Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams

by King, Charles

  Odessa was not quite a blank slate at the end of the Second World War, but it was something close: a city denuded of a major ethnic and religious community and with much of the rest of its population hunkering in cellars or dispersed to outlying towns and villages. The city was still reeling from artillery hits, aerial bombing, partisan raids, and the ravaging of its Jewish core. Odessan evacuees could be found throughout the Soviet Union, some as far away as Uzbekistan. Barely 200,000 people remained in the city, perhaps a third of its prewar population. The buildings and infrastructure had been looted by the retreating Axis armies. The costumes and seats from the opera house were gone. The docklands and grain elevators were smoldering ruins. Even the trolley cars were now doing service in Romania.2

  Crime, which the Romanians had sought to control but never rooted out, returned in force. Former partisans became bandits, visiting on the restored Soviet authorities the same kind of raids they had inflicted on the Romanians. Theft and robbery were common, and the boldest of the criminals left messages to the Communist authorities scrawled on city walls. “The day is yours before seven o’clock,” declared one graffito, “but we own the night.”3 Petty violence ran parallel to the state’s reckoning with those who had aided and benefitted from the occupation. Alleged collaborators were identified by Soviet archivists and apparatchiks who pored over the careful records kept by the Romanian authorities. Those without the good sense to have left with the fleeing Romanians were arrested, imprisoned, or shot. Even having lived in Odessa during the war was cause for suspicion, on the assumption that survival entailed some sort of compromise with the fascists. A new but short-lived wave of denunciations swept over the city, with neighbors fingering people who had supposedly worked for or sympathized with the “Romano-German barbarians,” as the language of the time cast the ousted occupiers.

  At the same time, Soviet officials worked to uncover the fate of those who had fallen victim during the war. In a massive effort at documenting human and material losses, an “extraordinary state commission,” working throughout much of the formerly occupied territory of the Soviet Union, assembled data on victims. Based on sworn oral affidavits, the commission’s reports were often rendered in striking detail. The lists of killed and deported still provide some of the most fine-grained assessments of the war’s toll, particularly on Odessa’s Jews. From these postwar assessments, for example, we know that sixteen people were removed from 74–76 Pushkin Street at some point during the war, including members of families identified as the Leidermans, Likermans, Kotliars, Shvartsmans, Kogans, Figelmans, Ashkenazis, and Katzes, among others. At 9 Shchepnoy Lane, twenty-three people—from sixty-five-year-old Chaim Tsyperman to nine-year-old Lusya Kravets—were “sent away by the fascists,” in the language of the affidavits.4

  No doubt some of the people who gave testimony to the commission were those who had enabled the deportation of the Jews in the first place. The same mix of motives that underlay the wartime denunciations were probably at work in the postwar accounting of victimhood. Goodness, neighborliness, and regret were present, but so too was rational self-interest. An official document certifying the displacement of residents from a precise address could also serve as a certification of abandonment, a key bureaucratic tool for neighbors seeking additional living space. There was a surfeit of housing in Odessa immediately after the war, given the relatively small population during the occupation period. But in the rush for housing after 1945—as both Jewish and non-Jewish evacuees returned home—empty properties were at a premium.

  Sura Sturmak had been deported to the camp at Domanevka during the war. She ended up confined to an old farm where Jews were made to live in a repurposed pig shed. Her sisters, brother, and mother were killed; her husband, a Red Army soldier, was missing in action. When she returned to Odessa after the war, she found the family apartment occupied by ethnic Russians. But by assembling affidavits and other legal documents, she secured a court order that pitched out the squatters and restored the space to its former inhabitant.5 For Jewish survivors, being on the lists of those “sent away” was a critical official validation of their claim to former property, now occupied by acquisitive neighbors. The commission affidavits, drawn up on old scraps of paper and pages torn from printed books, are a telling archival bookend to the denunciation reports of a few years earlier. In 1941 to be listed as a Jew, with a precise address and with all one’s family members named and accounted for, was the first step toward deportation and perhaps death. For the survivors after 1945, not being on a similar list meant effectively losing one’s apartment and residency status. In both cases, a bureaucrat’s scrawl meant the difference between being a real Odessan and an illegitimate one.

  Jews would never again be a sizable ethnic group in the city. By the time of the 1959 Soviet census, they accounted for only 12 percent of the population in the Odessa region, which included the city itself and several small towns—an increase from the wartime era, to be sure, but only a fraction of the prewar figure. That percentage declined steadily as Jews migrated to other parts of the Soviet Union or left to build new lives abroad, and as ethnic Ukrainians and Russians took their place in the city center and the industrial suburbs. But just as local Odessans had worried about what would happen if the Romanian occupiers left and Jews were allowed to exact “revenge,” Soviet officials sought to limit the effects of Jewish return on the postwar city.

  Official antisemitism, in both subtle and overt varieties, was a common feature of postwar life, in the Soviet Union and other newly Communist states in eastern Europe. A group that had been viewed as crypto-Communists by the Romanians was now seen as unreliable, rootlessly cosmopolitan, and—especially after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948—crypto-nationalists. Jewish religiosity was a particular target. Immediately after the war, the Soviets launched a campaign to “liquidate the minyans”—the groups of ten men required for ritual prayer—that had emerged spontaneously after the withdrawal of Romanian and German troops. By the early 1950s, even synagogues that had been allowed to reopen after the war were once again closed, part of a spiraling frenzy of antisemitism throughout the Soviet Union shortly before Stalin’s death. In an attempt to separate Jewish religious practice from Jewish national aspirations, the ritual phrase “Next year in Jerusalem” was ordered removed from prayers recited on Yom Kippur and Passover.6

  Antisemitism in Odessa long predated the arrival of the Axis powers, and it was still there when the city came back into the Soviet fold. “The vermin have returned,” Saul Borovoi heard Odessans saying about the arrival of evacuated Jews after the war.7 The writer Emil Draitser came back to the city with his parents after the war and lived there throughout the postwar reconstruction. “All Jews are cowards,” he recalled his schoolmates jeering. “During the war, they hid in Tashkent.”8 For some Jews, part of the cruel taunt was true, and providentially so. The ships that left the packed quayside in the autumn of 1941 carried tens of thousands of Jewish Odessans toward safety in other parts of the Soviet Union, the beginning of what would become, throughout the rest of the twentieth century, a mass exodus of Jews to other Russian and Ukrainian cities as well as to Israel, the United States, and other foreign countries. Between 1968 and 1980 alone, more than twenty-four thousand Odessan Jews—a little under a quarter of the Jewish population—left the Soviet Union for good. More followed during the Gorbachev era and after.9

  The end of Jewish Odessa produced an Odessan diaspora that gave the city a new kind of life well beyond the harbor and Deribasovskaya. In time, Odessa became revered as the Soviet Union’s imaginary Mississippi Delta, a remarkable incubator for music and dreamy nostalgia, yet also a place whose creative power really became evident once people managed to escape it. The city already had its Mark Twain in Isaac Babel, a writer who grasped the distinctive speech, social mores, and colorful characters of an age whose passing few people actually regretted. What it lacked was its Robert Johnson or Muddy Waters—the musicians who provided the
soundtrack for a lost world. After the Second World War, Soviet officialdom and popular culture managed to do something that Babel, shot by his Stalinist captors nearly two years before the Romanians had marched into his hometown, could not have foreseen: to transform the old city into an object of schmaltzy and melodic longing.

  WHEN SERGEI EISENSTEIN sat down to compile his fragmentary and poetic memoirs, he wondered somberly about the fate of the hundreds of extras in Battleship Potemkin, the men and women he had sent racing up and down the Odessa steps with a few shouts through his megaphone. He could remember many of them, since he had always made a point of learning the names of as many people on set as possible. But the identity of the film’s most famous actor—the baby in the carriage that bounces down the bloody staircase—remained a mystery. “He would be twenty now,” Eisenstein wrote in 1946.

  Where is he—or she? I do not know whether it was a boy or a girl.

  What is he doing?

  Did he defend Odessa, as a young man?

  Or was she driven abroad into slavery?

  Does he now rejoice that Odessa is a liberated and resurrected town?

  Or is he lying in a mass grave, somewhere far away?10

  Any of those fates would have been possible, but the city had had enough of villains and victims. By the time the Red Army goose-stepped down Richelieu Street, with smiling faces and submachine guns strapped across worn tunics, a pantheon of heroes was already emerging in popular lore and Communist Party history-writing. There were NKVD agents such as the famed Molodtsov-Badayev gang who launched daring strikes from their hideouts in the catacombs during the defense of Odessa. The almond-eyed sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko chalked up more recorded kills than any other Soviet soldier. The boy-patriot Yakov Gordiyenko, a graduate of the school the Bolsheviks had built out of marble quarried from the defunct Preobrazhensky Cathedral, ferried secret messages to the Communist underground before being shot by the fascists in 1942.

  None of these stories was exactly untrue. Partisan units, outfitted and directed by Moscow, had disrupted the early months of the Romanian occupation. But the postwar tales of sacrifice and derring-do often exalted minor figures in Odessa’s wartime experience, marshaling bit players as evidence of the city’s valiant, if only belatedly successful, stand against fascism and foreign domination. In the rebuilt city, commemorative plaques and statues served as public surrogates for private and more complex memories. An apartment where partisans hatched their plans and a building from which Soviet commanders directed the countersiege became everyday monuments to Odessa’s misremembered heroism. These tales of sacrifice and achievement were put on display in a new Museum of the Defense of Odessa, which registered tens of thousands of visitors annually.11

  Odessa was one of the first four Soviet cities—along with Leningrad, Sevastopol, and Stalingrad—to be awarded the title Gorod-Geroi, or “hero city.” Leningrad held out against a withering German siege for nearly two and a half years. Sevastopol withstood nine months of heavy artillery barrages. Stalingrad was the anvil on which Germany’s war on the eastern front was eventually crushed. Odessa was an oddity in that illustrious group. Most of the population spent the war safely evacuated to the east. Much of the rest found ways of cooperating, either actively or grudgingly, with the Romanians. But Odessa was the only major Soviet center held captive by an invader other than Nazi Germany, and being a martyr, however ambiguous, conferred a special kind of status.

  In time the hero city came to outshine the real one. The Soviet narrative of resistance and valor signaled Odessa’s passing fully into the realm of nostalgia. The myth of its experience in the Second World War was now woven into a new set of characteristics that were thought to define it: amicable multiethnicity, good beaches, faux-Mediterranean jocularity, and a zest for life that was only vaguely Jewish. As a favorite and sun-drenched locale for workers’ holidays, Odessa was becoming famous again as precisely the frontier destination that Catherine had intended, an important attraction on the Soviet Union’s southern coast.

  The whole process of remaking Odessa had begun even before its liberation. Just as Gherman Pântea was overseeing the reconstruction of the Odessa opera house and Gheorghe Alexianu was finding the most efficient way of squeezing a profit out of Transnistria, the Soviets were making another Odessa movie. Two Warriors is a forgettable piece of wartime propaganda produced by the Tashkent Film Studios, home to filmmakers and actors evacuated from occupied parts of the Soviet Union. The picture is the Soviet equivalent of minor Hollywood films that were eventually eclipsed by those with some claim to greatness, the handful of Errol Flynn and John Wayne vehicles that added complex characters to the standard model-navy battle sequences and patriotic sermonizing.

  The film tells the story of Arkady Dzyubin and Sasha Svintsov, the two soldiers of the title, and their adventures during the siege of Leningrad. The comrades share the deep bond of frontline friendship, the kind that allows Dzyubin to rib Svintsov to the point of anger, but also the kind that pushes Svintsov to rush into danger—twice—to save his friend from certain death. Dzyubin is a wingman par excellence. When the tongue-tied Svintsov gives up on getting the girl, a charming blonde Leningrader with a winning smile, Dzyubin steps in to ghost-write the love letters that win her heart.

  Critics didn’t think much of the movie when it was released in 1943. The plot is shaky at best, and the musical numbers are pasted awkwardly into the script. But behind the front lines, Soviet movie-goers were soon humming the signature tunes and laughing at the antics of Dzyubin and Svintsov. It was exactly the kind of feel-good flick that the Soviet Union required at the time, even as its western reaches were under foreign control. According to the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, these weren’t just actors “but real, authentic people” going through the same traumas and everyday triumphs of their Soviet comrades.12

  No one who saw the film could have missed the basic message. Svintsov is from the Ural Mountains, the end point of European Russia and the place beyond which, in the middle of the war, millions of Soviet citizens had found refuge. Dzyubin was from Odessa, the Soviet Union’s southern paradise, which now lay beneath the fascist boot. The two men were from different places, but they were fighting for essentially the same thing: Svintsov to hold on to what the Soviet Union had managed to retain, Dzyubin to take back what the foreign invader had wrenched away. Beyond the patriotism, at the film’s core is the wish that many of the film’s viewers would have shared—the simple desire to be done with war and go home. For the next half century, if Soviet citizens were asked to name someone who represented the city of Odessa, they would probably have named Arkady Dzyubin. Plenty of Russians today, nostalgic for the films their parents and grandparents knew, would do the same. And in thinking of Dzyubin, they automatically thought of the actor who created him.

  Mark Bernes was perfect for the part. He had a wide and open face, with the first hints of the furrows of wisdom and middle age, a Soviet version of William Holden or Humphrey Bogart, yet with the smiling eyes and subdued humor of Spencer Tracy. But Bernes was not, nor ever claimed to be, an Odessan—at least until he played one in a film. He was born in September of 1911 in a small town near Chernigov, in north-central Ukraine, and grew up in the regional center of Kharkov. His family was probably of Jewish heritage—Bernes’s fans certainly assumed it—although Bernes himself preferred to speak of his roots as being in Ukraine rather than in any particular ethnic group. His father was a junk dealer and odd-jobs man. His mother was the real power in the household and managed to keep things together in tough times. Her ambition for her son was that he should become either an accountant or a violinist, but he disappointed on both fronts. He displayed an early attraction to the limelight, and even though he had no formal theatrical training, he seemed to relish the songs and folk poems that swirled around his native region. At age fifteen he saw his first theatrical production and fell in love with the stage. He took a job plastering theater notices around town and managed to secure a
place as an extra in several productions. That experience took him to Moscow, and by 1930 he had landed a position in the famed Korsh Theater.

  Bernes was still relatively unknown more than a decade later when he was cast in the film role of Dzyubin. He answered an open call for auditions, and after two weeks he was called back and given news that he had earned the part. Then began what he later called a real soldier’s life. To prepare for the role, he donned a regular uniform and lived on a soldier’s rations. He visited hospitals to listen to the dialect of Odessans and pick up its pronunciations and tones—the “g” that sounds like an “h” or the upward glide at the ends of sentences, usually accompanied by shrugged shoulders and pursed lips. But it was only when he got a bad haircut from an inexperienced barber—“teased-up in a characteristically Odessan way,” as he called it—that he felt he was finally prepared to inhabit the character.13

  Bernes had the ability to portray youthful Soviets in exactly the way they remembered themselves: struggling to build a young country and fight off an invader, but doing so with the good humor and comradeship they embraced as part of their national character. Bernes’s Odessan became a Soviet Everyman. Russians and Ukrainians found in him a jocular but courageous hero, motivated by love of country but eager for the war to end. For others, Dzyubin’s Jewish identity was unspoken but evident. “We know your kind, the Odessans,” an artilleryman in Two Warriors sneers at Dzyubin. What he really meant would have been clear to both Jewish and non-Jewish viewers. “What kind of Odessans do you mean?” Dzyubin replies, agitated and defensive. “The women and children bombed by the Germans?…Don’t mess with Odessa. There’s sorrow and blood there.” More than ever before, the qualities Odessans claimed as their own—cosmopolitanism, freedom, and resilience—were appropriated by the larger country of which they were a part. The city had once been a place of escape, exile, and adventure. Now, through the alchemy of cinema and wartime displacement, every Soviet citizen could imagine himself to be just a little bit Odessan.