Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (29 page)

In time the hero city came to outshine the real one. The Soviet narrative of resistance and valor signaled Odessa’s passing fully into the realm of nostalgia. The myth of its experience in the Second World War was now woven into a new set of characteristics that were thought to define it: amicable multiethnicity, good beaches, faux-Mediterranean jocularity, and a zest for life that was only vaguely Jewish. As a favorite and sun-drenched locale for workers’ holidays, Odessa was becoming famous again as precisely the frontier destination that Catherine had intended, an important attraction on the Soviet Union’s southern coast.

The whole process of remaking Odessa had begun even before its liberation. Just as Gherman Pântea was overseeing the reconstruction of the Odessa opera house and Gheorghe Alexianu was finding the most efficient way of squeezing a profit out of Transnistria, the Soviets were making another Odessa movie.
Two Warriors
is a forgettable piece of wartime propaganda produced by the Tashkent Film Studios, home to filmmakers and actors evacuated from occupied parts of the Soviet Union. The picture is the Soviet equivalent of minor Hollywood films that were eventually eclipsed by those with some claim to greatness, the handful of Errol Flynn and John Wayne vehicles that added complex characters to the standard model-navy battle sequences and patriotic sermonizing.

The film tells the story of Arkady Dzyubin and Sasha Svintsov, the two soldiers of the title, and their adventures during the siege of Leningrad. The comrades share the deep bond of frontline friendship, the kind that allows Dzyubin to rib Svintsov to the point of anger, but also the kind that pushes Svintsov to rush into danger—twice—to save his friend from certain death. Dzyubin is a wingman par excellence. When the tongue-tied Svintsov gives up on getting the girl, a charming blonde Leningrader with a winning smile, Dzyubin steps in to ghost-write the love letters that win her heart.

Critics didn’t think much of the movie when it was released in 1943. The plot is shaky at best, and the musical numbers are pasted awkwardly into the script. But behind the front lines, Soviet movie-goers were soon humming the signature tunes and laughing at the antics of Dzyubin and Svintsov. It was exactly the kind of feel-good flick that the Soviet Union required at the time, even as its western reaches were under foreign control. According to the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, these weren’t just actors “but real, authentic people” going through the same traumas and everyday triumphs of their Soviet comrades.
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No one who saw the film could have missed the basic message. Svintsov is from the Ural Mountains, the end point of European Russia and the place beyond which, in the middle of the war, millions of Soviet citizens had found refuge. Dzyubin was from Odessa, the Soviet Union’s southern paradise, which now lay beneath the fascist boot. The two men were from different places, but they were fighting for essentially the same thing: Svintsov to hold on to what the Soviet Union had managed to retain, Dzyubin to take back what the foreign invader had wrenched away. Beyond the patriotism, at the film’s core is the wish that many of the film’s viewers would have shared—the simple desire to be done with war and go home. For the next half century, if Soviet citizens were asked to name someone who represented the city of Odessa, they would probably have named Arkady Dzyubin. Plenty of Russians today, nostalgic for the films their parents and grandparents knew, would do the same. And in thinking of Dzyubin, they automatically thought of the actor who created him.

Mark Bernes was perfect for the part. He had a wide and open face, with the first hints of the furrows of wisdom and middle age, a Soviet version of William Holden or Humphrey Bogart, yet with the smiling eyes and subdued humor of Spencer Tracy. But Bernes was not, nor ever claimed to be, an Odessan—at least until he played one in a film. He was born in September of 1911 in a small town near Chernigov, in north-central Ukraine, and grew up in the regional center of Kharkov. His family was probably of Jewish heritage—Bernes’s fans certainly assumed it—although Bernes himself preferred to speak of his roots as being in Ukraine rather than in any particular ethnic group. His father was a junk dealer and odd-jobs man. His mother was the real power in the household and managed to keep things together in tough times. Her ambition for her son was that he should become either an accountant or a violinist, but he disappointed on both fronts. He displayed an early attraction to the limelight, and even though he had no formal theatrical training, he seemed to relish the songs and folk poems that swirled around his native region. At age fifteen he saw his first theatrical production and fell in love with the stage. He took a job plastering theater notices around town and managed to secure a place as an extra in several productions. That experience took him to Moscow, and by 1930 he had landed a position in the famed Korsh Theater.

Bernes was still relatively unknown more than a decade later when he was cast in the film role of Dzyubin. He answered an open call for auditions, and after two weeks he was called back and given news that he had earned the part. Then began what he later called a real soldier’s life. To prepare for the role, he donned a regular uniform and lived on a soldier’s rations. He visited hospitals to listen to the dialect of Odessans and pick up its pronunciations and tones—the “g” that sounds like an “h” or the upward glide at the ends of sentences, usually accompanied by shrugged shoulders and pursed lips. But it was only when he got a bad haircut from an inexperienced barber—“teased-up in a characteristically Odessan way,” as he called it—that he felt he was finally prepared to inhabit the character.
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Bernes had the ability to portray youthful Soviets in exactly the way they remembered themselves: struggling to build a young country and fight off an invader, but doing so with the good humor and comradeship they embraced as part of their national character. Bernes’s Odessan became a Soviet Everyman. Russians and Ukrainians found in him a jocular but courageous hero, motivated by love of country but eager for the war to end. For others, Dzyubin’s Jewish identity was unspoken but evident. “We know your kind, the Odessans,” an artilleryman in
Two Warriors
sneers at Dzyubin. What he really meant would have been clear to both Jewish and non-Jewish viewers. “What kind of Odessans do you mean?” Dzyubin replies, agitated and defensive. “The women and children bombed by the Germans?…Don’t mess with Odessa. There’s sorrow and blood there.” More than ever before, the qualities Odessans claimed as their own—cosmopolitanism, freedom, and resilience—were appropriated by the larger country of which they were a part. The city had once been a place of escape, exile, and adventure. Now, through the alchemy of cinema and wartime displacement, every Soviet citizen could imagine himself to be just a little bit Odessan.

One of the film’s musical numbers, “Dark Is the Night,” is sappy and sentimental, but it struck a chord with a Soviet populace reeling from the Axis invasion, the separation of families across front lines, and the years of privation and hardship that seemed to have no clear end. The film’s other hit, “Shalandy,” cemented Bernes’s place as a professional Odessan. The name refers to the Russian word for scows, the flat-bottomed boats used by Black Sea fishermen to haul their catch ashore. It was a lively nonsense ditty about a goodtime sailor, Kostya, and his pursuit of the fisherwoman Sonya. The song surely had the most unappealing first line in all of pop music: “The scows were full of grey mullet.” But you could really swing a glass of beer to the chorus: “I can’t say much about all of Odessa, / ’Cause Odessa is very great, / But in Moldavanka and Peresyp, / They adore Kostya the sailor.” This was all supreme silliness, of course, but it was Odessa’s silliness, and in a time of awfulness and privation, it could make a person smile or even cry—Odessa’s own version of “Yankee Doodle” or “Waltzing Matilda.” It is still the closest thing the city has to a national anthem.

Almost immediately upon its release,
Two Warriors
was a smash with audiences across the Soviet Union—in marked contrast to the way
Battleship Potemkin
had sunk when it opened in theaters twenty years earlier. Dzyubin became the archetypical Soviet soldier, the kind who fought unsparingly for the homeland but also pined sweetly for his beloved. The role won Bernes the Order of the Red Star from the Soviet government. Fan letters told of the film’s impact on individual lives. “Thank you from a happy viewer,” wrote one of his female admirers nearly two decades after the film’s premiere. “When I saw
Two Warriors
, I decided that Arkady Dzyubin was the only kind of husband for me. I found my future husband when he was demobilized, some eighteen years ago. We went out for a while, then got married. Life is great, and we have two children. Overall I’m the happiest woman in the world. Way to go, Mark Bernes!”
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One evening after the film’s initial release, Bernes appeared on stage at a cultural club in the city of Kuibyshev, on the Volga River, to talk about the role of Arkady. He reminisced about his early childhood in Ukraine but mentioned in passing that he had never set foot in Odessa.

“You’re wrong!” shouted someone from the back of the hall.

“It seems someone disagrees with me,” said Bernes. “But it’s strange that someone should think he knows more than I do about this, since I was the one who created the role. Maybe he would like to explain what exactly he means?”

A young army officer stepped forward, trussed up in a new full-dress uniform.

“It’s me!” he said imploringly. “But I’ll explain a bit later.”

After the evening’s program had finished, the officer appeared backstage and said that he was a native Odessan. He was so excited after seeing
Two Warriors
that he had told his young wife and in-laws that he and Bernes had been childhood friends, lolling on the beach and chasing stray cats in Moldavanka. He had been able to keep up the ruse until Bernes made his unfortunate admission onstage.
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Bernes went on to become one of the great purveyors of music known in Russian as
shanson
—a mix of torch-song longing, the false romanticism of criminality, and minor-key Slavic melancholy. When he died in 1969, it was as if a bit of the city had passed as well. As one of his biographers claimed, he had captured the essence of Odessa itself: “a light humor; irony combined with a tender, almost sentimental soulfulness; and an openness and simplicity that were reflected in an outward sharpness of judgment.”
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Bernes was one of several Soviet pop stars who made being Odessan into a profitable profession. Some of them were actually from the city. The Falstaffian and expansive Leonid Utesov—Jewish and Odessan by birth, and one of the fathers of Soviet jazz in the 1930s—managed to survive both Stalinism and the war. He gave concerts on the eastern front and bucked up war-weary audiences with his own versions of “Shalandy” and other hits. He went on to become a central figure in the postwar expansion of the myth of “Old Odessa” across the Soviet Union, including the legend that jazz had been originally fashioned in the crucible of Odessa’s gangster haunts, klezmer bands, and sailor pubs. “Odessa has a lot to it,” he wrote in his conversational and saccharine autobiography.

Utesov’s orchestra—like his prose—had the power to transport audiences to a warmer, cheerier place, but one where reveling in being rough around the edges and thumbing your nose at authority were the standard. His contemporary, the writer Konstantin Paustovsky, waxed lyrical about his own childhood in the city and, through his short stories and autobiographical tales, introduced a new generation of postwar Soviets to the universe of multiethnic cheats and witty men on the make. It was if nothing at all had happened between Babel’s day and the postwar era. The First World War, Stalinism, bombardment and occupation, and the draining of Odessa’s Jewishness all disappeared behind the veil of romanticized memory and selective forgetting. The hero city again became the home of likable and rebellious antiheroes.

Utesov’s music and his cheeky memoirs, published in the 1960s and 1970s, were wildly popular with Soviet listeners and readers. Like those of Paustovsky, they re-created a world that no one could actually remember, but they were all the more powerful because of it. Whatever had been lost in the first half of the century could now be recalled in new, more interesting, and golden-hued forms in the second half. From the mid-1960s until the mid-1980s, at least a dozen major-release Soviet films were either set in “Old Odessa”—the era of the First World War through the 1920s—or featured a character with Odessa origins. Isaac Babel’s
Odessa Tales
were republished in this period for the first time since the 1930s, as were Ilf and Petrov’s novels featuring the exploits of the scheming Ostap Bender, some of which had five million copies in print by the end of the 1970s.
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Like the myth of the hero city itself, none of what Paustovsky wrote or Bernes and Utesov performed was completely untrue. But from the 1950s onward, it became part of a growing industry in literature, film, the popular press, and tourism: the substitution of memory and nostalgia for history and remembrance. In the age of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, you might arrive by train, bus, or ship on a subsidized holiday from your office or factory job, with accommodation in any of the resort hotels located along the Black Sea coast. You could take in the Odessa steps and the Pushkin monument at the end of Primorsky Boulevard (the renamed promenade known as Nikolaevsky Boulevard in the tsarist era), and if you were part of an official delegation, you could lay a wreath at the monument to the unknown sailor in Shevchenko Park. A bus ride could take you to an entrance to the catacombs, located in a nearby village and marked by a socialist-realist statue of underground fighters in sweaters and flat caps, submachine guns at the ready.