets,” adds Ravnitsky) with open arms. Ravnitsky’s report ends with the conclusion that the outcome of the affair was that most, if not all, of the Jewish habitués returned to their beloved Fanconi, but these events caused “our brothers to raise their self-evaluation as Jews.”43 Thus, we can see that Odessa’s prominent cafés were spaces of tensions and contested meanings. The highly visible attraction of Jews to Café Fanconi was so prominent that it made it appear as a modern “Jewish space.” Mr. Fanconi and his waiters might not have liked the marking of the café as Jewish, but they depended on it in order to continue to flourish. Moreover, we can see the economic tension between middle-class merchants and maskilim, as well as between Jews and non-Jews and even among the owner, the waiters, and the habitués.44

      These tensions and the fact that Jewish modernity in Odessa was inextricably bound to its cafés became evident to Ravnitsky’s friend, the young Sholem Aleichem (Sholem Rabinovich), who was soon to become one of the most beloved and influential Yiddish writers in the world. Sholem Aleichem came to Odessa from Kiev in 1891, after he lost all his father-in-law’s wealth in the stock exchange. He lived in Odessa for a number of years, trying to make a living by publishing in Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish. These years in Odessa were difficult financially for Sholem Aleichem but also very memorable and productive. Unlike some of the “Sages of Odessa” but like Adler, Goldfaden, Gordin, Ravnitsky, and Rabinovich, Sholem Aleichem enjoyed visiting Odessa cafés, eating, drinking, observing, and participating in the activity that took place there. In London: A Novel of the Small Bourse (1892),45 which is the first part of what evolved to become the epistolary novel The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl, Sholem Aleichem makes masterful comic use of the space of Café Fanconi. More than any text written before it, Sholem Aleichem’s novel situates Odessa’s cafés on the map of modern Jewish literary imagination.

      In the novel, the protagonist, Menakhem-Mendl, who arrives in Odessa from his tiny fictional shtetl Kasrilevka, is bewitched by the stock market and the currency-exchange market of Odessa, where he believes he has made a large amount of money quickly and without much effort. Menakhem-Mendl is equally allured by Café Fanconi, the location of the elusive “small bourse” in the novel’s subtitle, where business is done over a cup of coffee or tea. As he writes to his provincial wife, Sheyne-Sheyndl, whom he left behind in the shtetl, “If only you understood, my dearest, how business is done on a man’s word alone, you would know all there is to know about Odessa. A nod is as good as a signature. I walk down Greek Street, drop into a café, sit at a table, order tea or coffee, and wait for the brokers to come by. There’s no need for a contract or written agreement. Each broker carries a pad in which he writes, say, that I’ve bought two ‘shorts.’ I hand over the cash and that’s it—it’s a pleasure how easy it is!”46

      After a few days, Menakhem-Mendl boasts that he is so successful in Odessa that all the dealers already know him in Café Fanconi:

      By now they know me in every brokerage. I take my seat in Fanconi with all the dealers, pull up a chair at a marble table, and ask for a dish of iced cream. That’s our Odessa custom: you sit yourself down and a waiter in a frock coat asks you to ask for iced cream. Well, you can’t be a piker—and when you’re finished, you’re asked to ask for more. If you don’t, you’re out a table and in the street. That’s no place for dealing, especially when there’s an officer on the corner looking for loiterers. Not that our Jews don’t hang out there anyway. They tease him with their wisecracks and scatter to see what he’ll do. Just let him nab one! He latches on to him like a gemstone and it’s off to the cooler with one more Jew.47

      It is hard to mistake the target of Sholem Aleichem’s biting humor. The provincial Menakhem-Mendl, the quintessential luftmensh (man of the air), would soon lose all his money in the Odessa speculative market, as Sholem Aleichem himself did in Kiev and as the character of Khaim-Shulim did in Osip Rabinovich’s novel. But Menakhem-Mendl’s experience also captures something essential about the Odessa café as a metonym for the contradictions of urban Jewish modernity.48 Sure, the café gives anyone, even Menakhem, access to a marble-top table and, along with it, to conversations about politics and culture and even to the business that presumably takes place by a mere nod. Moreover, all of this can be done while a waiter in a frock coat will serve you coffee and the best ice cream in the city. However, if you lack the money to order a few servings, you are out in the street, in danger of being picked up by a police officer ready to roust any Jew who might interfere with the life and the business of the café. Sholem Aleichem builds on Osip Rabinovich’s Khaim-Shulim and on Ravnitsky’s maskil in “the Fanconi affair,” but his comic genius goes deeper in penetrating into Odessa café life.

      We can see through Menakhem-Mendl’s letters to his wife that the modern business that takes place in the thirdspace of the café is different from the “old” and more tangible business. It is very much tied to smart conversations about politics and news, which Menakhem-Mendl can only partially follow. He tries to explain to his wife that her “doubts about the volatility of the market reveal a weak grasp of politics.” Menakhem-Mendl gets his “grasp of politics” in Café Fanconi by speaking to a habitué named Gambetta, “who talks politics day and night. He has a thousand proofs that war is coming. In fact, he can already hear the cannon booming. Not here, he says, but in France.”49 Thus, one can presumably sit in an Odessa café, where journalists and readers gather, read newspapers from all over the world, follow the news about the war in Paris and London, and speculate on currencies and stocks that are part of the new modes of capitalist economy. This economy is like the ephemeral “market” in the café that people like Menakhem-Mendl cannot really fathom, even if he desperately tries to.

      Menakhem-Mendl’s wife, Sheyne-Sheyndl, is as essential to the epistolary novel and to understanding Jewish café culture in Odessa as the male antihero is. In spite of the fact that she never leaves the shtetl of Kasrilevke, she is able to mount a critique of Café Fanconi and the conversations and business that go on there. About Gambetta, the source of knowledge about politics and market manipulation, she writes to her husband, “And as for your Gambetta (forgive me for saying so, but he’s stark, raving mad), I’d like to know what business of his or his grandmother’s it is. You can tell him to his face that I said so. What kind of wars is he dragging you into?”50 Sheyne-Sheyndl is also highly suspicious about the fact that her husband spends so much of his time at Café Fanconi, instead of doing some more traditional business or work. She also suspects his fidelity when she writes, presumably without even understanding what a café is or what its name is, “And by the way, Mendl, who is this Franconi you’re spending all