Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (19 page)

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—security. “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.

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

S
ailors 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.

During the war the city lay near the geographical intersection of Europe’s old empires—Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian—and of the new kingdoms, nation-states, and nationalities that were quickly spiraling away from their control. The city’s three largest ethnic groups—Russians at 39 percent, Jews at 36 percent, and Ukrainians at 17 percent—were ready audiences for political entrepreneurs marketing radically different visions of the future.

Odessans found themselves on multiple front lines: between Jews and their tormentors, between Ukrainian nationalists and their tsarist opponents, between radical Marxists and the forces of autocracy. But it was hard to tell which events heralded major changes and which might blow away with the next northeasterly wind. A visiting American physician observed in October of 1917 that all the ships in the harbor were suddenly flying red flags. “No one seems to know why, as we have not heard of any Naval Victory, nor is it a special holiday.”
¹
The doctor was witnessing Odessa’s version of the Bolshevik Revolution. Yet even that turned out to be of passing importance, at least in the short term.

Faced with horrible conditions on the battlefield and political revolutions in the imperial capitals, the Russian army collapsed over the course of 1917. Soldiers faded back into the civilian population, formed armed gangs and pitiful bands of beggars, or coalesced into the armies that eventually drew up on opposite sides of the Russian civil war—the Whites who remained loyal to the old order and the Reds committed to the ideals of revolution. The Central powers made plans to rush through the door that now opened on the eastern front. To block Germany, Turkey, or Austria-Hungary from gobbling up Russia’s industrial and shipping centers, the Entente powers divvied up responsibility for occupying portions of the old empire. British troops were dispatched to the east, to the Caucasus region, to secure control of the strategic oil fields of Baku. In Odessa a disheveled army of French colonial forces—composed in part of North African troops outfitted in colorful pantaloons and woolen great coats—marched down Nikolaevsky Boulevard and instituted a hasty and ill-planned military rule.

This effort in prophylactic occupation was short-lived. Despite the French declaration of martial law, the city remained in near anarchy, with hungry refugees raiding shops and people sometimes being killed in the street for their overcoats.
²
French sailors, subjected to harsh treatment aboard the republic’s own vessels, heeded the Bolshevik call to soldiers and seamen to unite against capitalist oppression. The French fleet anchored in the Black Sea briefly raised the red flag of Communism alongside the tricolor.
³
With French forces in disarray, Russian units now loyal to the new Bolshevik government marched into Odessa and claimed it for the revolution. Yet that effort, too, proved to be temporary. By the late summer of 1919, the anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army, commanded by the famed White general Anton Denikin, pushed out the Bolsheviks and launched a campaign against suspected Red sympathizers.

The tide soon turned against the White armies across the former empire. Denikin’s forces fled in the face of a new offensive by Bolshevik troops. As the Bolshevik army made its final entry into Odessa in February of 1920, tens of thousands of refugees crowded with their baggage near the ice-choked harbor, seeking passage aboard the few merchant vessels and Allied warships that remained in the bay. Commander Gordon Ellyson, in charge of the U.S. naval detachment sent to evacuate Americans from the city, reported scenes of pathos and horror. A woman made her way through the crowds with a baby carriage, looking for the husband and child from whom she had been separated in the scramble. Another woman lugged a gilt-edged mirror. A man stumbled to the ships carrying only a banjo with no strings, while his partner struggled under the weight of a small church organ strapped to his back. Sailors strained to hoist an automobile aboard a Greek vessel before the ping of rifle shots from Bolshevik snipers convinced them to abandon the project.

Crowds surged ahead, slipping on the ice-covered docks and trying to stuff themselves aboard small launches. Some were thrown overboard or beaten back by panicked sailors trying to keep their own craft from capsizing. Meanwhile, gunfire echoed throughout the city as the remaining shore-side defenders fired potshots at Bolshevik advance parties. Now and then, the thundering thirteen-and-a-half-inch guns of the British battleship
Ajax
, anchored in the inner harbor, sent shells hurtling toward Bolshevik positions. Within days, the last defenders—bits of the Volunteer Army, Ukrainian irregulars, and Allied soldiers and seamen—had left the city for good.
⁴

After the departure of the Whites, the city was a place of burned buildings and refugees. Average urban-dwellers tried to make sense of the power shifts that seemed to occur from month to month. “Miles of houses still await reconstruction,” noted a visitor nearly a decade after the war had ended. “Their blackened walls stick up like decayed teeth against the brilliant blue of the sky, and in the suburbs of the city are whole streets, empty, plundered, dead.”
⁵
The march of armies across the defunct empire had put millions to flight, emptying villages and bringing agricultural production to a halt. Jewish inhabitants of the old Pale of Settlement were targeted by all sides, from tsarist units who blamed them for the Red menace, to Ukrainians seeking an independent Ukrainian state, to Bolshevik cavalry who requisitioned grain, goods, and animals at will.

A remarkable snapshot of the chaos of this period—and its particular effect on the region’s Jews—is provided by a survey conducted in Odessa in the summer of 1921.
⁶
With the Bolsheviks now squarely in charge, activists from the Jewish Public Committee for Aiding the Victims of Pogroms, an independent social organization headquartered in Moscow, conducted a survey of Jewish refugees resident in the city. They posted fliers in Russian and Yiddish requesting that Jews register voluntarily at one of ten bureaus set up in the center and on the outskirts of town. Since registering was also a way of receiving aid channeled through the committee from Jewish communities abroad, there was an incentive for Jews to present themselves to be counted. Interviewers collected a wealth of information about families and individuals based on oral testimony. When interviewers had reason to be suspicious about someone’s story, they recorded no information unless the person could provide proof, such as showing up with all of their children in tow or producing an official document to confirm residence or employment. The result was a sophisticated sociological record of civilian suffering at the end of the Russian civil war.

Capturing and holding the city had been a strategic goal of the Austro-Hungarians, French, Ukrainians (in several factions), Whites, and Bolsheviks. But given that individuals and families drifted into the city from a relatively limited region—mainly the southern Ukrainian provinces of Kiev, Odessa, Podolia, and Nikolaev—the scale of Jewish displacement and death across the former Pale of Settlement is all the more evident. The committee counted 12,037 Jewish refugees, of whom 9,042 were currently resident in Odessa. Another 1,801 were registered by family members as still living in their home towns and villages; 1,194 were named as deceased. Just under a third had lost at least one family member in a pogrom, around 44 percent of them losing one or both parents. Most often, it had been the fathers, but many had seen their mothers killed as well. Families were still sizable, however, with the average respondent reporting five family members still living. The vast majority of victims were adults, but nearly 17 percent of families had lost someone under the age of sixteen.

Pogrom survivors came from all professions and social classes. Students, traders, business owners, clerks, teachers, and port workers comprised the majority. But the single largest group—nearly 31 percent—were housewives, probably a reflection of the disproportionate targeting of men in pogroms and the wider civil war, with women left as the head of household. (Not surprisingly, two-thirds of the registered dead were men.) With families and entire villages on the move on foot and by oxcart, covering hundreds of miles to reach relatives or the assumed safety of a city; with Cossack detachments, Red and White armies, and ordinary bandits roaming the countryside; and with a history of organized anti-Jewish violence across the western empire stretching back a half century or more, it was no surprise that people reported what amounted to serial victimhood. More than half the respondents said that they had lived through three or more events that they classed as pogroms.

The survey provides a unique, microscopic view of displacement and violence, but it pales in comparison to what we know overall about refugees and death during this period. By the summer of 1917, over seven million people had been displaced in European Russia. The majority were probably what would now be called ethnic Russians, but minority groups—always suspected of loyalty to some enemy power—were explicitly targeted by invading armies, bandits, and the many independent military groups that formed amid war and revolution. In all the cities of the western empire, refugees arrived from the countryside seeking food and a modicum of shelter, adding to the mass of homeless wanderers that had emerged already during the disorders of 1905.
⁷

The survey captured a vital change in the city’s Jewish population, however. The community—some 125,000 people in the last tsarist-era census—had been as diverse as any other in the city in terms of profession and social class. But if there was a typical Odessan Jew, at least the kind revealed by censuses rather than by the antisemitic imaginings of Russian nationalists, it was the lower-middle-class businessman working as a merchant, petty trader, innkeeper, or small factory owner, making a living in an economic landscape that was both uncertain and at times actively hostile. Russians, Ukrainians, and Germans had nearly as many of their number living as peasants on Odessa’s outskirts as they did working in urban-based professions on the docks and the industrial periphery. But Jews, far more than the Christians with whom they shared the city, were the quintessential urban community. By the 1890s over 95 percent of Jews were classed as petty bourgeois by estate—the old category of
meshchane
into which they had rapidly moved over the course of that century.
⁸

Yet after nearly two decades of upheaval, from the primordial violence of 1905 through the First World War and the rolling pogroms of the Russian civil war, that individual was largely gone. Now the prototypical Jew was likely to be a housewife and widow who had brought her children from the countryside after some terrible act of violence, and had experienced even more horrors along the way. That was one of the people whom Odessa’s greatest writer, Isaac Babel, was working to describe at the time.

W
HILE
V
LADIMIR
J
ABOTINSKY
was busy trying to create a fighting force for Palestine, his fellow Odessan was sitting on a horse in a Cossack cavalry regiment. It was an unlikely place for a Jew, to say the least. But Isaac Babel made a habit of being in the wrong place at the right time.

Babel was born in June of 1894 in Moldavanka, to middle-class Jewish parents. Round-faced and bespectacled, with a hairline that quickly lost out to an expansive and furrowed brow, he was steeped in the classics of European literature, as well as in the ancient traditions of Talmudic reasoning and argumentation. The family survived the 1905 pogrom only because of the intervention of Christian neighbors, who hid several family members from the mobs that roamed the empty streets. Babel’s grandfather, however, was among the victims.