Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (18 page)

Citizens with more specific interests might seek membership in the Black Sea Yacht Club, the New Russian Society for the Encouragement of Horse Breeding, the New Russian Society of Hunting Enthusiasts, or the Odessa Society of Amateur Velocipedists. The reading public could find books at several libraries and reading halls, or purchase their own volumes at one of the city’s eighteen bookstores. Visitors might find lodging at any of twelve first-class hotels and countless private houses and small inns. They could stroll among the curious statues and engravings displayed in the museum of the Imperial Odessan Society of History and Antiquities, or lose themselves in the green expanse of Alexandrovsky Park. When they had had enough of the city, they could take the regular train service to anywhere in the empire or Europe, or board one of the dozens of steamships making daily runs to the other Russian ports on the Black Sea or weekly excursions to Constantinople.
¹⁹

It was hardly a golden age for the city. The grain trade had fallen off, and Odessa’s relative importance in the empire and the wider world was already in decline. But a snapshot of the individual lives being played out in the city’s modest homes and courtyards reveals a wealth of talent and imagination—some of it belonging to native Odessans but most connected with people who passed through the city while making their reputations elsewhere. The Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem was living near the park. He later became the celebrated creator of Tevye the Dairyman and, after a move to the United States, the masterful codifier of what we now think of as shtetl culture. Simon Dubnow, the distinguished historian of Russian Jewry, was holding court in his flat in Bazaar Street. Leon Pinsker, one of the early prophets of what would come to be called Zionism, was dying in his rooms on Richelieu Street. A few blocks away, the register of the Preobrazhensky Cathedral recorded the christening of one Anna Gorenko. She later resurrected an old family name, Akhmatova, as her nom de plume. A few blocks farther to the west, in Moldavanka, the warehouse-owner Emmanuel Babel was celebrating the birth of his son, Isaac.

For Jews, a wide array of ideologies, political programs, and social networks spread themselves through the city like melons offered at the bazaar. The Odessa branch of the Society for the Propagation of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia worked to forward the values of the
maskilim
, including the use of the Russian language. The Society for the Support of Jewish Farmers and Artisans in Syria and Palestine—known informally as the “Odessa Committee” and for a time the only legal Zionist organization in Russia—supported Jews who opted to begin new lives as farmers in Ottoman-ruled Palestine, at least until the Ottomans began restricting Jewish immigration.

The promise and horror of Odessa in the decade separating 1894 from 1905 seem deeply contradictory. How could a city generally satisfied with its easy cosmopolitanism fall so speedily into communal chaos? Many Odessans—especially Jews—seemed to be swimming against a swelling tide. “Assimilation begins precisely with the relaxation of old prejudices,” says one of the characters in
The Five
, “but a prejudice is a sacred thing;…Perhaps the genuine meaning of morality…consists of prejudices.”
²⁰
That was the novel’s essential point. The growing exclusion of Jews from Russian civic life was not merely a result of their neighbors’ biases. For the author of
The Five
and its thinly veiled narrator, Vladimir Jabotinsky, exclusion, self-awareness, and pride in one’s own cultural peculiarities were crucial dimensions of what Jewishness ought to be. In his day, Odessa seemed to confirm the view that national identity was the atomic unit of human society. The veneers offered by assimilation, imperialism, and cosmopolitanism could not disguise the age-old yearning for nations to express their own unique genius. Jews, Poles, Russians, and Greeks might bump up against each other on Deribasovskaya, but everyday civility was not the same thing as commonality of interest or ambition. In the end, this particular way of thinking about nationality was both the antithesis and the product of everything Jabotinsky’s native city claimed to be.

N
EARLY A THOUSAND MILES
away from Odessa, the Israeli port of Acre contains an old prison famous for housing heretics. Originally constructed during the Crusader era, the imposing Acre fortress was a place where the Knights Templar could hide away their infidel captives. Successive Arab and Ottoman rulers used it to stash the rebellious, the unorthodox, and the merely inconvenient. The nineteenth-century religious leader Bahá’u’lláh, founder of the Bahá’í faith, was shoved into a dingy cell by Ottoman authorities for preaching the revolutionary idea that all religions are part of a divine and progressive revelation. Almost a century later, the new political power in the city—the British mandate authorities in Palestine—found the prison an equally serviceable place to keep one of the most troublesome Odessans of the era, the novelist, journalist, and activist Vladimir Jabotinsky, Zionism’s archetypical champion as well as its most controversial dissenter. His storied career—from Odessa to Palestine to an early death in the United States—reveals a great deal about the political eddies that swirled around his hometown in the transition from the nineteenth century to the twentieth.

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 rejected 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.