Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (16 page)

Mechnikov’s reputation did not survive his fame, however. In books and public lectures, he promoted the idea that “intestinal putrefaction” was the real cause of aging, senility, and premature death. He railed against the large intestine, that den of rotting waste that sends its poisons coursing through the neighboring organs. He stopped short of advocating its prophylactic removal, eventually settling on the ingestion of yogurt, teeming with beneficent bacteria, as the key to health. From his own experience, he reasoned that a pessimistic outlook could enhance the putrefaction in the gut, which is why he urged his audiences to look on the sunny side or, as he called his system of optimistic philosophy and yogurt-eating, “orthobiosis.” Until his death in 1916, he remained fascinated by medical cases in which surgeons had managed to create an artificial anus and thus bypass the maleficent intestine. The pathbreaking scientist died peacefully, at Pasteur’s institute in Paris, as an eccentric quack.
³³

It doesn’t take too much imagination to see the troubled professor, faced with deep personal loss and witnessing the evasion of public health regulations in the busy seaport, having the first inkling of a revolutionary idea: that like the old soldiers working for tips in the lazaretto, or the venal quarantine officials finding ways of fleecing a ship’s captain, or the administrators at the opera house giddily planning a new season after news of a plague outbreak in Constantinople, sometimes the true vanguard in fighting disease is the body’s own remarkable ability to turn threats into opportunities.

But if these peculiar skills had allowed Odessa’s citizens to build a multicultural and often tolerant boomtown, they were weakening in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. “The thought of Odessa always brings on very bitter feelings in me,” Mechnikov wrote to a correspondent shortly after he and Olga began their long sojourn abroad.
³⁴
The crowds that filled the streets were no longer the gay and colorful masses that had enchanted travelers earlier in the century. Cudgels and banners, mobs and shouts, the sound of breaking glass and rapid footfalls on the granite pavers were now familiar sights and sounds. Mechnikov’s family had converted to Christianity two generations earlier, and given his mother’s Jewish roots, he might have sensed the chill descending over the city. Between the lecture hall and the laboratory, he had witnessed the opening salvos of Odessa’s long and brutish war on its own Jewishness. The city had embarked on a new century of self-loathing that would test the harder virtue that the city’s founders, like Mechnikov’s energetic phagocytes, had tried to cultivate: the struggle to consume difference without being destroyed by it.

Heroes and martyrs: Members of a Jewish self-defense group posing with the body of a comrade, one of the victims of the violence of 1905.
From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

“[E]
very year at Passover the Greeks beat up the Jews and robbed them,” recalled the actor Jacob Adler, who spent his childhood in Odessa.
¹
Riots and rough-ups involving Jews and Christians were recurring, if not constant, features of the city’s social life, much as they were in virtually any European city with a Jewish minority. Odessans were as susceptible as any Russian subjects to the persistent antisemitic myths that dogged Jews throughout the Pale of Settlement and beyond, from collective responsibility for the death of Christ to the grotesque idea that the recipe for matzo required the blood of Christian children. When violence occurred, pervasive cultural antisemitism was only the catalyst for more pedestrian causes. Significant riots erupted in 1821 and 1859, mainly involving Greek residents who blamed Jews for a host of imagined crimes, from aiding the Turks in their battles with Greek revolutionaries to conspiring against Greek merchants in the grain trade.

By Ilya Mechnikov’s day, the optimism of the old
maskilim
was still high. Jewish newspapers—including
Razsvet
(Dawn), established in 1860 as the first Russian-language Jewish periodical in the entire empire—carried stories of worldly success and progress. Some were even confident enough to air controversies and disputes internal to the community—such as the tension between assimilation and tradition—in their pages. Yet several new features of city life exacerbated the uneasy relations between Jews and Christians, eventually turning Odessa into the site of the first large-scale pogroms in modern Russian history.

The city’s population was exploding, tripling in the second half of the nineteenth century. Newly freed Russian and Ukrainian peasants and the growing number of workers in the mills and metal shops of the city’s suburbs—often young, male, and single—found themselves in a city where Jews were confident of their social status and economic might. Jewish firms accounted for well over half the total income from the grain trade.
²
However, the city’s great industrial concerns—the Weinstein flour mill, the Zelberschmidt and Goldberg noodle factory, the Brodsky sugar refinery—were rarely the outright targets of violence. It was rather the small-time Jewish traders and shopkeepers, the local merchants and tailors, whose stores were vandalized and houses burned whenever riots flared.

Jews did not dominate Odessa’s economic life overall, given the city’s reliance on shipping and agricultural output, areas in which Christian proprietors and producers still held pride of place. But their role tended to be public, prominent, and precisely in those spheres where they and Odessa’s newer immigrants were in most direct contact. Given state-imposed restrictions on landownership and access to particular professions, Jews were naturally concentrated in the roles still open to them by law and convention. By the beginning of the 1880s, Jews accounted for two-thirds of the city’s registered merchants and traders, nearly three-fourths of the inn-keepers and proprietors of public houses, and two-thirds of veterinarians and pharmacists. By contrast Christians made up over 80 percent of the city’s workers, including some three-fourths of the workforce employed in Jewish-owned factories.
³

When carters had a sick cow, when petty traders haggled over the price of a bolt of imported cloth, and when working men sought to combat the winter chill with a bottle of vodka, they were in intimate interaction with their Jewish neighbors. But in a context of rising Russian nationalism and the state’s growing fear of political subversives, this familiarity bred the opposite of fellow-feeling. “The common remark therefore is that ‘Everything is in the hands of the Jews,’” the U.S. consul reported to Washington.
⁴

The spark for violence could be minimal. In April of 1871, on Orthodox Easter Sunday, a group of Jewish boys was said to have insulted Greek Christians attending religious services outside an Orthodox church. Words were exchanged, and the two crowds threw rocks and punches. As word of the scuffle spread, Russian workmen joined in, chasing the Jewish boys through the streets and lobbing rocks at the windows of synagogues. Organized crowds—perhaps as many as twenty thousand men—soon formed throughout the city and launched a systematic attack on Jewish taverns, grocers, ironmongers, jewelers, pottery shops, and dry goods stores, destroying what they could not loot. Jewish printing presses were wrecked, and all the windows of the Brody synagogue were shattered.
⁵
After three days of chaos, six people had been killed, nearly two dozen wounded, and hundreds of businesses and homes damaged or destroyed. Infantry and mounted lancers were called in to restore order. Artillery was deployed in the streets, and the police and military arrested some fifteen hundred people.
⁶

The basic conditions that facilitated public violence only grew over the next decade. More peasants arrived from the old noble estates, bringing with them a repertoire of mob activism and an unwavering faith in the pronouncements of Orthodox priests. The
meshchane
were declining as a percentage of the population and disappearing as the bedrock of urban life. Student radicals took advantage of the relatively easy access to books and periodicals of several political persuasions—nationalist, liberal, socialist, and anarchist—and formed underground circles dedicated to remaking the empire in accordance with their own political and social programs.

The Russian state, always wary of Odessa’s openness, also began to develop its own program for managing social change and disorder. Police surveillance increased. Public administration swung between robust local control and harsh centralization. When violence returned in the spring of 1881—student riots and another pogrom in response to the assassination of Alexander II—state institutions sought to use the chaos for their own ends, intervening to halt the violence only when rioters threatened more than Jewish shops and homes. The next year, new imperial ordinances, the infamous May Laws, placed harsh restrictions on Jewish property ownership, residence, work schedules, and participation in city government. The laws were a sop thrown to the radical Russian nationalist groups that had directed anti-Jewish mobs throughout the southern empire, and they now signaled the state’s clear retreat from the relative liberalism of the previous twenty years.

Violence was not new, but the state’s acceding to it, even facilitating and rewarding it, in large part was. Anti-Jewish violence in Odessa established a template of accepted explanations and a menu of official responses that were replicated throughout the empire over the next two decades. The term we now use in English for these events—pogroms—is itself of Russian vintage (although anti-Jewish violence at the time was usually described euphemistically as “riots” or “disturbances”). It derives from
grom
, the Russian word for thunder, as if attacks on Jews had a natural, perhaps even heavenly, source. When violence occurred, the theory went, it was because Christians were simply fed up with Jewish treachery and venality. The state could justifiably, even productively, step aside when Jews got what was coming to them, reserving real intervention until the outpouring of gentile discontent threatened the general public order. The historical evidence now suggests that the central Russian government had little direct role in organizing the pogrom-makers, but regional and local officials were at least complicit by their own inaction.
⁷

A city in which Jews had managed to reach the heights of commerce, even moving into the realm of city administration, was closing down around them. The confidence of the old
maskilim
wavered. Jewish choices were now limited but clear. Some left altogether, creating the same brief dip in the Jewish percentage of the population that had occurred after the violence of the early 1870s—one of the periodic waves of emigration to western Europe and the United States that would continue for the next century.
⁸
Others formed self-defense organizations, storing up knives, pistols, and determination to fend off the next round of bloodletting and in the process providing yet further targets for police agents and informers.

Still others found answers in ideologies of liberation and revolutionary change, sober political faiths and utopian movements that would soon be labeled Zionism and Russian social-democracy. For both Jews and Christians, schools and the local university became informal training grounds for a new generation of young men and women who saw “revolutionist” as a profession, from famous dissenters such as Leon Trotsky to lesser-known exponents of radical philosophy and political action. One of the clearest expressions of the pathways available to Jews—and indeed to many non-Jewish Odessans—comes from a work that probably has the truest claim to being the great Odessa novel.

T
HE
F
IVE
, the work of the Odessa journalist and Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, was written in Russian in 1935 and published in Paris the next year. It was translated into Hebrew in the 1940s but only made it into English—the first translation into any Western language—in 2005.
⁹
The novel looks back on a much earlier time, the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, and Odessa’s long march away from the cosmopolitan ideals in which its reputation was grounded. It contains poetic descriptions of early-twentieth-century Odessa, with nostalgia-tinged portraits of its streets and smells, its characters and passions.

The story lines are multiple and disjointed, but the main arc follows the lives of a group of successful, Russian-speaking Jews, the Milgrom family and their associates. The Milgroms might be superficially described as assimilated Jews, inhabiting a Russian cultural space and thriving in a city that they considered fully their own. They sit in a box at the opera. The mother, Anna Mikhailovna, floats above a shifting array of intellectuals and artists, a society matron of the first order. The father, Ignats Albertovich, commands a grain emporium whose fortunes run from the Dnieper River to the Mediterranean. The family’s five children have an infinity of choices in life: to read Nietzsche like Marko or the Torah like Torik; to take on the trappings of a nihilist and troubled revolutionary like Lika; to skip school and slum it with cardsharps and crooks like Seryozha; or to be the toast of Odessa society like the coquettish and unattainable Marusya, the Milgrom’s scandalously modern daughter whose only limit with the boys, she says, is her diaphragm.

Yet the idea of assimilation—implying a fixed identity that morphs into something else—barely figures into their self-image. They wear their religious heritage lightly. They see themselves as having nothing in common with the shtetl Jews who filter into the city during harvest season. Zionism holds little appeal. They are Russian in most senses of the term—most senses, that is, except the one that came to matter most: the ability to negotiate their path through a society increasingly divided along national lines. Odessa was a club of nationalities, says the novel’s narrator, a place of “good-natured fraternization” where the city’s “eight or ten tribes” managed to get along. But in their homes, they lived apart. “Poles visited and invited other Poles, Russians invited Russians, Jews, other Jews; exceptions were encountered relatively infrequently, but we had yet to wonder why this was so, unconsciously considering it simply an indication of temporary oversight, and the Babylonian diversity of our common forum, as a symbol of a splendid tomorrow.”
¹⁰

Like the city itself, the Milgroms found themselves living in a world of tissue paper and crystal, beautiful, delicate, and unspeakably fragile. In an era of political radicalization, Lika is expelled from school and sent off to a two-year exile for seditious activity. Marko puts down Nietzsche and joins a Jewish self-defense organization in the back streets of Moldavanka. Torik, the conscientious student and good Jew who pores over Hebrew textbooks, makes plans to convert to Christianity. Seryozha, the fun-loving hedonist, has acid splashed in his face by a cuckolded husband. Even for Marusya, the perpetual tease, things end badly. In the novel’s climax, she performs a shocking act of self-sacrifice. Now married and with children, she heats milk on the stove for her young son, who is playing in the hallway of their country house. In a moment of carelessness, she allows the fire to lick the sleeve of her housecoat. Seconds later, engulfed in flames, Marusya struggles to the kitchen door and throws the latch from the inside, preventing her son from opening it. He remains safely in the hall while his mother burns to death only inches away. Half of Odessa attended her funeral.