Moshe Leib Lilienblum, Elḥanan Leib Lewinsky, Yehoshu‘a Ḥ. Ravnitsky, and others. These writers, intellectuals, and political figures formed a loose circle that became known as the “Sages of Odessa.”25 They wrote in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian and had followers far and wide.
Some of these “Sages of Odessa” who tried to foster a highbrow sense of Jewish culture and nationalism did not know how to respond to the mixture of consumption, leisure, business, conversation, and intellectual activity that was exhibited in Odessa cafés. Somewhat ironically, this ambivalent attitude can be seen best in a Hebrew feuilleton—that hybrid literary-journalistic form that originated in Paris and became associated with the café and with Jews—titled “ ‘Ir shel ḥaiym” (City of life, 1896), in which Elḥanan Leib Lewinsky reflects on various cultural spaces in Jewish Odessa.26 In his feuilleton, Lewinsky writes that he passed with sadness a building on Langeron Street, a bustling café that only a few years earlier had been a library. After a few years of absence from Odessa, Lewinsky asks the owner of the building why, in a “city full of men of enlightenment and readers of books,” the library could not attract more readers? The proprietor answers that Odessan Jews enjoy “boisterous activity, rich food, and harsh coffee” but not books. The Jews of Odessa, Lewinsky concludes, are happy to pay good money for “the sheer pleasure of having dirty water tossed in their faces.”27
It should be clear that Lewinsky’s feuilleton and his condemnation of Odessa’s Jews’ love of cafés and “harsh coffee” does not mean that he did not frequent some of these cafés himself. However, it is indicative of a certain attitude of Odessa’s Jewish “sages” who were reluctant to frequent these cafés. Reading through their memoirs and what other people wrote about them, it becomes evident that these “sages,” especially those of the older generation, preferred to meet behind closed doors, rather than in the café. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, there were a number of attempts to create Jewish literary and cultural clubs such as Beseda (Conversation), but they were only partially successful.28 Some of the “Sages of Odessa” met in “salons” that took place, often on Friday evenings or Saturdays, behind closed doors in the private houses of Abramovitsh, Ahad Ha’am, and Dubnow.29 These “salons”—an institution that had flourished in Europe since the eighteenth century—were an alternative to the café. Instead of the thirdspace of the café, located between the private and the public, the inside and the outside, salons were open only to a small group of people who were familiar to each other, spoke essentially the same language, and had similar concerns. As we shall see, salons of one kind or another constituted competition for the café in almost every city in which modern Jewish culture was created.
However, Odessa cafés were important for many other, mostly younger Jewish writers and intellectuals, as well as for the development of Jewish theater in the city. The modern Yiddish theater was born in Romania in the middle of the 1870s and was consolidated in Odessa in the late 1870s and 1880s, before migrating and spreading to Warsaw, London, New York, and other cities around the world. As in the case of Jewish journalism and literature, in the realm of theater, Odessa cafés were part of a cultural network of Jewish creativity in transit. Avrom Goldfaden, the leading pioneer of Yiddish theater, settled in Odessa in 1878, after some years spent in Romania, and established a theater troupe that met, rehearsed, and sometimes performed in Odessa’s cafés and taverns. The Yiddish actor Jacob (Yankl) Adler was born in 1855 to a family of migrants to Odessa and began his acting career in the city. The playwright and director Jacob Gordin also began his journalistic and literary activities in Odessa in the 1880s, before he moved to New York City and its cafés. In 1882, the Yiddish popular writer and dramatist Nokhem Meyer Shaykevitch, known as Shomer, opened a Yiddish theater in Odessa in partnership with Goldfaden. Peretz Hirshbein, who arrived in Odessa in 1908, established his own art theater troupe there. Although all these playwrights, directors, and actors migrated elsewhere—mostly to New York City—because of frequent tsarist bans on Yiddish productions, Odessa was crucial for the growth and maturity of the Yiddish theater.30
In Odessa, local café-chantants staged Yiddish plays, and both cafés and taverns influenced the creation and diffusion of music that was closely related to these theatrical performances.31 Jacob Adler wrote about his stormy youth in Odessa and how he roamed between cafés, taverns, and the Russian city theater.32 When he returned from serving as a solider in the Russian army during the 1877 war with Turkey, he started to work as a journalist at the Russian newspaper Odesski vestnik (Odessa messenger), but he spent the evenings at café-chantants and wine cellars, as well as in Café Fanconi, where he met with other actors and began his theatrical career.33 Adler soon became more involved in the theater, and his acting friends met at Café Fanconi, as well as in the Jewish-owned Akiva’s café on Rivnoya Street, where theatrical rehearsals and performances also took place.34 When Avrom Goldfaden came to Odessa the following year, there was much excitement at Café Fanconi, where “everybody already gathered, all talking about Goldfaden and the sensation his arrival made.”35 Eventually, Adler acted with Goldfaden’s troupe in Odessa and other cities in the Russian Empire, before he migrated to London and to New York City.
The role of Odessa cafés as part of a growing network of Jewish culture can also be seen in the activities of Jacob Gordin, the most important Yiddish playwright of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Gordin was born in Mirgorod, a small town in Ukraine, and traveled far and wide in the Russian Empire. He lived in Odessa and, like Adler, published essays in Russian, in the local liberal newspaper Odesski vestnik.36 In the 1880s, Gordin frequented Odessa cafés and knew them very well. Although he started writing Yiddish plays only after his migration to New York City, many of his plays depict Odessa and are infused with Odessa’s society. A case in point is Gordin play’s Saffo (Sappho), produced in New York in 1900.37 The entire play takes place in Odessa and is based on Gordin’s familiarity with the city and its social and cultural life.
The main figure of the play is Sofia Fingerhut—dubbed “The Jewish Sappho”—a figure of a “New (Jewish) Woman,” who works in an office to support herself. At the beginning of the play, Sofia is about to get married to Boris, a modern Jewish photographer. Matias Fingerhut, the father of the bride-to-be, is torn between his happiness about the marriage and his fear of the new values that his daughter and Boris share. Mr. Fingerhut declares to his daughter and wife that he is “going to treat himself to tea in the terrace of Café Paris—perhaps the French-owned Café Robina—so everybody will know what sort of man [he] is.”38 In this case, Matias, a migrant to Odessa and a merchant, is clearly torn between his notion of masculinity, Jewishness, and middle-class respectability and his daughter’s newfound independence. Soon after, Sofia finds out that Boris really loves her sister, Lisa, and refuses to marry her, in spite of the fact that she has a baby with him. In act 2 of the play, which takes place a few years later, Sofia continues to live and work as a single woman. Boris and his friend Samuel Tseiner discuss match-making in Café Fanconi, and Mr. Fingerhut also visits the café, where he receives much information about the relationships between his daughters and the men in their lives. He finds out that a young Jewish pianist, with the nickname Apolon, fell in love with Sofia/Sappho, but she resisted him. The play ends with Sofia moving out of Odessa with her little daughter.
Although Gordin wrote the play for an American Jewish audience in New York, where it was very successful, it was clear to viewers that modern Russian Jewish figures (Boris, Sofia, and Apolon) were likely to be found in Odessa. These young Jews, as well as their merchant father, could flaunt their modernity in Cafés Fanconi and Paris. But Gordin’s play also highlighted an important gender element of Odessa’s cafés. Sofia, the modern Jewish woman, only hears about what is going on in the cafés but never participates in their social life. Throughout the nineteenth century, Odessa cafés were developed as homosocial, masculine spaces, where “respectable” women were not to be seen. Thus, Sofia’s relative independence as a working, single woman could not be sustained in Odessa’s cafés.
Gordin’s play is a good example of the importance of Odessa cafés in modern Jewish life, but it also highlights the conflicts and tensions around gender and around the changing contours of what it meant to be “Jewish” in the modern
