One of the film’s musical numbers, “Dark Is the Night,” is sappy and sentimental, but it struck a chord with a Soviet populace reeling from the Axis invasion, the separation of families across front lines, and the years of privation and hardship that seemed to have no clear end. The film’s other hit, “Shalandy,” cemented Bernes’s place as a professional Odessan. The name refers to the Russian word for scows, the flat-bottomed boats used by Black Sea fishermen to haul their catch ashore. It was a lively nonsense ditty about a goodtime sailor, Kostya, and his pursuit of the fisherwoman Sonya. The song surely had the most unappealing first line in all of pop music: “The scows were full of grey mullet.” But you could really swing a glass of beer to the chorus: “I can’t say much about all of Odessa, / ’Cause Odessa is very great, / But in Moldavanka and Peresyp, / They adore Kostya the sailor.” This was all supreme silliness, of course, but it was Odessa’s silliness, and in a time of awfulness and privation, it could make a person smile or even cry—Odessa’s own version of “Yankee Doodle” or “Waltzing Matilda.” It is still the closest thing the city has to a national anthem.
Almost immediately upon its release, Two Warriors was a smash with audiences across the Soviet Union—in marked contrast to the way Battleship Potemkin had sunk when it opened in theaters twenty years earlier. Dzyubin became the archetypical Soviet soldier, the kind who fought unsparingly for the homeland but also pined sweetly for his beloved. The role won Bernes the Order of the Red Star from the Soviet government. Fan letters told of the film’s impact on individual lives. “Thank you from a happy viewer,” wrote one of his female admirers nearly two decades after the film’s premiere. “When I saw Two Warriors, I decided that Arkady Dzyubin was the only kind of husband for me. I found my future husband when he was demobilized, some eighteen years ago. We went out for a while, then got married. Life is great, and we have two children. Overall I’m the happiest woman in the world. Way to go, Mark Bernes!”14
One evening after the film’s initial release, Bernes appeared on stage at a cultural club in the city of Kuibyshev, on the Volga River, to talk about the role of Arkady. He reminisced about his early childhood in Ukraine but mentioned in passing that he had never set foot in Odessa.
“You’re wrong!” shouted someone from the back of the hall.
“It seems someone disagrees with me,” said Bernes. “But it’s strange that someone should think he knows more than I do about this, since I was the one who created the role. Maybe he would like to explain what exactly he means?”
A young army officer stepped forward, trussed up in a new full-dress uniform.
“It’s me!” he said imploringly. “But I’ll explain a bit later.”
After the evening’s program had finished, the officer appeared backstage and said that he was a native Odessan. He was so excited after seeing Two Warriors that he had told his young wife and in-laws that he and Bernes had been childhood friends, lolling on the beach and chasing stray cats in Moldavanka. He had been able to keep up the ruse until Bernes made his unfortunate admission onstage.15
Bernes went on to become one of the great purveyors of music known in Russian as shanson—a mix of torch-song longing, the false romanticism of criminality, and minor-key Slavic melancholy. When he died in 1969, it was as if a bit of the city had passed as well. As one of his biographers claimed, he had captured the essence of Odessa itself: “a light humor; irony combined with a tender, almost sentimental soulfulness; and an openness and simplicity that were reflected in an outward sharpness of judgment.”16
Bernes was one of several Soviet pop stars who made being Odessan into a profitable profession. Some of them were actually from the city. The Falstaffian and expansive Leonid Utesov—Jewish and Odessan by birth, and one of the fathers of Soviet jazz in the 1930s—managed to survive both Stalinism and the war. He gave concerts on the eastern front and bucked up war-weary audiences with his own versions of “Shalandy” and other hits. He went on to become a central figure in the postwar expansion of the myth of “Old Odessa” across the Soviet Union, including the legend that jazz had been originally fashioned in the crucible of Odessa’s gangster haunts, klezmer bands, and sailor pubs. “Odessa has a lot to it,” he wrote in his conversational and saccharine autobiography.
But more than anything there’s music.
They sing from morning to night.
Take the courtyard of our building, for instance.
A summer morning. The gentle Odessa sun. The wind is a tonic. If you drink it, you’re tasting the gifts of the earth, and they go down pretty smooth. Those gifts work their magic on you, too. Of a morning, each courtyard is a bazaar. A musical bazaar.
“Meeee-loooons, meeee-loooons by the slice!” intones the heart-rending bass….
A hysterical tenor joins the aria. Then the baritones weave themselves into the duet.
“Froooo-zeeeen iiiic-eeees!”
“Knife sharpening! I fix razors!”…
So it’s no wonder that I’ve loved music since childhood.17
Utesov’s orchestra—like his prose—had the power to transport audiences to a warmer, cheerier place, but one where reveling in being rough around the edges and thumbing your nose at authority were the standard. His contemporary, the writer Konstantin Paustovsky, waxed lyrical about his own childhood in the city and, through his short stories and autobiographical tales, introduced a new generation of postwar Soviets to the universe of multiethnic cheats and witty men on the make. It was if nothing at all had happened between Babel’s day and the postwar era. The First World War, Stalinism, bombardment and occupation, and the draining of Odessa’s Jewishness all disappeared behind the veil of romanticized memory and selective forgetting. The hero city again became the home of likable and rebellious antiheroes.
Utesov’s music and his cheeky memoirs, published in the 1960s and 1970s, were wildly popular with Soviet listeners and readers. Like those of Paustovsky, they re-created a world that no one could actually remember, but they were all the more powerful because of it. Whatever had been lost in the first half of the century could now be recalled in new, more interesting, and golden-hued forms in the second half. From the mid-1960s until the mid-1980s, at least a dozen major-release Soviet films were either set in “Old Odessa”—the era of the First World War through the 1920s—or featured a character with Odessa origins. Isaac Babel’s Odessa Tales were republished in this period for the first time since the 1930s, as were Ilf and Petrov’s novels featuring the exploits of the scheming Ostap Bender, some of which had five million copies in print by the end of the 1970s.18
Like the myth of the hero city itself, none of what Paustovsky wrote or Bernes and Utesov performed was completely untrue. But from the 1950s onward, it became part of a growing industry in literature, film, the popular press, and tourism: the substitution of memory and nostalgia for history and remembrance. In the age of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, you might arrive by train, bus, or ship on a subsidized holiday from your office or factory job, with accommodation in any of the resort hotels located along the Black Sea coast. You could take in the Odessa steps and the Pushkin monument at the end of Primorsky Boulevard (the renamed promenade known as Nikolaevsky Boulevard in the tsarist era), and if you were part of an official delegation, you could lay a wreath at the monument to the unknown sailor in Shevchenko Park. A bus ride could take you to an entrance to the catacombs, located in a nearby village and marked by a socialist-realist statue of underground fighters in sweaters and flat caps, submachine guns at the ready.
During the concert season, the Opera and the Philharmonic, which had taken up residence in the grand and Moorish commercial exchange, were packed with Soviet citizens being reminded that here, in the Soviet south, high culture and the beach could come together in ways that the capitalist West could never imagine. “Tourism is one of the best forms of relaxation,” noted a typical Soviet brochure on the city. “Travel along tourist routes always enriches man’s mind, helps him to become more deeply acquai
nted with the Motherland of yesterday and today, and provides a major aesthetic delight…. That is why from year to year in our country an army of tourists continues to expand.”19 The army could be seen each evening at sunset, ambling disheveled and sunburned up and down the slight incline of Deribasovskaya Street.
Fresh fruits and vegetables could be purchased a short distance away in the Privoz market all year long, something unheard of in other Soviet cities. Giant flea markets flourished in Moldavanka, even at times when such unofficial commerce was frowned upon by the Soviet state. But the visitor’s experience in the city was a carefully managed one. Crime remained a problem. If you were a Soviet tourist, you knew that you could be mugged or stabbed even in the city center, a relative rarity in other urban areas. If you happened to stop by a local library, you would not find many books on the city’s Jewish heritage, since zealous librarians would have removed most of them for fear that they were actually Zionist tracts at odds with the message of Soviet universalism.20 The city’s wavering relationship to its Jewish identity remained even after few Jews were left to argue the case.
The roots of Odessa’s brand of nostalgia lay in the nineteenth century; the sense that the best of times had already passed was a feature of its artistic and cultural life already in Count Vorontsov’s day. But “Odessa-Mama”—the appealing and warm mother-city that Soviet crooners and writers extolled—now became a surrogate for the knotty realities that had defined the city in the first half of the twentieth century. The Soviet version of Odessan patriotism covered a darker and more recent past: the inescapable fact that the Jewish heritage celebrated mainly in code—in countless stories, novels, plays, films, joke books, concerts, musicals, and other ribaldries—had been actively erased in the living memory of those who now sought to re-create it.
TODAY THE EPICENTER of tourist Odessa is still Deribasovskaya Street. Its hipster cafés, Ukrainian restaurants, ice cream vendors, and street artists share space with the shock troops of globalization: an Irish pub, a McDonald’s, and—that universal marker of twenty-first-century cosmopolitanism—a band of Andeans with panpipes. It has been transformed from its cleaner and more restrained Soviet-era version, but even then Deribasovskaya was a destination, the place to which you repaired when you had had enough of the beach and the obligatory stops at the sites of sacred patriotic memory.
Some of the excitement and tumult of postwar tourism can still be felt just off Deribasovskaya in the City Park, a small and manicured green space shaded by some of the most beautiful and stately trees in town. The park was laid out not long after the city’s founding. It anchors the vibrant street life in the old center as it has done for more than two centuries. In the warmer months, wedding parties promenade there. A brass band gives concerts in the gazebo. Young people ogle and flirt on the benches. But there are two attractions that are post-Soviet in vintage.
One is an empty chair, the other a statue of a round man seated on a small bench. Both, in their way, are monuments to the power of dreams and invention. The former recalls Ostap Bender, the fictional swindler of Ilf and Petrov’s novels The Twelve Chairs and The Golden Calf, a literary character immortalized as typically Odessan: a person of Oriental cunning and larger-than-life ambitions, whose picaresque exploits involved the search for a set of dining chairs thought to contain a magnificent treasure. The latter is the jazzman Leonid Utesov, his arms outstretched toward any visitor who wants to sit down for a rest or a snapshot.
Although both monuments were erected only after the Soviet Union collapsed, they shine from the people who have clambered over them or patted their bronze surfaces for good luck. The Bender and Utesov monuments are among the few places in Odessa—perhaps in all of Ukraine—where visitors habitually stand in polite and orderly queues, lining up to capture a picture that will link them with two of the city’s most famous native sons. But in the short space between the two, between a wholly invented life and an energetically embellished one, lies the past of the real Odessa—a city that, like Utesov’s klezmer-infused music, remains largely improvisational, shifting wildly between the solo and the communal and always threatening to slip out of control.
CHAPTER 12
Twilight
Odessa in Brooklyn: Russian veterans of the Second World War, many wearing their medals, march along Coney Island Avenue in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, in commemoration of Soviet victory day, May 2009. Photo by Todd Maisel/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images.
On the Brighton Express from the Atlantic Avenue station, I sat down beside an elderly man with a veined and bulbous nose, a small Pekingese dog standing primly on his lap.
“Is this the train to Sheepshead Bay?” he asked in Russian—“Shipskhit Bey”—as the brick mid-rises and small frame houses of outer Brooklyn sped by. I told him it was and that I would let him know when we were getting close to his station.
“Ah, you speak Russian,” he said. “I could see that you were a Russian.” He waved his open hand in circles in front of his face. “Not like them.” He crinkled his nose and flicked his wrist toward three lanky Caribbean men, in sunglasses and dreadlocks, who had been talking loudly in the seats opposite.
The man said he had emigrated from Odessa ten years ago but never really needed to learn English in his new home. He had started out just down the subway line in Brighton Beach, where it was easy to thrive in a Russian-only environment, but had moved some time ago.
When we reached his stop, he waddled slowly, dog in tow, toward the opening subway doors. He said people were more “aristocratic” in his new neighborhood. The old one now had too many people like them, he whispered, still in Russian, tilting his head toward the Caribbean men across the aisle.
One stop down the tracks, though, and Brighton Beach seemed to be full of people like him.
On the boardwalk, elderly neighbors, pink-skinned already on a hot day in spring, sat in silence on wooden benches, the men with their shirts open and legs splayed, the women with their eyes closed and faces turned to the sky. Floppy beach hats and plastic nose shades discouraged the April sun. A cool breeze swept occasionally across the flat, damp sands, blowing eastward from the towers and roller coaster humps of Coney Island. A Russian shop sign advertised “Morozhennoye na lyuboi vkus,” rendered below in liberal and pregnant translation as “The Tasteful Ice Cream in Town.”
“In Odessa you can smell Europe,” Pushkin once wrote. In Brighton Beach, you can smell Odessa. It hits you as soon as you step down from the elevated train platform onto the avenue: the fishy sea air, a whiff of old cooking oil, the sweetness of overripe fruit, dark traces of motor oil and axle grease, the tang of dill and parsley, the alcoholic sting of cheap perfume, and the assertive revival of vintage sweat, all braided like a garland of garlic, silent as to source or cause. Odessa’s oddities and incongruities are there too. A Starbucks sits uneasily between the Detsky Mir toy store and the Tel Aviv Fish Market. A parade of granny carts trundles beneath the overhead trains.
Tourist T-shirts now market Brighton Beach as “Little Odessa by the Sea,” but that would have seemed bizarre to the neighborhood’s founder. William A. Engeman knew a good deal when he saw it. A wealthy railway man and arms dealer who had profited by selling weapons to both sides during the American Civil War, Engeman arranged in 1868 for the purchase of several hundred acres of ocean-front property near the village of Gravesend in Brooklyn. The area had already begun to develop shortly after the war, when New Yorkers, seeking a respite from the grime and gloom of Manhattan, were drawn to the unspoiled beaches lying at Brooklyn’s southern tip.
Engeman was slow off the mark, however. Coney Island and Manhattan Beach were already developing as major destinations. Sandwiched between the two, Engeman’s project had little hope of overtaking the more established resorts. He needed a gimmick, and he ended up with several. In addition to a pier, hotels, and eventually a boardwalk, Engeman built entertainment venues: a music hall, a pavilion, a theater billed as “the handsomest seaside theatre in
the world” located at the end of the quarter-mile pier, and, through his connections to Tammany Hall, a racetrack. Engeman’s genius was not to compete directly with his neighboring developments, which always offered bigger headliners. His strategy was to provide affordable entertainers just glitzy enough to draw a crowd. As the destination became more and more popular, Engeman staged a public contest to name the development. The winning entry was “Brighton Beach,” after the famous resort town on the southern coast of England.
By the time of Engeman’s death in 1897, people were arriving in droves—but not exactly from the source that the old developer would have expected. Engeman had intended Brighton Beach to be a more family-friendly environment than its rival Coney Island: an entertainment venue open to middle-class New Yorkers but free of the riffraff that had caused other parts of coastal Brooklyn to acquire seedy reputations. For Engeman, this meant informally excluding Jews, among other undesirables. But over the next century, whenever the neighborhood looked in peril of decline, with dropping house values and a sliding population, a new wave of Jewish migrants always rescued it just in time.
Jews from the Lower East Side had already begun to make their way to Brighton Beach at the turn of the century, seeking an alternative to the cramped quarters of Delancey Street. Boarding houses and bungalows sprouted along the neighborhood’s three major avenues, butting up against each other in the small but airy fifteen blocks that defined its boundaries. A greater influx of Jewish immigrants arrived following the 1903–1905 pogroms in the Russian Empire, especially those fleeing Odessa and the borderlands of Ukraine. By 1918 the old Brighton Beach Music Hall, which had featured some of the greatest performers in vaudeville, had become a theater specializing in Yiddish-language plays, the first summer Yiddish theater in the United States. The renowned Odessan actor Jacob Adler performed there, as did the tragedienne Jennie Goldstein, the leading man David Kessler, and scores of other performers, such as the twenty Jewish chorus girls who shared the stage of the old music hall, and the composer and pit conductor Joseph Rumshinsky, billed as the “Irving Berlin of the Yiddish stage.”1
Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams Page 24
