Looking at the habitués of Café Fanconi, he realizes that he knows “every single one of them even blindfolded.” Then he sees a decorated army general sitting by the front table in the open veranda of the café, accompanied by an assistant, whom he is in the process of sending to his wife at home with an important message. When the general catches a glimpse of the narrator standing in front of him, the narrator asks him in his broken Russian, “Your Excellency, how would you like to buy a calendar?” The general actually buys one from him, apparently to get rid of him.70
The narrator, desperate to sell the last calendars in his stock, remembers Tolmachev’s home address and goes there, selling another calendar to his young, beautiful wife. After this success, the narrator hurries back to Café Fanconi in an attempt to get rid of the very last calendar. He sees what appears to him to be another army general, but then he realizes that he is “just one of the waiters from Café Fanconi, running with a napkin tucked under his arm and wiping the sweat from his face.” When the waiter tells the narrator that the general asks to see him again, he is sure that “his general” likes the Jewish calendar so much that he has sent the waiter to fetch him another one, and he begins to negotiate the price. The story then cuts off abruptly, but we know the end was not good: “We don’t dare show our faces on the streets selling a Yiddish or Hebrew book or a paper. We have to hide it inside our coats like contraband or stolen goods.… So I have to have a sideline business—‘interesting postcards from Paris.’ ”71 Sholem Aleichem’s satire is directed in this story toward the narrator, a simple Jew, a family man, who tries and fails to adjust to the new times. But the bitingly ironic story is multidirectional. It demonstrates that in the years before World War I, Odessa cafés were the sites of political and economic change and also of tense negotiations. The negotiations in the thirdspace of the café occurred between Jews and gentiles, unwanted migrants and the authorities, the poor and the rich. All of these elements represented different versions of Odessa’s cultural identity and of what it meant to be an Odessit in the café.
Middle-Class Respectability, Gender, and Jewish Gangsters
In Sholem Aleichem’s “Three Calendars,” the poor Jewish man who used to sell Jewish calendars around Café Fanconi turns into a dealer in smutty postcards from Paris; other Jews become swindlers and gangsters in and around Odessa cafés. According to Jarrod Tanny, the years before World War I were critical to the development of the Odessa mythography, as writers, journalists, and other myth makers depicted “the thieves and other deviant characters who shaped and were shaped by Odessa.”72 A good example of this mythography is the work of the Jewish-Russian writer Semyon Yushkevich and especially his three-volume novel Leon Drei (1908–1919). The main protagonist, Leon—whose last name derives from the Yiddish word dreyen: to spin or to swindle—likes to create an image of himself as a financially and romantically successful person. He is engaged to Bertha, and both of them think about opening a store. Leon is happy to deposit the dowry he received from his future father-in-law. As he leaves the bank, Leon contemplates, “It’s time to have a snack! I want to drink a shot of vodka and eat a sandwich with sardines.”73 But then, Leon changes his mind: “He felt that instead of vodka, he would happily drink a good, fragrant cup of coffee with cream, and he directed his steps toward the French Dupont Café. He chose Dupont because this café was considered to be the best in town. Many distinguished citizens gathered here: dealers, bankers, merchants, frivolous music stars, high-society ladies, cardsharpers, and other no less respected and respectable people. Leon had his day schedule planned when he entered the rotunda, where the habitués of the café sat at tiny marble tables.”74
This is a good example of how Odessa and its cafés became tied, together with the fictional Leon Drei, with swindlers who make appearances in cafés. In the popular and literary imagination, Odessa in the 1910s became a “city of rogues and gangsters,” and this depiction was linked to Jewishness and to Jewish culture and to café culture, implicitly or explicitly. As in Prohibition-era Chicago, crime was central to the city’s identity. William E. Curtis, a traveler from North America, wrote that Odessa was “one of the most immoral communities in Europe,” where the locals are “given to gambling and dissipation of all kinds.” He noted the many cafés in Odessa, where “all night the air is filled with music and laughter, and pleasure-seekers turn night into day,” and he wondered when the people in the cafés “attend to their business.”75
The American journalist Sydney Adamson, in his profile of Odessa in 1912, also perceived the cafés as an essential part of the cultural identity of the city and its citizens.76 He wrote that “everybody in Odessa goes, at some time or other, to Robina[’s], or to Fanconi[’s] across the way.” He noted especially the presence of “ladies,” which was a growing phenomenon in the cafés, and of men of “commercial and official monde.” His impression of Café Fanconi’s “comfortable atmosphere of tea and cakes” reminded him of “Parisian shops in the Place Vendome or Rue de la Paix” and “might even belong to Fifth Avenue” in New York City.77 Apparently, both gangsters and respectability could exist in Odessa cafés side by side in an elusive and potent harmony.
These impressions of Odessa’s famous cafés and their habitués and visitors raise the issue of what the historian Roshanna Sylvester has called “respectability,” which was of utmost importance to many journalists and others who attempted to safeguard Odessa’s reputation and its public space.78 Moreover, the comparisons of Odessa and its cafés to other cities, made by visitors and locals alike, seem to be part of an anxiety about Odessa’s identity and in particular the notion that Odessa was a pale imitation of other, more “authentic” and much larger urban centers. This anxiety can also be seen in a 1913 guide to the city, in which Grigory Moskvich, who composed a series of guides to cities in the Russian Empire, wrote that the dream of the “essential Odessit” was to “transform himself into an impeccable British gentleman or blue-blooded Viennese aristocrat.” Then, “immaculately dressed, with an expensive cigar in his teeth,” the Odessit was ready to meet his public. Whether “getting into a carriage or sitting down in one of the better cafés,” the Odessit was “out to impress by his appearance, aware of his own worth, looking down on everyone and everything below.”79
Not only Russian and American travelers to Odessa were worried about the issue of middle-class respectability and paid much attention to life in its urban cafés. Sylvester has analyzed how Odessa’s Russian newspapers, especially the progressive Odesski listok and the more lurid publication Odesskaia pochta, covered the city and its cafés in their feuilletons and stories. Many of the journalists who wrote in these papers were Jewish, and the dominant culture of the city was marked as Jewish because lower-middle-class Jews were “more responsible than any others for giving texture to the Odessan form of modernity.”80 One of the most prolific and popular journalists who covered Odessa’s urban scene was the Jewish Iakov Osipovich Sirkis, who used the pseudonym Faust. Faust wrote in Odesskaia pochta many feuilletons about the city’s social and cultural landscape and claimed that when Odessa infants start to talk, “the first word they pronounce is [Café] Robina! Especially clever ones utter the phrase, Robina and Fanconi!” he proclaimed. The father rejoices, Faust continued, “As I live and breathe, the baby will be a big merchant!”81
Another feuilletonist in the same paper, with the name Satana (Satan), expressed similar feelings about the importance of the city’s two most prominent cafés: “Every Odessan, regardless of social position, considers it necessary to go to the Robina or Fanconi at least once in their lives,” Satana declared, but especially to the Robina. “To live in Odessa and not go to the Robina is like being in Rome and not seeing the pope.” In a feuilleton penned by Leri, one of Odesski listok’s journalists, in June 1913, the journalist wrote about Odessa’s popular cafés: “It is always the way in Odessa. First, the tasteless smoke-filled mansions of Robina, Libman.… a cup of coffee, and business conversation; then, an assault and battery, breach of the public peace; then, the bleak chamber of the justice of the peace. And the next day small synopses printed in the newspapers. Such are our ways, a kind of Odessan fun-house mirror.”82
Café Robina, mentioned in so many of these feuilletons, was founded in the 1890s,
