of Hebraists, produced 60 percent of all Hebrew books published in Russia. However, the situation changed rapidly. Soon Jewish schools, synagogues, and other religious groups, including nearly all non-Bolshevik cultural institutions, were closed. The Evsektsiya (Jewish section of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) waged campaigns against persistent ritual customs such as circumcision, as well as against Hebraists. Almost all Hebrew and some Yiddish writers left Odessa in 1921, after Hebrew was declared a “reactionary” Zionist language in the Soviet Union. Many of them found new homes in Berlin, New York, and Tel Aviv.91
However, Jewish creativity in Russian and Yiddish did not come to a halt, nor did the world of the Jewish café culture disappear immediately. During these tumultuous years, an extraordinary group of Jewish Odessan writers and cultural figures who wrote in Russian appeared on the horizon. They became, for the first time, a dominant force in the Russian literary and cultural sphere. Many of these young Russian writers, Jews and gentiles, created the Kollektiv poetov (Poets’ collective), an informal club that met in the cafés, as well as in private apartments. Among its members were Lev Slavin, Eduard Bagritsky, Valentin Kataev, Yuri Olesha, Semyon Gekht, Ilya Ilf, and Evgeny Petrov. The young Isaac Babel, who was associated with the group, boldly declared in his 1916 sketch “Odessa” that “this town has the material conditions needed to nurture, say, a Maupassant talent.”92 Babel and his friends fulfilled the promise. The important Russian critic Victor Shklovsky called this group of writers “the Southwestern School” of Russian literature. Some of them were Jewish by birth and upbringing, and some were not; some lived in Odessa, and others left it for Moscow or St. Petersburg (renamed Petrograd). But they all absorbed a common Odessan atmosphere, which included strong Jewish undertones.93
The most prominent articulations of Odessa’s café culture during the chaos of war and revolution are found in the writings of Babel, who was doubtless Odessa’s most important Russian modernist writer. Babel was born in the Moldavanka in 1894, but soon after his birth, the family moved to the nearby town of Nikolayev. In 1905, they returned to live in the center of Odessa. Much of Babel’s writings, including the famous “Odessa Stories,” are based on his experience of the city between 1905 and 1915. Babel lovingly evoked the city and its cafés in an Odessan-Jewish style that constantly made use of Yiddish and Hebrew expressions and “types,” such as the luftmensh, the rabbi, and the good-hearted swindler.94 Babel wrote about the humor of Odessa that developed in the city’s cafés, as well as the characters he saw and met in them—from Benya Krik, the Jewish gangster, to middle-class merchants, aspiring writers, fashionable women, and such people as cross-dressers—who constantly traversed the social and cultural borders.
In 1918, Babel published in Petrograd’s newspaper two feuilletons with the title Listki ob Odesse (Odessa dispatches), in which he describes Odessa in the period of the 1917 revolution and civil war.95 In spite of the chaos of these years, and Babel’s living away from his city, his feuilletons manage to capture something of Odessa cafés in times of turbulence. In one of the sketches, Babel longs for the speedy revival of the city’s port and wishes to see its cafés filled with music again. In another feuilleton, Babel takes his readers, without much of an introduction, directly into an unnamed café, where he introduces S., a “female impersonator,” who sits alongside 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
