A Rich Brew. Shachar M. Pinsker

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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 your time with? Is it a he or a she?”51

      Although the café habitués used to be all men, just around the time Sholem Aleichem wrote his comic novel, modern women began to access the café, which raised the suspicions of traditional wives like Sheyne-Sheyndl. It is also clear that she is correct about the demise of her husband’s business activities. Soon enough, Menakhem-Mendl starts to lose everything he gains and more. At this point, he confesses, “I tell you, my dearest wife, I’ve had my fill of Odessa and its market and its Fanconi and its petty thieves!”52 In Sholem Aleichem’s novel, Café Fanconi can indeed be a dangerous place if you do not know how to navigate your way in this thirdspace of urban modernity. Odessa cafés were clearly both a blessing and a curse to many Jews who migrated to the city and made their home there. While they were crucial to the development of Jewish business, politics, theater, music, press, and literature, they also exposed strong anti-Semitic sentiments, the challenges of modernity, and changing economic and class structures. The café was becoming a site of tense negotiation around consumption and politics, gender, and the widening economic gaps that were part and parcel of Odessa’s Jewish urban modernity.

      Revolution, Pogroms, and Politics in the “City of Life”

      At the beginning of the twentieth century, Odessa’s status as a center of modern Jewish literature and culture unparalleled in the Russian Empire was firmly established, as was its role as an anchor in a network of Jewish culture. This did not stop its reputation for being full of wealth and full of sin. The tensions that were visible after 1881 in Odessa cafés and elsewhere only intensified in these years, when the Russian Empire entered a deep recession. Odessa’s economy suffered a setback due to the decrease in demand for manufactured goods, a drop in the supply of grain available for export, and the drying up of credit. There were flaws in Odessa’s economic infrastructure, and conditions continued to deteriorate, especially following the outbreak of war between Russia and Japan in 1904. All these developments fused together with the political and economic unrest that swept the Russian Empire before the failed 1905 revolution against the tsarist regime; that unrest was especially high in Odessa, in spite of its relative distance from imperial centers and its reputation as a multiethnic, cosmopolitan “city of life.”53

      One of the defining moments of that aborted revolution took place in Odessa: the rebellion that erupted on the Russian battleship Potemkin on June 14, 1905, immortalized by Sergei Eisenstein’s film The Battleship Potemkin (1925). A few months after these dramatic events, Tsar Nicholas II issued the October Manifesto, promising political reforms. A large pogrom, a wave of anti-Jewish violence, erupted in Odessa on October 18–22, 1905, in which at least four hundred Jews and one hundred non-Jews were killed and approximately three hundred people, mostly Jews, were injured. Around 1905, a new generation of Russian Jews—some born in Odessa, others who had migrated to the city—came of age and found their place within the city’s cultural life. The October pogrom and several others that followed it thoroughly shaped members of this new generation but did not dim their engagement with the city. Most of them felt thoroughly at home in Russian language, literature, and culture, and they made good literary use of the unique Russian dialect of Odessa, which was tinged with Yiddish and Hebrew and with influences of many other languages spoken in Odessa. Odessa continued to attract young people from the Pale of Settlement who wanted to bask in the light of the “Sages of Odessa,” but many of Odessa’s new writers and cultural figures, as well as its merchants and lower-class workers, were born in the city and proudly considered themselves to be real Odessits. Odessa cafés continued to play an important role in the city and in Jewish culture in the tumultuous and occasionally violent years around the revolution. Much of the writing in and about the café reflected on the changes that took place in Odessa and the tensions that abounded around the aborted revolution and the pogroms.54

      The Jewish-Russian writer and journalist Vladimir Jabotinsky was born to an acculturated middle-class family in Odessa in the year 1880. The young Jabotinsky, who later became the leader of the Zionist Revisionist party in Palestine became the chief cultural correspondent for the prestigious Russian daily Odesskie novosti, writing many witty feuilletons. Jabotinsky used to sit in Odessa’s famous cafés, writing, observing, and gathering information about cultural events in the city, as well as in the simple Greek cafés near the port, which he especially liked. Years later, he wrote about the city in his semiautobiographical novel Pyatero (The Five, 1936).55 In the novel, Jabotinsky chronicles the lives of five children in the Milgrom family and their different orientations, choices, and fates. Many of the events in the novel take place in the center of Odessa, where “one could see the trading terraces” of the two most famous institutions, Café Fanconi and Café Robina, which were “noisy as the sea at a massif, filled to overflowing with seated customers, surrounded by those waiting to get in.”56

      The narrator’s view of these cafés as sites of “trading” captures well the mixture of business and pleasure, literature and culture, sociability and commodity, in the period before 1905. The changes that occurred in Odessa after the turbulent events of 1905 are also experienced and depicted through the cafés, which according to Jabotinsky suddenly emptied. In fact, for Jabotinsky and his narrator, after 1905, Odessa would never be the same city, and the years of the fin-de-siècle constituted the golden age of Odessa, its cafés, and its other public spaces. Jabotinsky describes in the novel a literary club that met in a building at the center of Odessa in 1903 as an ideal location for cultural mixture: “I think that most interesting of all was the peaceful brotherhood of peoples amongst us at the time. All the eight or ten tribes of old Odessa met in this club, and really it entered no one’s head, even silently to oneself, to notice who was who.”57

      Something of the way Jabotinsky experienced the cross-cultural pollination of the years before 1905

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