Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams

by King, Charles

  THERE IS NO REASON to notice the building on the downhill slope of Zhukovsky Street in the city center. It is overshadowed by the stoic grandeur of the nearby Philharmonic concert hall and dwarfed by the plane trees that arch over the length of Pushkin Street around the corner. But the blue-gray building, its foundations shifting and its plastered facade crumbling away behind a wrought-iron fence, was for a time the major symbol of one of the peculiarities of Jewish life in Odessa. Until it became the Rosa Luxemburg Workers’ Club under the Soviets and then a storage facility and archive during the Second World War, it was the principal synagogue of the group known as the maskilim.

  In the late 1820s the roughly four thousand Jews in Odessa accounted for a little less than 13 percent of the population.9 Over the next decade, the size and nature of the Jewish community underwent a profound change. Jewish immigrants began to flood into Odessa from other towns and cities in the Pale of Settlement. Business opportunities in the free port, along with the Russian government’s lax enforcement of residency restrictions, rendered Odessa a desirable destination for ambitious Jewish traders and merchants. These new arrivals brought new money and energy into the city, but they also carried with them a set of novel ideas: the beliefs, orientations, and cultural mores of the Haskalah, or the Jewish Enlightenment.

  The Haskalah movement was spawned by the life and work of Moses Mendelssohn, the famed eighteenth-century German Jewish intellectual. The core of Mendelssohn’s thought was that many of the traditional features of Jewish life—from rabbinical authority to social isolation—should be transformed in line with the values of reason, freedom, and progress. Mendelssohn and his followers did not reject all the features of Jewish culture; rather, they sought to modernize and cultivate only those that would enable Jews to become integrated citizens of enlightened polities. They promoted changes in dress, language, relations with non-Jews, and the range of professions through which Jews might find new avenues of achievement, such as agriculture.

  In practice, the Haskalah was reformist rather than rejectionist, and many of its outward manifestations were evident in the urban landscape of central and eastern Europe: synagogues that resembled Christian cathedrals, liturgical choirs that used the scales and harmonies of European classical music, and publishing houses that preferred German, Polish, or Russian to Yiddish. In the Pale of Settlement, Mendelssohn’s ideas took root after his death in 1786, but the values and practices of the Haskalah created rifts within the Pale’s existing Jewish communities. Jews were divided not only among a number of different strands of maskilim—the general term for the pious but progressive adherents of the Haskalah—but also among their common opponents: traditionalists, Hasidic Jews, and those who rejected the Haskalah in favor of even more radical assimilation to Russian culture.

  Maskilim had made their way to Odessa from other parts of the Pale throughout the first two decades of the nineteenth century, but the new wave of migration brought scores of foreign families, especially Jews from Brody and other parts of Galicia, to the seaport. Like Odessa, Brody was a free city, exempt from most commercial taxes, a status it had been granted when it came under Austrian control after the partition of Poland in 1772. It came to occupy a critical role in the trade between central Europe and the Russian Empire, an effective inland port that negotiated among the Austrian, Prussian, and Russian components of partitioned Poland. After the creation of Odessa, Brody found its natural sea-facing partner. In time, migrants followed the business connections that grew up between the two cities, moving permanently to Odessa and taking advantage of the boom in imports and exports.

  Greeks and Italians remained the mainstay of Odessa’s trading class, as they had been since the city’s founding, but by the 1830s Jews from Brody occupied a central role as middlemen, particularly in agricultural goods. They knew the local producers in the hinterland. They had good relations with drovers and carters. They had an extensive network of friends, relatives, and associates throughout central and eastern Europe, who in turn acted as financiers and wholesalers for the bales, bundles, and barrels that arrived quayside from the Mediterranean. Joachim Tarnopol, one of the city’s foremost Haskalah writers and thinkers, described the power wielded by the Brody immigrants: “The people from Brody are normally of an exemplary zeal and energy: they spare no honest measure in honorably making a living and meeting the needs of their families…. [T]heir relations with several notable financiers in Europe and their fairness in punctually meeting their obligations allow them to take in the full range of banking operations, and they [thus] render…a great utility to the commercial world.”10

  Jews from Brody and its surrounding region were known not only for their business acumen. They were also central proponents of the Haskalah. In short order, they set about the task of creating social institutions in Odessa that re-created and surpassed, in a southern climate, those they had known in Galicia. With the support of the city government, they established a private school teaching biblical subjects as well as Russian, mathematics, geography, and bookkeeping—a style of education ardently opposed by traditionalist Jews in the countryside. Later, they secured funds to build a small synagogue with worship conducted according to the “enlightened” styles already prevalent in central Europe. Permanent seating prevented jostling and overcrowding. Worshippers were enjoined not to speak during the service, prohibiting a practice among traditionalists that maskilim found primitive and chaotic. Old music was jettisoned in favor of innovative choral works composed by Nissan Blumenthal, the celebrated cantor who would remain in place until his death in 1903 at the age of ninety-eight. By the 1860s, congregants had raised sufficient funds to erect a second, more elaborate structure, a soaring building of Moorish design that became one of the most prominent public buildings in the city—today the tumble-down structure at the corner of Zhukovsky and Pushkin streets.11

  As Blumenthal’s four-part harmonies echoed through the synagogue on the Sabbath, the Brody maskilim could reflect confidently on their place in the city’s establishment. Like all Jews, they still faced a host of legal restrictions and social prejudice, even from relatively liberal administrators such as Vorontsov. But within the city’s Jewish community, maskilim had taken control of local affairs, heading the key committees and public bodies that governed Jewish communal life, literally from bris to burial. They had given to the city a distinctly progressive cast, and the reforms they pioneered were catching on throughout the empire. Odessa’s Jewish school became the model for wider, state-sponsored experiments in Jewish education. Blumenthal’s compositions floated from synagogue to synagogue—many are sung around the world today—while his choir school produced generations of singers and composers. The assertiveness and confidence of merchants, musicians, and religious leaders made the city’s growing Jewish community an object of respect and awe, even as it was routinely denigrated by Jewish traditionalists. In time the ways of the maskilim evolved even further. Assimilation to Russian language and culture supplanted the orientations of the first generation of Galician Jews, who had looked to pioneering German reformers for inspiration and instruction. The city was already on its way to becoming the great center of modernizing Judaism in the Russian Empire.

  “The fires of hell burn around Odessa,” went a saying popular among Yiddish-speaking villagers; in some versions, the flames were said to spread for seven miles beyond the city limits, in others for ten or more. But the distant glow was more of an enticement than a warning. Odessa became a place where mixing rather than enforced separation came to define Jewish life. On Saturday evenings, Nikolaevsky Boulevard was filled with Jewish families taking in the sea air, the men dressed in frockcoats and the women in the latest European fashions, before decamping to a café near the Hotel Richelieu.12 At the opera, Jewish patrons sat next to gentiles or crowded the standing-room area near the stage. A city lodged within the Pale of Settlement—a territory meant to restrict Jews’ ability to mix with gentiles—was becoming a crucible in which traditio
nalists and reformers, Jews and Christians, could occupy the same social space. “It is to foreigners,” one commercial report noted succinctly, including most of the city’s Jews in that category, “that the town owes its present flourishing condition.”13

  Odessa was New Russia’s answer to the shtetl—it was a place where Jews were socially integrated rather than isolated, “enlightened” rather than traditionally minded, and generally optimistic about their ability to convince the Russian state of their social utility. New ordinances provided for a greater Jewish voice in imperial institutions. New educational opportunities were emerging for Jewish youth. From time to time, the Russian state even restricted the wearing of Hasidic kaftans and other distinctive styles of dress, a move generally welcomed by the maskilim. As Joachim Tarnopol declared in his confident survey of Jewish life in Odessa in the 1850s, “[T]he flame of civilization…[has] dissipated the shadows of prejudice and has spread the light.”14 Yet over the next two decades, as Jews moved out of middlemen positions and into the very center of Odessa’s economic life, the openness, opportunity, and integration that had originally attracted the maskilim were put to the test.

  WHEN FOREIGN TRAVELERS ventured across the Eurasian steppe, it was difficult to know which was worse: bouncing along rutted roads in a hired wagon careering along at breakneck speed, or stopping in a fly-blown inn where a meal was little more than moldy bread and rough wine, and one’s bed a straw mat covered by a ragged blanket.

  It was all the more surprising, then, when travelers came across a small slice of Germany that had been transplanted to the windy flatlands. Small wooden houses were gathered in neat rows around a plain stone church. Doorposts were painted with simple but elegant flower motifs. Blooming flowerboxes decorated the street-facing windows. A visitor was greeted with a friendly but wary “Guten tag,” and if he asked for onward directions to another village or city, he should be sure to know its name in German rather than in Russian. “How agreeably was I surprised to see the advanced state of agriculture as we travelled southwards,” wrote the wife of a Russian officer not long after Odessa’s founding, “and to find this mighty empire, which, I own, judging from its vast extent, I supposed to be thinly peopled, covered with populous villages and waving corn [wheat].”15 Germans, especially members of the reclusive Mennonite Christian denomination, had been invited by Catherine the Great to set up farms across New Russia shortly after her acquisition of the territory from the Ottomans. Germans brought agricultural skills that were lacking in a frontier peopled mainly by nomads and Cossacks. In turn, they received land, exemption from military service, and ready outlets for their produce in the burgeoning Russian ports along the Black Sea.

  Odessa was founded by foreigners in Russian service, and that heritage reproduced itself generation after generation. Niche industries abounded. If you were a well-to-do merchant, your barber was likely to be an Armenian, your gardener a Bulgarian, your plasterer a Pole, your carriage driver a Russian, and your nurse-maid a Ukrainian.16 “There is nothing national about Odessa,” recalled one visitor disapprovingly.17 Some could describe it only by analogy—as a Russian Florence, a Russian Naples, a Russian Paris, a Russian Chicago, even a Russian Cincinnati.18 Others could do no better than give a litany of the exotic types you might encounter on the major boulevards, in the docklands, or at the bazaar: the Armenian in his astrakhan hat; the Greek in his blue breeches; the Albanian with fustanella and tall felt hat; the Turk in brimless fez; the Tatar in pink pelisse or enormous cape; the long-bearded Orthodox priest with his violet robes and gold-headed staff; the schoolboy in the severe uniform of the Richelieu Lycée; the Russian or Ukrainian woman in an embroidered cloth headdress; the peasant with his blue calico trousers stuffed into low boots; and the officers of a hundred naval and civilian ranks, brocaded, beribboned, and festooned.19 Arriving after a fifty-hour steam journey from Constantinople in the summer of 1851, the travel writer Edmund Spencer found a “semi-oriental” city rather than the Russian one he expected: “Strictly speaking, Odessa cannot be considered a Russian town with reference to its inhabitants, who are principally Germans, Italians, Greeks, Jews, Armenians, and a few French and English; and being a free port, merchants from every part of the world may be seen wandering about the streets in all the variegated costumes of Europe and Asia, which adds not a little to the gaiety and variety of the promenade.”20

  What many observers overlooked was the segmented unity of the city: the fact that despite its extreme diversity of habits, religion, dress, and profession, there was a growing sense of being Odessan. Indeed, to be a local, by birth or adoption, was to be an outsider in whatever particular sense one wanted to define it: a progressive Jew as opposed to a traditionalist; a German farmer on the far-flung Eurasian steppe rather than the floodplains of northern Europe; a free-holding peasant, working one’s own land rather than toiling exclusively for a distant noble landlord; a Greek or Italian, clinging to the same seacoasts once visited by ancient Aegean seamen and medieval Genoese merchants. Over time, the balance of power among all these groups changed. But there was a golden thread that bound Odessa’s quiltlike population together, and it was the product that, more than any other, enabled the great boom in Odessa’s economy at mid-century. From the 1830s through the 1860s, the grain trade made the city the busiest and most vibrant port in the Russian Empire and transformed the lives of its many diverse communities.

  “WHEN GRAIN is in demand, things go well.”21 That was the simple equation once proposed by the duc de Richelieu, and it might have been Odessa’s motto for much of the nineteenth century. Until the 1860s, Odessa was the breadbasket for much of the Western world, feeding a hungry European and, increasingly, global market. Foreign consuls sent breathless dispatches to European capitals about fluctuations in the prices of wheat and barley. Foreign ministers contemplated the effects of diplomatic squabbles on the supply of foodstuffs. Only with the discovery of oil farther to the east, in the Russian Caucasus and the Caspian seaport of Baku, was Odessa’s chief cash export exceeded by that of a rival Russian city.

  Odessa’s commercial success lay in its position at the intersection of flatlands and seascape, where the produce of the former could be sent to markets across the latter. But a series of fortunate accidents allowed the city to enhance this natural gift. Talented administrators such as Vorontsov argued for maintaining the free-port status, which was a considerable inducement to foreign and local entrepreneurs. Improvements in the harbor allowed larger ships to enter and lie safely at anchor. The fall-off in plague outbreaks around the Black Sea reduced much of the time that ships, goods, and passengers spent in quarantine. When the Peace of Adrianople was signed between the tsar and sultan in 1829, ending nearly a decade of diplomatic bickering, trade squabbles, and outright war, Russia had secured a historic set of concessions from the Ottomans, including an end to the Ottoman practice of boarding and searching Russian merchant ships. The period of relative peace that followed—from the late 1820s to the early 1850s—provided ease of shipping through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits.

  The economic results were immense. Grain exports from all the Russian Black Sea ports stood at a yearly average of under two million chetverts (a unit of Russian dry measurement equal to 5.77 U.S. bushels) before 1813, but by the 1860s that figure had risen to over sixteen million chetverts. Over half those exports were coming solely from Odessa.22 Between the 1830s and 1850s, the annual volume of grain exports to Italian ports more than doubled, while the French were importing ten times as much Odessa grain at the end of that period as at the beginning.23 After the late 1840s, the easing of restrictive import laws in England and the introduction of hardier wheat varieties in Russia opened new markets for Odessa’s produce, well beyond the traditional Mediterranean destinations. By the middle of the century, well over a thousand ships were leaving Odessa each year.24 The number of British ships sailing into the Black Sea increased sevenfold between the mid-1840s and the early 1850s, with Britain accounting fo
r a third or more of all destinations of vessels exiting the port.25 Wheat, barley, rye, and other grains filled the holds of long-haul sea vessels flying the flags of most major European powers.

  Oxen and wagons filled with sacks of wheat in the port of Odessa, from a nineteenth-century photograph. Author’s collection.

  Of all these goods, the queen was wheat. Ninety percent of Russian wheat exports flowed out of the empire’s Black Sea ports, and many of the sights, sounds, and smells of Odessa derived from its production and sale.26 Immense herds of cattle provided manure for fertilizer in the countryside and pulled the thousands of wooden carts that bore the harvested grain from field to storage centers. Chumak carters and drovers followed established routes that cut deep ruts across the steppe, converging from the far reaches of Bessarabia, Podolia, and other parts of the western empire. Once in the city, they could deposit their loads in any of hundreds of storage facilities, some of them empty, repurposed stone houses, others elaborate granaries, resplendent with pilasters and pediments, rising on the far side of the ravines that divided the city.27

  Some carters would return north with cloth, wine, or other imported goods offloaded from merchant vessels in the harbor, while others chose to transform their infrastructure into capital. The dried dung could be collected and sold as fuel to poor families, and the animals could then be given up to slaughter for meat and hides. The sweet smoke of burning, grass-rich manure mingled in the air with the reek of tallow vats and the sharp odor of tanneries, the factories that produced the bricks of processed fat and bundles of unworked leather destined for Turkey, Italy, or France.