were also spaces of various conflicts and tensions, not just between traditional and more modern Jews but also between men and women, businesspeople and intellectuals, Jews and gentiles. The vigorous Jewish presence in these cafés attracted much attention, for better or worse. After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, when there were waves of anti-Jewish violence in the Russian Empire (even in Odessa), the reaction to the Jewish presence in cafés was sometimes marked with anti-Semitism, real or perceived, as well.39 On August 10, 1887, Ha-melits reported about a story published in Novorossiysk telegraph, a regional Odessa newspaper that was known as instigating Judeophobia:
The Jewish community of Odessa decreed a boycott on the tavern of Mr. Fanconi and made it forbidden to all Jews to step inside the house, because he printed in the journal a letter and cursed the Jews who made it a communal space. On both sides of the coffeehouse Jews stood up and announced this boycott; they took note of anyone who did not obey them and entered the café. Mr. Fanconi is very happy with this boycott because now the huge crowd of Jews, who used to do business there, stopped visiting; instead many Christians continued to frequent it, to drink and eat there to their heart’s content.40
Less than two weeks after the report, in the same Hebrew newspaper, Ravnitsky, who used the pseudonym Bar-Katsin, wrote a story in order to better explain what happened and to further report on the latest outcome of this affair in Café Fanconi. Ravnitsky wrote,
For the sake of the readers who are far from Odessa, I would like to explain the meaning of this event, which became a topic of conversation for everybody in our city. Fanconi is not a tavern but the largest café and pastry shop in the city of Odessa. This is the meeting place of many not-so-small merchants, the elite of Odessa who do not care much about money. The establishment, which stands proudly in the center of the business district, became a meeting place of every respectable merchant. And when one merchant looks for another, he knows that he would find him in Fanconi and converse with him over a cup of coffee and sweet pastries. It is easily noticeable that almost all the habitués of the café are our Jewish brothers.… In the checkbook of every Jew in our town … you would find a nice sum that was payable to Fanconi.… With the price one pays for a cup of coffee and light delicacies, a poor man with a wife and five children can live quite comfortably.41
In short, Ravnitsky contended, since the opening of the café, the relationship between the middle-class Jews of Odessa and Café Fanconi was beneficial to all. What instigated the Fanconi affair was a young and poor maskil, who used to frequent Fanconi without having enough money to pay. Somehow he always got by, with one person or another paying for him, until the waiters of the café had enough and decided to throw water on him in order to scare him off. This act created a strong backlash, with many of the Jewish habitués of the café scolding the waiters.
According to Ravnitsky, in response to all this, Mr. Fanconi himself wrote a letter to Novorossiysk telegraph, seeking to defend his workers and blame the Jews for “turning his café into a tavern, making noise, and creating mayhem.” The habitués decided to do the unthinkable, namely, to avoid Fanconi, and the café became almost completely empty, to the chagrin of Mr. Fanconi. Subsequently, he decided to publish a large announcement in the liberal newspaper Odesskie novosti (Odessa news) that, according to Ravnitsky, said the following: “The good relationship between Café Fanconi and the maskilim of our city over many years forces me to explain in print … that all the rumors about Jews refusing to visit the café are completely wrong, because most Jews, apart from a small minority, continue to frequent the coffeehouse. I ask all those who were insulted by the ugly act of the waiters or by misunderstanding our announcement in Novorossiysk telegraph to understand that I never meant to offend the Jewish people.”42
Figure 1.1. Postcard of Café Fanconi, Odessa
Mr. Fanconi noted that nobody could accuse him of anti-Semitism and that he warmly welcomed everybody (“and their deep pockets,” adds Ravnitsky) with open arms. Ravnitsky’s report ends with the conclusion that the outcome of the affair was that most, if not all, of the Jewish habitués returned to their beloved Fanconi, but these events caused “our brothers to raise their self-evaluation as Jews.”43 Thus, we can see that Odessa’s prominent cafés were spaces of tensions and contested meanings. The highly visible attraction of Jews to Café Fanconi was so prominent that it made it appear as a modern “Jewish space.” Mr. Fanconi and his waiters might not have liked the marking of the café as Jewish, but they depended on it in order to continue to flourish. Moreover, we can see the economic tension between middle-class merchants and maskilim, as well as between Jews and non-Jews and even among the owner, the waiters, and the habitués.44
These tensions and the fact that Jewish modernity in Odessa was inextricably bound to its cafés became evident to Ravnitsky’s friend, the young Sholem Aleichem (Sholem Rabinovich), who was soon to become one of the most beloved and influential Yiddish writers in the world. Sholem Aleichem came to Odessa from Kiev in 1891, after he lost all his father-in-law’s wealth in the stock exchange. He lived in Odessa for a number of years, trying to make a living by publishing in Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish. These years in Odessa were difficult financially for Sholem Aleichem but also very memorable and productive. Unlike some of the “Sages of Odessa” but like Adler, Goldfaden, Gordin, Ravnitsky, and Rabinovich, Sholem Aleichem enjoyed visiting Odessa cafés, eating, drinking, observing, and participating in the activity that took place there. In London: A Novel of the Small Bourse (1892),45 which is the first part of what evolved to become the epistolary novel The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl, Sholem Aleichem makes masterful comic use of the space of Café Fanconi. More than any text written before it, Sholem Aleichem’s novel situates Odessa’s cafés on the map of modern Jewish literary imagination.
In the novel, the protagonist, Menakhem-Mendl, who arrives in Odessa from his tiny fictional shtetl Kasrilevka, is bewitched by the stock market and the currency-exchange market of Odessa, where he believes he has made a large amount of money quickly and without much effort. Menakhem-Mendl is equally allured by Café Fanconi, the location of the elusive “small bourse” in the novel’s subtitle, where business is done over a cup of coffee or tea. As he writes to his provincial wife, Sheyne-Sheyndl, whom he left behind in the shtetl, “If only you understood, my dearest, how business is done on a man’s word alone, you would know all there is to know about Odessa. A nod is as good as a signature. I walk down Greek Street, drop into a café, sit at a table, order tea or coffee, and wait for the brokers to come by. There’s no need for a contract or written agreement. Each broker carries a pad in which he writes, say, that I’ve bought two ‘shorts.’ I hand over the cash and that’s it—it’s a pleasure how easy it is!”46
After a few days, Menakhem-Mendl boasts that he is so successful in Odessa that all the dealers already know him in Café Fanconi:
By now they know me in every brokerage. I take my seat in Fanconi with all the dealers, pull up a chair at a marble table, and ask for a dish of iced cream. That’s our Odessa custom: you sit yourself down and a waiter in a frock coat asks you to ask for iced cream. Well, you can’t be a piker—and when you’re finished, you’re asked to ask for more. If you don’t, you’re out a table and in the street. That’s no place for dealing, especially when there’s an officer on the corner looking for loiterers. Not that our Jews don’t hang out there anyway. They tease him with their wisecracks and scatter to see what he’ll do. Just let him nab one! He latches on to him like a gemstone and it’s off to the cooler with one more Jew.47
It is hard to mistake the target of Sholem Aleichem’s biting humor. The provincial Menakhem-Mendl, the quintessential luftmensh (man of the air), would soon lose all his money in the Odessa speculative market, as Sholem Aleichem himself did in Kiev and as the character of Khaim-Shulim did in Osip Rabinovich’s novel. But Menakhem-Mendl’s experience also captures something essential about the Odessa café as a metonym for the contradictions of urban Jewish modernity.48 Sure, the café gives anyone, even Menakhem, access to a
