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Mapping Urban Cafés and Modern Jewish Culture

Moldavanka

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A Brief History of Odessa Odessa was established in 1794 by the Empress Catherine the Great on land conquered from the Ottoman Empire on the site of the Black Sea fortress town of Khadzhibei. Catherine sent notices throughout Europe offering migrants land, tax exemptions, and religious freedom, attracting migrants of all types.

Thanks to its status until 1859 as a porto franco —a free port, exempt from taxes—Odessa attracted wealthy foreign merchants and exporters. Within a few decades, it became a sizable city as well as the preeminent Russian grain-exporting center. Odessa was multinational, multilingual, and multiethnic, which was reflected in its cafés. The 1855 Robert Sears guide to the Russian Empire declared that
“there is perhaps no town in the world in which so many different tongues may be heard as in the streets and coffeehouses of Odessa, the motley population consisting of Russians, Tartars, Greeks, Jews, Poles, Italians, Germans, French, etc.”
In particular, Odessa appealed to Jewish migrants because the city was located at the southern end of the Pale of Settlement, the area of the Russian Empire to which Jews were confined. This meant that Jews could settle there with few restrictions. Many Jews, both from Galicia, especially the city of Brody, and from small towns throughout the Russian Empire, made their way to Odessa in search of a better life. Jews were the fastest growing population in Odessa, and by 1892, the city’s 124,511 Jews formed the second-largest group in terms of size and were nearly as numerous as those listed as Russians.

Politically and culturally, toward the middle of the nineteenth century, Odessa became a center of Jewish life and attracted many maskilim: proponents of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment that began to take hold in eastern European cities and towns. In the 1860s, Odessa was the empire’s center for the publication of multilingual Jewish periodicals. Rassvet, Sion, and Den appeared in Russian-language editions between 1860 and 1871, as did Ha-melits in Hebrew and Kol mevaser in Yiddish in the same period. By the late 1860s, major Jewish book publishers opened branches in Odessa, promoting, among other publications, books of the Haskalah movement.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Odessa became the fourth-largest city in the Russian Empire. Around that time, Odessa was blessed, or cursed, with many cafés. In 1894, the newspaper Proshloe Odessy reported about 55 cafés and teahouses, 127 bakeries, and 413 restaurants in the city. In 1897, the 138,935 Jews constituted over a third of the city’s total population. Most of the Jews who lived in Odessa at end of the nineteenth century were migrants, from middle-class merchants to poor Jews, who were living and working as small artisans and middlemen in neighborhoods and suburbs such as Moldavanka.
1905 in the Odessa Café Odessa, a mythologized center of modernity and relative freedom in the Pale of Settlement, had always been a site of tension between social classes, ethnic groups, nationalities, and political ideologies. These tensions became particularly apparent after the failed 1905 revolution against the Tsarist Russian regime, and the subsequent wave of anti-Jewish violence in Odessa. The changes which the city underwent during this tumultuous period were reflected in its cafés, especially as these were thirdspaces which allowed many groups of people to interact with one another.

Vladimir Jabotinsky, a Jewish-Russian writer and journalist who later became the leader of the Zionist Revisionist party in Palestine, experienced these changes in the Odessa café firsthand. A common habitué, Jabotinsky used to sit in Odessa’s famous cafés, writing, observing, and gathering information about cultural events in the city, as well as in the simple Greek cafés near the port, which he especially liked.

In his semiautobiographical novel Pyatero (The Five, 1936), Jabotinsky writes that during the golden age of the café—before 1905—“one could see the trading terraces” of the two most famous institutions, Café Fanconi and Café Robina, which were “noisy as the sea at a massif, filled to overflowing with seated customers, surrounded by those waiting to get in.”

In the memoir of his friend Israel Trivus, one of Odessa’s Zionists, he describes Jabotinsky's experience in the Greek Café Ambarzaki in 1904. Jabotinsky said that in Ambarzaki “there is an aroma of Asia, . . . but it creates an ambience that takes you up to the sky, where there is no limit to your thought and imagination.” Jabotinsky was attracted not only to the divine "ambrosia and nectar" in the form of "a fragrant cup of Turkish-style coffee" which he enjoyed at Ambarzaki, but also to the rich conversation in the café which revolved around Greek and Jewish national movements and the emerging Zionist movement, as well as around the glories of Odessa, Pushkin’s poems (which Jabotinsky recited from memory), the city, and its cafés.

Yet, all of this would change after 1905, when, as Jabotinsky states, the cafés in Odessa suddenly emptied. Some cafés were even in the line of fire amidst the chaos of 1905, such as Café Libman. Libman, the Jewish-owned establishment in the center of Odessa, was bombed by a group of socialist-anarchists in December 1905 as a part of their effort to create “economic terror.” While this act of terrorism was directed at "bourgeois bloodsuckers," as the anarchists referred to Mr. Libman and other café-owners, Café Libman was really a place where students, liberals, and intellectuals would go. One of the Odessa anarchists, Daniel Novomirsky, criticized the bombers precisely for bombing a café where the “local intelligentsia”—many of them Jewish—would sit and drink tea and coffee.

The pogrom of 1905 was a painful reminder that even a city such as Odessa was not immune to anti-Semitism. A number of writers described in their fiction the devastation of the anti-Jewish violence in texts that were centered in cafés and similar institutions. Aleksandr Kuprin does this in his short story “Gambrinus” (1907), named after a real establishment in the center of Odessa. Gambrinus was not a café like Fanconi, Robina, or Libman but an underground establishment, a mix of tavern and café-chantant, in which music was played every night. In the story, the most beloved musician in Gambrinus was Sashka, an Odessan Jewish fiddler who was steeped in the tradition of Jewish (klezmer) music that developed in Odessa. Sailors and workers would flock to see and hear Sashka, based on a real figure, Sender Pevzner, who was familiar in Odessa for his violin playing. In the story, after the pogrom in Odessa erupted, the very same people who enjoyed Sashka’s playing in Gambrinus were suddenly incited against Jews. After disappearing for some time, Sashka returned to Gambrinus with a broken arm, unable to play his fiddle. The story ends with the triumph of art over the force of anti-Semitism and violence, as Sashka takes up a small harmonica and begins to play one of his beloved tunes.

The violence of the revolution and the pogroms which entered Odessa cafés also plays a role in Ya’akov Rabinovitz’s Hebrew novel Neve kayits (A summer retreat, 1934). It revolves around the life of young Jewish men. All of them are acculturated to Russian culture; some are from bourgeois families, and others belong to revolutionary movements. The tensions between Jews and non-Jews and the threat of anti-Semitism and violence gradually enter their bohemian life. The end of the novel comes after several acts of violence against Jews and revolutionaries. At this point, the plot moves from the seaside and the boulevards of central Odessa to the suburb of Moldavanka—infamous for its Jewish destitute residents, as well as poverty and crime—where Yitzḥak and his friends go to the humble cafés in which they normally would not be seen. One of the visitors, an owner of a small hotel, complains that
“there is no rest, they destroy the city, the commerce, and everything. And we are Jews.”
During these turbulent times, Jews of all backgrounds feel more at home and more able to talk about their situation in humble cafés in Moldavanka or in the Jewish and Zionist self-defense circles than in places such as Cafés Fanconi, Robina, or Libman.
Moldavanka Moldavanka is a neighborhood in Odessa where many middle-class and poor Jewish migrants lived. By the late 19th and early 20th century, Moldavanka had become infamous for its destitute Jewish residents and for poverty and crime, which was reflected in the literature about Odessa.

The most memorable depictions of Moldavanka are found in the stories of Isaac Babel, who was born there in 1894. Babel’s most famous Odessan character is the gangster Benya Krik, the self-proclaimed “king of Odessa.” Benya Krik was based on the real figure of Mishka Yaponchik (Moisey Volfovich Vinnitsky), who operated mostly in Moldavanka and whom Babel knew well.