us to see the role of Odessa in Jewish modernity in eastern Europe. Through the lens of the café, we can better understand Odessa as an anchor in the silk road of transnational modern Jewish culture in a time of far-reaching urban migration, a period of transition from traditional forms of Jewish cultural expression to modern, secular ones.
Compared with other European cities of distinction and culture, nineteenth-century Odessa was very young. Established in 1794 by the empress Catherine the Great on land conquered from the Ottoman Empire on the site of the Black Sea fortress town of Khadzhibei, Odessa received its name—after an ancient Greek settlement called Odessos—the following year. Catherine sent notices throughout Europe offering migrants land, tax exemptions, and religious freedom. In addition to a nucleus of Russian officials, Polish landlords, and Ukrainians, many non-Slavs responded to her call. Within a few decades, a new city emerged, energetic and quite different from any other in the Russian Empire. With handsome streets laid out by Italian and French architects, a harbor sending shiploads of grain to every Mediterranean port, and the leadership of a series of tolerant and economically progressive administrators, some of whom were foreign-born, Odessa’s economic foundations were established alongside its cultural ones. Thanks to its status until 1859 as a porto franco—a free port, exempt from taxes—it attracted wealthy foreign merchants and exporters. Within a few decades, it became a sizable city and soon commanded an international reputation as the preeminent Russian grain-exporting center. Thus, from its beginning until the city became known as the capital of Novorossiya, the empire’s “wild south,” Odessa was multinational, multilingual, and multiethnic. It attracted migrants of all types and creeds, with substantial numbers of Greeks, Turks, Italians, Armenians, Tatars, and Poles as well as some French, Swiss, and English.3
The city also attracted numerous Jewish migrants. Odessa was at the southern end of the Pale of Settlement, the area of the Russian Empire to which Jews were confined. This meant that Jews could settle there with few restrictions. Many Jews, both from Galicia, especially the city of Brody, and from small towns throughout the Russian Empire, made their way to the city in search of a better life. In fact, Jews were the fastest growing population in the city; they quickly adapted to the entrepreneurial business spirit of Odessa and became prominent players in internal Russian commerce to and from the city.4 In Odessa, Jews did not have to “assimilate” to a single set of customs but to an urban way of life created by different groups and ethnicities, including the Jews.5 Politically and culturally, toward the middle of the nineteenth century, Odessa became a center of Jewish life and attracted many maskilim: proponents of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment that began to take hold in eastern European cities and towns. In the 1860s, Odessa was the empire’s center for the publication of multilingual Jewish periodicals. Rassvet, Sion, and Den appeared in Russian-language editions between 1860 and 1871, as did Ha-melits in Hebrew and Kol mevaser in Yiddish in the same period. By the late 1860s, major Jewish book publishers opened branches in Odessa, promoting, among other publications, books of the Haskalah movement. People such as the writer and editor Aleksander Zederbaum and Yitskhok Yoyel Linetski, a popular Yiddish writer, made their way to Odessa and found there ample opportunities to write and publish.6
The result was a palpable sense of Jewish freedom in the Russian Empire, although a freedom represented in highly ambivalent ways in the popular and literary imagination. People hoped to “live like God in Odessa,” as one Yiddish dictum declares, but it was also imagined as the place where “the fires of hell burn for seven miles around it,” because it was understood as a city of sin, vice, and temptations. This double image of Odessa soon became an essential component of the mythography of the city. The city was experienced both as a cosmopolitan place of enlightenment and culture and as El Dorado, a place in which one might get rich but that was also full of corruption and sin. Midway through the nineteenth century, these conflicting images of Odessa were crystallized around a number of urban cafés. Coffeehouses were not commonplace in the cities and towns of the Russian Empire. Odessa was different. People in Odessa liked calling their city “Little Paris”; the city was often compared to others in Europe and America but rarely to Moscow or other Russian cities. As Oleg Gubar and Alexander Rozenboim write in their survey of daily life in Odessa, one of the similarities between Odessa and Paris was “the presence of cafés, colorful and festive, with graceful verandas or tables simply placed under … acacias on shady, picturesque streets.”7
Odessa’s first cafés, like those in other European cities, were Turkish, Greek, and Armenian, regions that were the chief importers of coffee to the city through the Black Sea from the Ottoman Empire.8 Alexander Pushkin, the great Russian poet of the nineteenth century, lived a short period of political exile in Odessa in 1823–1824 and visited these cafés. He immortalized the city in his verse novel Eugene Onegin, in which he wrote, “like a Muslim in his paradise, I drank coffee with Oriental grounds.”9 Later, cafés in Odessa were owned also by Italians, French, Swiss, Germans, and Jews, and their food and drinks, as well as their appearance and ambience, were influenced by all the different places from which the owners came. The warm weather of Odessa encouraged many of these places to be open to the tree-lined boulevards and streets, with verandas that let people enjoy the weather and the sea air and enabled cafés to be experienced as a thirdspace, located between the inside and the outside, the private and the public.
Jewish presence in these multiethnic cafés was first recorded in the mid-nineteenth century. The 1855 Robert Sears’s guide to the Russian Empire declared that “there is perhaps no town in the world in which so many different tongues may be heard as in the streets and coffeehouses of Odessa, the motley population consisting of Russians, Tartars, Greeks, Jews, Poles, Italians, Germans, French, etc.”10 Local Jews and Jewish travelers from other parts of the Russian Empire noted the confluence of Odessa cafés and Jewish culture in the 1860s. It was an age of relative tolerance in Russia and a time of growth and maturity for Odessa’s Jewish community, which constituted a sixth of the population of the city. In a published letter from November 2, 1861, Z., a traveler from Vilna (Vilnius, Lithuania), wrote about his experience in Odessa, which he called “the capital of Jews” in the Russian Empire. “In the days after I returned from Odessa, I hastened to relate to you,” he wrote to a friend, “the impressions I had.… I won’t tell you about the beauty, the princely life, the freedom and the wealth, which is already more or less familiar to all; I will tell only that I, at least, have never seen a comparable city.… But all this is of secondary importance for Jews, as there are many beautiful cities in the empire. I want to dwell only on the situation of our coreligionists there.” As an example of what he found so attractive and exceptional in Odessa, Z. gave the city cafés: “When I stopped by Café Richelieu,” Z. observed, “I saw that almost all of the customers were Jews, who argued, read, reasoned, and played; eventually I realized that this was something in the way of a Jewish club.” What caught his attention more than anything else was that in the cafés, Jews “felt absolutely at home.”11
The attraction of Jews to Odessa’s cafés and the sense of ease and being “at home” in them, without being watched and judged, was seen as a sign of freedom and progress to some and as a threat to others. This ambivalent attitude can be seen in memoirs, letters, and newspapers, as well as in fiction written by Jewish writers. The Russian-Jewish writer, journalist, and editor Osip Rabinovich came from the small town of Kobelyaki and studied at Kharkov University before becoming a notary in Odessa. Being a notary did not stop Rabinovich from visiting and enjoying Odessa’s cafés. He also became very interested in the world of journalism and Russian literature and began to publish feuilletons and stories in Odessa’s Russian newspapers. In 1860, Rabinovich established the first Russian-Jewish periodical in Odessa, Rassvet (Dawn). In a short story published in 1865, Rabinovich described a traditional character named Reb Khaim-Shulim, a watchmaker who has troubles supporting a large family in the city of Kishinev. When he wins a lottery ticket, his appetite for business and wealth grows. Lured by stories he had heard about Odessa and the possibilities of getting rich there, Khaim-Shulim sets out not only to retrieve his lottery winnings but to move to the city on the Black Sea. “I’m going to Odessa for the money,” he declares to his good friend Reb Khatskl (Yehezkel), but Khatskl warns Khaim-Shulim’s wife, Meni-Kroyna, just as her husband enters the room, that Odessa is a dangerous place, a city of sin:
