Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams
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Pushkin was to be sent home, to his family’s country estate at Mikhailovskoye, in Pskov province, where he would have little opportunity to get into trouble and could be easily invigilated from the capital. On July 29, 1824, he set out on the long journey north, leaving Lise and Odessa forever. Nine months later, Lise gave birth to a daughter, Sophie. Odessa gossips whispered that the child was Pushkin’s, a rumor that the poet did little to squelch. After all, their love story would soon be immortalized in other ways, not just in the marginal doodles of the Evgeny Onegin manuscript but, in fictionalized and poetic code, in the storyline itself. Like the initially besotted Lise Vorontsova, one of the central characters, Tatyana Larina, ultimately chooses loyalty to her husband over imprudent love. Wisps of Odessa remained in the work of a writer who went on to become Russia’s national poet and the supreme architect of the literary Russian language.
For reasons both personal and political, Vorontsov had secured Pushkin’s removal from Odessa. But the city’s growing reputation for radicalism came close to tarnishing Vorontsov himself. Tsar Alexander I had been a liberal-minded reformer in his early years on the throne. However, the revolutionary swells that seemed to threaten the post-Napoleonic order made him increasingly suspicious of those around him. In December of 1825, during a journey to New Russia, he died suddenly—and heirless—in Taganrog. Rumors flew. Had the tsar been assassinated? Was he really dead? The public mood was tense and the outcome of the imperial succession uncertain. As his body was being transported back to St. Petersburg, Alexander’s younger brother Nicholas announced after some delay that he would become tsar, seemingly skipping over the elder brother and next in line to the throne, Constantine.
The uncertainty over the succession—and the public perception that Nicholas was purposefully bypassing Constantine—sparked a rebellion. That icy winter in St. Petersburg, a group of military officers and their sympathizers refused to swear allegiance to Nicholas. On December 14, three thousand mutinous troops massed in Senate Square, arrayed against a far larger number loyal to Nicholas. A few cannon shots dispersed the protestors, leaving scores dead and injured. Sweeping arrests and dismissals followed. Five of the ringleaders—liberal activists and intellectuals known to history as the Decembrists—were eventually hanged.
In Odessa, the echoes of the Decembrist movement were profoundly felt. One of the centers of liberal activism had been Tulchin, a small garrison town to the north of Odessa, where young nobles, regimental officers, and writers exchanged ideas of liberty, social reform, and even an end to the tsarist monarchy. The suspicions of the new tsar, Nicholas I, naturally fell on the city and its governor-general, whose liberal disposition and progressive ideas—formed in English drawing rooms and Cambridge debating clubs—seemed dangerously close to the rebellious thinking of the Decembrists.
Vorontsov was at great pains to demonstrate his personal devotion to the monarch and convince him of New Russia’s loyalty. “It is worth noting that in the city of Odessa, about which so much ill has previously been spoken, there is not a single inhabitant nor a single functionary who has had any part in the conspiracy, much less been arrested for it,” the count wrote in his memoirs.22 He traveled to St. Petersburg to pay personal homage to the sovereign. He was so sincere in his professions of loyalty that he was soon appointed to the state tribunal in charge of prosecuting the Decembrist rebels. Vorontsov’s career and the city he commanded were delivered from immediate suspicion, but the aroma of rebelliousness was never completely gone. It would linger in Odessa for another century.
VORONTSOV HAD A CHANCE to demonstrate the city’s fidelity when the emperor and his family paid a visit in the summer of 1828. Lise, whose skills as a hostess were already celebrated, organized an elaborate garden party on the occasion of the empress’s birthday. The site was on the outskirts of Odessa, near the country estate where the royal family was spending part of its time in the south.
A triumphal arch of boughs and rushes was thrown up across the road leading to the estate’s gardens. Nearer the sea, a small theater was erected, along with a tent of Turkish draperies held up with spears. A band of regimental lancers provided music, while before the archway stood a detachment of noble girls and young women, all dressed in white summer gowns and grouped according to the color of their hats and ribbons. When the empress arrived, young Sophie Vorontsova—perhaps amid whispers about the girl’s alleged father, Pushkin—presented her with a garland of flowers.
The band struck up a tune. The crowd soon shifted to the seashore, where three men stood dressed in armor on the beach. Just offshore, Mademoiselle Mariconi, the prima donna of the Odessa opera, was slowly rowed ashore as she sang one of the arias from Rossini’s Tancredi. Waltzes and quadrilles followed, interspersed with breaks for iced refreshments, as Chinese lanterns illuminated the twisted trees on shore and the yardarms of ships anchored off the coast.23 Nicholas was so taken with the city that, some time later, he remarked that Odessa should be rightly considered second only to St. Petersburg in its importance to the empire.24
Portrait of Countess Elizabeth (Elizaveta) Vorontsova (ca. 1823) by Pyotr Fyodorovich Sokolov. Museum of Tropinin and His Contemporaries, Moscow/The Bridgeman Art Library.
Sketch thought to represent Lise Vorontsova, from the manuscript of Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin.
The grand frivolity of the imperial visit inaugurated an era in which Odessa was no longer a frontier town but rather the renowned southern counterpart to Russia’s northern metropolises. Under Vorontsov’s leadership, Odessa began to acquire the accoutrements of a real city. A near-daily Russian newspaper, Odessky vestnik (Odessa Herald), was launched in 1827, following on from the earlier French-language biweekly, the Journal d’Odessa. A public library opened in 1830. An experimental steamship service started in 1828 and would eventually be expanded to connect Odessa to all the major ports on the Black Sea and beyond. By the early 1840s, the city had over a hundred schools employing nearly four hundred teachers and enrolling close to five thousand students, both boys and girls—not counting the private institutions founded by the Greek, German, Jewish, and Armenian communities.25
From a ship anchored in the quarantine harbor, one could look up at the well-established city above: the boulevard, the commercial exchange, the classical columns of Vorontsov’s palace, the theater, the green and gold domes of churches. “It was, indeed, a European town we beheld, full of affluence, movement and gaiety,” wrote a French engineer, Xavier Hommaire de Hell, in the late 1830s.26 The spire of the massive Preobrazhensky Cathedral, the city’s foremost church, was completed in 1837, and four years later Vorontsov presided over the opening of Odessa’s most recognizable landmark: the grand staircase that flows from the upper city to the port below. The 220 steps and ten landings were designed by two Russian architects and fashioned in sandstone imported from Trieste at the exorbitant cost of 800,000 rubles. The staircase was generally reviled at the time as an “escalier monstre” and a poorly constructed folly likely to collapse in a few years.27 Yet crowned by the statue of Richelieu on Nikolaevsky Boulevard, the steps almost immediately became the preeminent symbol of the city.
From the bottom, the steps seemed to stretch almost to the sky, a ladder that gleamed gray-white in the sun. That effect was calculated, for the steps are considerably wider at the bottom than at the top, giving the sense that the statue of Richelieu is in fact far larger than it is in reality, an imagined colossus at the head of his own artificial mountain. From the top, the observer looks down the staircase and sees only the wide landings; from the bottom, the landings disappear entirely, leaving only a formidable flight of steps. Even today—with ten of the original steps now gone to provide for an enlarged port and the entire staircase encased in local granite rather than the original, fragile sandstone—Vorontsov’s creation pulls Odessa toward the sea while convincing newcomers of the grandeur of the city on a hill.
Decades later, after Vorontsov had moved beyond New Russia to serve as viceroy in the
tumultuous Caucasus, his contributions to the city were still remembered. He died of a stroke while traveling through Odessa in November of 1856. He had just weathered his last crisis, one that had been personally devastating. His two homelands—Russia and Britain—had ended a grinding and inconclusive struggle against each other in the Crimean War, a conflict in which Vorontsov’s relatives fought on both sides. The days in which Odessa’s founding giants could easily move between multiple worlds were coming to an end. The city was situated in an empire that would later become enamored with the purifying ideals of Christian Orthodoxy, nationality, and autocracy. At the memorial service for Vorontsov, the local archbishop reflected on Odessa’s expansion and prominence during the governor-general’s tenure in office. “Cherished like a child, she grew above all other cities,” he intoned in the soaring Preobrazhensky Cathedral, “she became truly the southern capital of Russia.”28
CHAPTER 5
“There Is Nothing National about Odessa”
The epicenter of the maskilim: Cantor and boys’ choir of the Brody synagogue, early 1910s. From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.
Lebn vi Got in Odes! went a traditional Yiddish phrase. “To live like God in Odessa!” could be a blessing, a curse, or a jab at the puffed-up pretensions of city folk. Odessa was a magnet for Jews from other parts of eastern Europe and Russia, a place where the social environment was relatively liberal, the weather pleasant, and the business prospects promising. Unlike in many European cities, there was never a distinct “Jewish quarter.” Class and wealth, rather than religion or ethnicity, were the determinants of neighborliness. The only time the city ever had a Jewish ghetto was when fascist occupiers created one during the Second World War.
Jewish merchants—six families, according to tradition—were already living in Khadjibey at the time of the Russian conquest, out of a total population of perhaps a few hundred. In the first informal censuses in the 1790s, several hundred Jews were recorded as working there as traders. Within a few years, the principal institutions of Jewish life, such as a synagogue, a burial society, and the Kehillah, or the body in charge of the community’s affairs, were in place.1 Throughout the nineteenth century, the Jewish population grew from under four thousand during Richelieu’s tenure as administrator to over seventeen thousand by the 1860s, representing around a quarter of the total number of Odessans. As the city’s overall population grew, it also became steadily more Jewish.2
The overland trade routes that linked central Europe to the Black Sea created lines of contact that had been traversed by Jews from the Middle Ages forward. This extensive commercial network ran through cities that became the inland partners of the port at Odessa. Cities such as Brody, a major market town to the north, in Galicia, were linked to the sea by the thousands of cattle drovers, cart-drivers, and merchants who, month after month, made the passage across the hills and plains between the heart of Europe and the coast. In the space of just over a century, Odessa’s Jewish community became the engine of the city’s economic life. By the early 1900s, around two-thirds of the handicraft shops and industrial enterprises, nearly 70 percent of the trading companies, and nearly 90 percent of the grain-trading firms had Jewish proprietors.3
Odessa attracted immigrants of all types and creeds, but there were particular reasons for its appeal to Jews. Free-port status opened the docks and quays to ships from throughout the Black Sea and Mediterranean worlds. That, in turn, provided an essential hub for overland routes to Jewish communities in central Europe. The great centers of Jewish life had emerged in inland cities and villages, from Warsaw to Vilna to the shtetls of western Ukraine. In the Russian Empire, restrictions were placed on Jewish residency and professions. From the late eighteenth century forward, Jews were by and large confined to the so-called Pale of Settlement, a vast swath of territory on the empire’s western frontier that included much of modern-day Lithuania, Belarus, eastern Poland, Moldova, and western Ukraine. Jewish migration to other parts of the empire was generally prohibited. Even within the Pale, Jewish sources of income were limited by law to a specific array of jobs, such as tavern-keeping, alcohol distilling, and petty trading. Jews remained a relatively small minority in the Pale, forming just over 12 percent of the total population by the 1890s. But their concentration in a small number of towns and cities made them one of the most visible—and often most easily targeted—ethnic and religious communities in the empire.
Italians and Greeks had seen Odessa as the northern partner of port cities on the Adriatic and Aegean seas, and they remained largely in control of the export businesses until the middle of the nineteenth century. But Jews emerged as the critical middlemen in Odessa’s commerce, linking up with peasants, immigrant farmers, and herders in the interior and forming an essential bridge to the large export concerns in the port city. Through their energy and social networks, Odessa became something that none of its early founders, from Potemkin to Vorontsov, could have imagined: the preeminent port of the Yiddish-speaking world. As a frontier city in need of both people and income, Odessa became one of the major urban centers of the Pale system, a modern and dynamic city where Jews could find economic prosperity and a degree of freedom within an otherwise constraining system. While Jews were viewed as competitors to Christian businesses in other corners of the empire—one of the reasons for legal restrictions on Jewish economic activity—their business contacts were seen as a boon in the growing city.
In order to conduct business in Odessa, merchants were required to register for membership in one of three established guilds. Each guild came with particular privileges, and membership was based on a graduated system of fees. In the middle of the nineteenth century, members of the first guild were required to pay an annual fee of 980 silver rubles (about $740 at the time) and, in return, were allowed to transact any form of business abroad and with Russia, as well as to operate up to three retail establishments. Members of the second guild paid the lower fee of 400 silver rubles (about $300) but were restricted to an annual turnover in their business of no more than 90,000 rubles. Members of the third guild paid the lowest fee, just over 100 silver rubles (about $80), but were further restricted to conducting business within Russia and not abroad. Foreign merchants, with a few exceptions for those who had long been established in Odessa, were required to be members of the first guild, while Russian subjects could choose among the three, depending on their means and the nature of their business activity. Significant numbers of Jews were represented in each of the three guilds. According to one report from the late 1850s, twenty-five merchants were registered in the first guild in Odessa, of whom five were Jews, while fifty-two merchants were inscribed in the second guild, of whom fifteen were Jews. The real distinction came in the third guild, where nearly half of the total number of members—367 of 782—were Jews.4 Crisscrossing the countryside and linking up with coreligionists and family members in the other cities and villages of the Pale, Jews quickly became prominent players in internal Russian commerce to and from Odessa, turning a deeply restrictive and often oppressive legal system into a vehicle for economic success.
The raucous business environment in the city, characterized by immense freedom of commerce and an entrepreneurial spirit, had an effect on other spheres of life as well. Freedom to trade meant freedom to establish businesses of all sorts—provided one could afford the appropriate guild status—which in turn enabled a certain license in public affairs that was unknown in other parts of the Russian Empire. The libertinism of high society that had been so attractive to Pushkin and his contemporaries had an equivalent in the other elements of Odessa’s public life, from the busy quayside to the commercial exchange where deals were hatched and fortunes made. Even public entertainments, such as the theater and opera, provided venues in which different classes and ethnic groups mixed more freely than virtually anywhere else in the tsar’s domain.5
For all its possibility, however, Odessa had an ambivalent relationship with its o
wn Jewishness. As a young city on the old Turkish frontier, it had none of the great rabbis, learned scholars, or mystical preachers found in other cities and towns. There was no Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, and no Vilna Gaon, the preeminent scholar of Jewish law. The ways of the shtetl and the insular courts of Hasidic tsadiks, or sages, which made obscure east European villages into sites of learning and pilgrimage, had no equivalent in Odessa. Much of eastern European Jewry looked on the city as a second-rate upstart at best and a den of crooks and apostates at worst. “Everything here is topsy-turvy. It’s as if they were trying to make fun of the world,” says the wandering beggar Fishke the Lame, a character created by Mendele Moykher-Sforim, the father of modern Yiddish literature. “Your Odessa is not for me.”6 The locus of traditional Judaism lay far to the north, in the Polish-Lithuanian borderlands. Youth and distance kept the city on the margins of traditional Jewish thought and culture.
Yet despite this goyish reputation among many Jews, to gentiles Odessa’s Jewishness—as one part of its culturally mixed identity—was an obvious and distinctive feature. “I saw here people of every nation,” recorded a Russian traveler in the 1830s, “Greeks, Italians, Germans, French, yids (there are a lot of them here), Armenians, and a mass of Ukrainians resting with their oxen and wagons in the squares.”7 As one contemporary French guidebook put it succinctly, “People see the Jews as a collective cabal, and they avoid them like the plague.”8 But Odessa had something that was patently invisible to many of its detractors: a special community of progressive, optimistic, and economically successful Jews who turned out to be the city’s signature contribution to Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement and the wider empire.