Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams

by King, Charles

  If political activism was drowsing in the 1890s, as Jabotinsky once said about his young adulthood, it awoke in 1905. Russian extremist groups such as the Black Hundreds had been active throughout the empire’s southern borderlands for years. To those were added Ukrainian organizations seeking everything from cultural autonomy to outright independence for Ukrainian-speaking peasants and town-dwellers. Socialism, too, had adherents who interpreted Marxism in forms ranging from the gradualist and democratic to the revolutionary and demagogic.

  This milieu helped shape Vladimir Jabotinsky as a Russian-speaker, a Jew, and a particular brand of Zionist. He was born on October 5, 1880, the son of a successful shipper. His father died before Jabotinsky’s first birthday, and the family immediately experienced a downsizing of means and ambition. His mother opened a small stationery shop, with the family taking up residence in rooms behind the main store. A family of merchants became, almost overnight, a family of shopkeepers, and Jabotinsky became one of the vehicles of his mother’s determination to restore the family to its previous social standing. She was insistent that he be allowed to devote time to his studies rather than bring in needed money by learning a trade.21

  Jabotinsky was born into an era in which opportunity was in shorter supply than it had been earlier in the century, especially for Jews. A numerus clausus, or anti-Jewish quota, was introduced for Russian educational institutions around the time he was preparing to enter high school. After several rounds of entrance examinations and many denials, he was finally admitted to the storied Richelieu gymnasium—a school at which his contemporary, Trotsky, never managed to gain a place—only to find that plenty of other Jews had managed to skirt the restrictions and ensure a slot on the student roster. Families that had taken for granted their ability to be vaguely Jewish by religion, Russian by language and culture, and unshakably bourgeois by class now found themselves battling a new wave of prejudice.

  In his classroom, Jabotinsky was arrayed in a row with the other nine Jews in his group of thirty students, contentedly separate but friendly with his Polish, Greek, Armenian, and Moldovan neighbors. He was a self-confessedly poor student and spent more time enjoying Odessa’s beaches and racing through Alexandrovsky Park than completing his lessons. When the gymnasium agreed to offer classes in Judaism, only a third of his Jewish classmates signed up. “The extent of my liberalism was that I forgot to get a haircut,” he wrote.22 He later considered his laziness at least partly providential. Had he continued through school, gone on to university, and then taken up a legal career, he might eventually have been killed—like so many other bourgeois lawyers—by the Bolsheviks. Foolishness, he wrote, “is one of the most successful ways of living like a human being.”23 After much begging and persuading, he convinced his mother to allow him to travel abroad as a correspondent for a liberal-leaning newspaper, Odessky listok, the same daily broadsheet that repeated salacious stories of criminal mischief and courtroom dramas. He had already achieved some success in placing his articles in the local press, and in the spring of 1898 he left to become the paper’s correspondent in Switzerland.

  The trip there, by train through Galicia, introduced Jabotinsky to the varieties of Jewishness that had been largely hidden to him in Odessa. “I had not seen either the side-curls or the kapota [traditional black coat],” he recalled, “nor such wretched poverty. Nor had I seen grey-bearded, old and respected Jews, taking off their hats when they spoke to the gentile ‘squire’ in the street.”24 Combined with his exposure to European ideas, first in Bern and later in Rome—socialism and nihilism, aesthetic abandon and nationalism—his time abroad sharpened his intellect and his pen. Jabotinsky was becoming a well-known journalist, a young man interpreting Europe for a city deeply insecure about its own European identity, and also something of a public intellectual. Odessans gobbled up the incisive and stylish prose of a writer who signed his pieces with the Italian pen name “Altalena.”

  Shockingly articulate, undereducated but erudite, with thick-rimmed glasses fronting a handsome and chiseled face, Jabotinsky shaped himself into a writer typical of Russia’s unsettled fin de siècle: someone for whom poetry, short stories, newspaper columns, translations, and novels were all products of a single artistic vocation, that of the socially engaged littérateur. At this stage, Jabotinsky’s worldview, if he had one at all, was a jumble: vague cosmopolitanism, warmed-over romanticism, a love of all things Italian, and a Zionism of convenience, based on the idea that Jews deserved their own homeland in Palestine—somehow and someday. He was, in other words, representative of his age and class, someone largely untouched by either traditional or Haskalah Judaism, even if his cultural references and personal opportunities owed a great deal to both, and a man confident in his Russian cultural identity.

  Jabotinsky returned to Odessa in 1901 as a literary columnist and cultural commentator for another popular newspaper, the liberal Odesskye novosti (Odessa News). Jewish intellectuals in the city were torn by the same debates that occupied their counterparts in other parts of Russia and Europe: between the universal values of the old Haskalah and the more particular demands of Zionism, between Jewish identity as largely cultural or religious, and between Zionism as the desire for a homeland anywhere or the struggle for a homeland specifically in Palestine. A gifted orator, with a knack for cutting and effective satire, Jabotinsky became one of the most energetic members of the city’s vibrant and contentious intelligentsia—a group that included the influential journalist Ben-Ami, the Yiddish writers Mendele Moykher-Sforim and Sholem Aleichem, the theorist of cultural Zionism Ahad Ha’am, and the group’s polestar, Simon Dubnow.

  Dubnow later recalled a literary salon in April of 1903 at which Jabotinsky enraptured the public with his analysis of the Jewish condition. This wraith of a nation would end its hauntings and wanderings, he said, only when it was able to create its own government on its own land, just as another Odessan, the pamphleteer and Zionist precursor Leon Pinsker, had earlier prophesied. During a break in the session, Dubnow stepped outside to find the attendees talking excitedly about news that had just drifted into the city. Refugees were arriving in Odessa from the countryside with stories of new attacks to the north.25 Jabotinsky had been giving his speech precisely at the time of the event that helped shape Zionism as an international project: the brutal killing of dozens of Jews by Russian nationalists in the Bessarabian capital of Kishinev.

  “The beginning of my Zionist activity is connected with two influences,” Jabotinsky wrote. “Italian opera and the idea of self-defense.”26 The throw-away line was typical Jabotinskian prose: too cute but more than a little true. The brand of Jewish nationalism he eventually adopted owed a great deal to the Risorgimento variety he had imbibed in Rome—the idea of a divided people becoming conscious of their underlying unity and then seeking the state-hood long denied them. He later met one of his early mentors, the Odessa Zionist S. D. Salzman, during an Italian opera at the Odessa theater.

  But it was the rise of self-defense organizations that gave life to his ideas about Jewish identity and territory. While Jewish groups had begun to arm themselves after the violence of 1881, in the wake of Kishinev self-defense became the logical response to a Russian state whose local officials seemed to facilitate the work of pogrom-makers. Jabotinsky recalled walking to Moldavanka—perhaps the first time the bourgeois intellectual had ever deigned to visit the down-and-out neighborhood—and finding himself in a large apartment filled with revolvers, crowbars, and kitchen knives. The next time around, Jews would fight back.

  Jabotinsky insisted that the 1903 Kishinev pogrom in no sense transformed his worldview. He had been a Zionist before, during his years abroad, and he remained one after. But the political context was different. Kishinev was a major battle in Russia’s underground war against its own Jews, one that would extend through the Odessa pogrom of 1905 and to the serial violence of the First World War and Russian civil war. What had changed were the options available to Jews like Jabotinsky who reject
ed the paths of revolutionary or democratic socialism. If the Russian state were now complicit in blocking the ability of Jews to live peacefully in the empire—if the imperial authorities, in other words, had become vehicles of a raw and primitive form of Russian nationalism—then perhaps the rift between Russians and Jews was something more than a matter of religion or heritage. Jews were a nation like any other, deeply divided and only semiconscious perhaps, but one that could be awakened to its own destiny. Pride and prejudice were the building blocks of other forms of nationalism—a theme that runs through The Five and Jabotinsky’s other creative work—and they could naturally be expected to serve the same function for Jews as well. Jews might even find some way of cooperating with the erstwhile pogrom-makers: the latter wanted Jews gone; the former simply needed someplace to go.

  Jabotinsky’s career as a professional Zionist now gained steam. He served as a delegate to the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel in the summer of 1903, the last one attended by political Zionism’s founder, Theodor Herzl. When he returned to Russia, he left Odessa and settled in St. Petersburg, but still traveled widely as a speaker and newspaper correspondent. With the outbreak of the First World War, Jabotinsky moved abroad and joined British forces fighting to defeat the Ottoman Empire. He helped organize the Zion Mule Corps and several battalions of the 38th Royal Fusiliers, a volunteer force known as the Jewish Legion, that saw action at Gallipoli and in Palestine. He remained in Palestine after the war, during the period of the British mandate, and took on the role of activist, leading the Haganah, or clandestine Jewish military organization. When local Arabs attacked the Jewish quarter in Jerusalem in April of 1920—seemingly repeating the same springtime violence that Jabotinsky had known in Russia—the British blamed the Haganah for provocations. Jabotinsky was arrested and later found himself a prisoner in the Acre fortress, his Russian first name exchanged for a Hebrew one, Ze’ev.

  His military activities and imprisonment for the Zionist cause gave Jabotinsky a fame that is now remembered mainly as infamy. An international outcry led to his release from Acre, but fault lines between Jabotinsky and other Zionists quickly widened. He broke with the mainstream Zionist movement not long after his release, founding what came to be called “revisionist Zionism”: the right-wing, antisocialist, militaristic, and uncompromising commitment to a Jewish homeland on both banks of the Jordan River. It rested on a belief in the fundamental incompatibility between Jewish and Arab territorial aspirations.

  In a series of articles in 1923, he put forward the concept of an “iron wall” separating Arabs and Jews. Arab populations were unlikely to acquiesce to Jewish settlement, nor were the two peoples likely to come to a voluntary and amicable compromise, he believed. The two national movements were at base irreconcilable, and the only way Jews could survive in their own land would be to create an unbreakable wall of military force to discourage Arab aggression and protect Jewish claims.27 Jabotinsky died before any of these goals could be realized. He collapsed from a heart attack in upstate New York while on a speaking and fundraising tour in the summer of 1940. But he had lived long enough to see the storm clouds gathering. He accurately predicted the coming cataclysm, a genocide that would destroy Jewish culture in Europe and make the homeland in Palestine a reality.

  Today, Jabotinsky’s views sit uneasily with a tradition that sees the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 as the end point of a united people’s journey from near destruction to triumph. There is a prominent street named in his honor in Jerusalem, but while the Israeli political right continues to see Jabotinsky’s writings as prescient, his reputation pales beside those of other Zionists and Israeli statesmen such as Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion. His own maximalist stance on most political issues and his biting denunciations of other Zionists as weak-willed and deluded led Ben-Gurion to label him “Vladimir Hitler.”

  Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon gives a speech next to a photograph of the spiritual founding father of Israel’s political right, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, during a Likud Party convention in Tel Aviv, August 2004. Pedro Ugarte/AFP/Getty Images.

  Jabotinsky was the founder of a youth organization, Betar, whose principles and aesthetics still bear more resemblance to those of European right-wing extremists than to the grassroots socialism of the kibbutz. In his early writings he was maddeningly inconsistent in his beliefs. In his correspondence he remained solicitous, petulant, and overly concerned with slights and grievances. His choice of allies swung from the principled to the opportunistic to the plainly bizarre. Zionism and Italian fascism had much in common, he wrote to Benito Mussolini in 1922, and “the movement that you represent and your personality interest me greatly.”28

  Ultimately Jabotinsky’s contribution—if it can be called that—was to champion the Zionist cause while also pedestrianizing it. The central tenet of his thought was the concept of hadar, a Hebrew word signifying respect and self-esteem—something he believed was absent among both black-coated shtetl Jews and their “enlightened” coreligionists. Inculcating hadar was simply to bring to Jewish communities the actively “national” way of being that Italians knew as italianità and Germans as Deutschtum: a prideful commitment to embodying the essence of one’s race, ethnicity, or nationality. In this regard, there was nothing peculiar about the fact of Jewish nationalism, he believed, other than that it had long been crushed by empires and denied by Jews themselves, who turned to traditional religion, cultural assimilation, or naive socialism as second-best alternatives to their own frustrated national ambitions. “I learned how to be a Zionist from the Gentiles,” he wrote in 1934. Zionism was not about finding consolation or a “moral prop” to support an afflicted people, much less about realizing a providential plan. The idea of being the chosen of God was the opiate of the masses, an obstacle to Jewish nationalism rather than its divine essence. Creating a Jewish homeland was the natural political outcome of Jewish nationhood, no different in principle from the aim pursued by other European national movements.29

  It is not hard to see the particular influence of his Odessan surroundings in Jabotinsky’s nationalist philosophy. If every other group in Odessa had sooner or later found their highest cultural expression in nationalism and independence—the Greeks in the 1820s, the Italians in the 1860s, and the Ukrainians and Russians who sought something similar as the old empire faltered—why should Jews be any different? The only thing that distinguished them from their neighbors, he felt, was a matter of commitment: their general unwillingness to struggle against other legitimate nationalist movements whose goals happened to be opposed to those of Jews. Jabotinsky was in this sense a “cosmopolitan ultra-nationalist,” as one of his biographers put it.30 He believed in national groups as the core species of world society. Survival of the fittest was the basic mechanism that determined which ones ended up with their own nation-states.

  This narrative fits awkwardly with the claim to uniqueness that undergirds most versions of national origins and destiny, including the Jewish one. But Jabotinsky’s brand of Zionism became far more powerful than its author’s relative obscurity might today suggest. The Israeli state he envisioned has moved away from the old socialist version of Zionism on which it was founded. Large-scale privatization has diminished social equality and changed the social contract between citizens and government. New waves of immigration have brought Jews, especially from Russia, who have little direct memory of the European nationalisms that victimized their great-grandparents or of the democratic socialism that inspired them. A real “iron wall” in Jerusalem now reinforces Jabotinsky’s metaphorical one.

  After two Palestinian uprisings, suicide bombers in Jerusalem restaurants, the expansion of West Bank settlements, and the virtual disappearance of the Israeli political left, Israel has in many ways remade itself in Jabotinsky’s image. Revisionism has become the new mainstream. The state has retreated from the more ambitious social agenda of earlier decades to the basic concern that Jabotinsky hoped would define it—secur
ity. “Everything begins in Odessa,” says the narrator in the biographical film shown at the Jabotinsky Institute in Tel Aviv, the museum and research center that preserves Jabotinsky’s personal archive. It does, indeed. The Israel of the twenty-first century—a state that defines itself in exclusively national terms and in which disparities between rich and poor have diminished old commitments to social equality—embodies many of the ideals that Jabotinsky picked from the crumbling cosmopolitanism of his old hometown.

  CHAPTER 8

  New World

  Massacre on the steps: The famous baby carriage scene from Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film Battleship Potemkin. Goskino/The Kobal Collection.

  Sailors and firemen were on strike for much of 1906 and 1907. Grain carters followed suit in 1910. Underground groups, although infiltrated by police informants, attracted party members and sympathizers in the port district and industrial suburbs, with political programs that ran from socialist to anarchist.

  Shipping picked up after the end of the disastrous Russo-Japanese war but was hit again by the outbreak of a brief conflict between Italy and the Ottomans in 1911 and two wars in the Balkans in 1912 and 1913. When the Russian Empire entered the First World War in 1914, the city’s merchants had already lost entire fortunes in overseas commerce. The Ottomans’ decision to join as a German ally—a move that impeded traffic through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits—effectively brought business to a halt. With little to do and less to lose, stevedores and seamen, emboldened by ready supplies of vodka, contributed to the general malaise by regularly smashing heads as well as windows.