that Café Robina became Odessa’s most fashionable haunt, a main hub of middle-class social life. Among its denizens were some of the city’s most high-profile personalities: politicians, financiers, high-ranking officers, distinguished professionals, and “stars” from the world of entertainment, as well as many journalists and writers, who no doubt made the place more famous and desirable by writing about it. Part of the reason for Café Robina’s popularity was that it served so many purposes. Businessmen and politicians came there to work, negotiating deals or conducting meetings over coffee and sweets. Others came in search of work, hoping to strike up profitable acquaintances with successful entrepreneurs, exporters, merchants, or brokers. Many others, including women, came simply to relax, enjoy the company of friends, and catch up on the news of the day.
Odessa’s middle-class women were a growing public presence on the streets of the city. They were known to “take tea” in the “ladies’ sections”—it is unclear whether these sections were completely segregated or were created more ad hoc with certain tables of the café—that presumably existed in Café Fanconi, Café Robina, and other Odessa cafés. But there was much male anxiety about the growing phenomenon of the modern, independent women sitting in cafés. An Odesski listok piece titled “Ladies Chatter” tried to give readers some insight into what these women do in the café and the content of their half-Russian, half-French conversation: “Yesterday evening we intended to go to the Café Robina.… We got in the carriage and arrived—where do you think—at Ditman’s! … Imaginez vous! … I, of course, was astounded.”83 It was not only the presence of “unrefined” women in the cafés that worried the journalists and writers. Journalists also reported on the fact that Café Robina charged astronomical prices for their food and drink in spite of not-so-perfect sanitary conditions. Odessa’s journalists mounted a critique of the visitors, especially young people who were drawn to the Robina’s “fairy-tale atmosphere.” The columnist Faust declared that when “a bashful youth” wanted to “fix a meeting with a girl,” he would exclaim, “To Robina!” When a “proper” lady wanted to talk with a “proper” gentleman, she would whisper, “To Robina!”84
Figure 1.2. Postcard of Café Robina, early twentieth century
The journalists in Odessa’s local press began to speak about a type: the Robinist, the habitué of Café Robina. The most typical Robinist was presumably a young man, son of the middle class, well bred and well educated, who should have been the pride of polite society but was its nemesis. According to journalists, Robinisti were always immaculately dressed, giving every appearance of gentility, but in fact were devious, cynical men. The journalist Satana pointedly unmasked the young men as social frauds: “Look at them. They have chic visiting cards, collars brilliant and elegant, ties that are something delicious. All signs stamp them as higher gentlemen. But if you probe one, you will find a rogue, a thorough rogue.”85
Eliezer Steinman, a modernist Hebrew writer who lived in Odessa during much of the 1910s, before he moved to Warsaw’s and Tel Aviv’s cafés, gets at the gender and socioeconomic hierarchies in Odessa’s cafés, as well as their implicit middle-class respectability and Jewishness, in his novel Esther Ḥayot (1922).86 At the center of the novel is Esther, a young, married, Jewish woman from a small town in the Pale of Settlement. Locked in an unhappy married life, she decides one day to leave her home and family and to follow her younger sister, Hanna (Anna Avramova in Russian), to Odessa. In the big city, Esther lives in a room of a hotel and meets various men, who show interest in Esther or in her sister. One of them is the young Russian Adolf Grigorovich, “a native Odessit and the loyal, loving son of the city.”87
Adolf takes Esther and her sister Hanna for a walk in the boulevards of Odessa, and in no time, they arrive at Café Fanconi. Seen through the eyes of the poor migrant Esther, from whom the author keeps an ironic distance, the café, as the city itself, is a complex thirdspace of appearances and mirrors that needs to be deciphered: “When the doormen opened the doors of the café, it seemed to Esther for a moment that the doors of new life had opened.” Esther recognizes that “all the smiles, politeness and gentility were, of course, a matter of transaction, and yet the sham was not too jarring to her heart,” for “in the café the deceit was elevated here to the level of truth.” Unused to café life, for Esther, “the mundane is transformed and elevated into a holy day.” This passage highlights the considerable currency of bourgeois appearance in Odessa and its cafés. Fashionable clothing, traveling in a carriage, shopping at an expensive boutique, and going out to a chic café were part and parcel of the city’s “respectable” lifestyle. And yet, as Esther notices, the café was also a place of social transactions: “Surely there was some order here, but the hierarchies were fluid. Each person here was a guest but also owner. Everything was different.”88 As a Jewish woman in Odessa, Esther learns that in the mirror house of the café, the social order can be, to some degree, suspended, though it is unlikely to be completely upended.
The second part of the novel, in which the two sisters, Hanna and Esther, wander through the streets of Odessa, suggests how the fluidity of social order in the café may enable, at least on the imaginary level, an indeterminacy of gender identities and hierarchies. The sisters, having become wary of the men they know, imagine themselves to be “Cavalier” and “Dame”: “Let’s walk around Deribasovskaya Blvd. without any men; leave them alone. Later we’ll walk to Café Fanconi and catch a table. I will smoke a cigarette … and invite ‘the dame of my heart,’ feed her with pastry and chocolate … just like a man.” As female flâneuses, the two sisters, who imagine themselves as a couple, make their way to Café Fanconi, drink hot chocolate, and read the newspapers, which are full of sensational stories about strange events and adventures in Odessa. But when they leave the café, the potential narrative energy of their imaginative release is immediately restituted when they meet a new man, a medical student, who invites them to his “regular table” in the more fashionable and more “exclusive” Café Robina.89
On the one hand, Steinman seems to articulate a critique—very common in the journalistic and literary writings of Odessa in this period—of the “ladies’ chatter” that ridicules their attempts to appear “cultured.” On the other hand, the femininity and the provincial Jewishness of Esther and her sister, which the narrator never lets the protagonists or the readers forget, also act as a double-edged sword. If the café is chiefly a masculine, bourgeois domain, to which urban men can chivalrously invite their “ladies,” it also enables the two sisters to enact a performance of gender that exposes its social conventions. The space of the café becomes, by the 1910s, a site in which the identity of the “New Jewish Woman” is enacted and examined. It is a mirror that reflects and sometime distorts her social, personal, and gender identity, her passions and desires, which are both real and imaginary, public and private.
World War I, Sovietization, and the Cafés of “Good Old Odessa”
When World War I was declared in 1914, Odessa was far away from the major battlefields. There was an attempt by the Ottoman Empire, which joined forces with Germany, to attack Odessa’s port, but it was not successful. During the war, the city lay near the geographical intersection of the Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian Empires, and business was continually interrupted; but the city itself was unperturbed. Ya’akov Fichman, a Hebrew poet who lived in Odessa during the first years of the 1900s, came back to the city in 1915 and observed that Odessa during the Great War was “calmer and quieter than the day it was established”: “The deserted port seemed as if it stretched to the eastern horizon.… The city itself was full of life. The cafés were full of people.… The War years—I am afraid to say—were the most carefree years in our life.”90
Even amid the war and during the 1917 revolution and the civil war that erupted in Russia, Odessa did not experience the widespread violence that convulsed much of Ukraine and the Russian Empire more generally. However, the city passed back and forth nine times between Russian “Whites,” Ukrainian nationalists, the French, and the Communists. Soviet
