Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

In fact Orthodox Jews didn’t have an especially comfortable time of it in Odessa. According to a local proverb, “The fires of Gehenna burned for seven miles around Odessa” (“zibn mayl arum Odess brent dos gehenem”). The profound indifference to officialdom crossed all borders of nation and faith — both churches and synagogues were less frequented here than in other places, and more than a third of couples with children were unmarried. But the opera was very good. The poet Batyuskkov thought it better than the Moscow opera. Everyone went to the opera, including religious Jews in their sidelocks and hats who were mocked in the stalls for their loud and excessive enthusiasm. The cab drivers sang opera arias as if they were gondoliers. The Odessan way of things was unusually tolerant of difference; it demanded of Odessa’s citizens not so much a readiness to assimilate, as a readiness to hop from one language to another, one idea to the next.

Odessa resembled one of the ancient Mediterranean towns, in that it belonged to no single culture or nation. Laws ceased to have effect here, its mafia was immortal, its cuisine had no equals. But unlike Naples (for example), Odessa only rose from the sand and the foam two hundred years ago, and at beginning of its history it barely had time to invent a mythology of its own. The mythology was gradually invented around it, and it fitted surprisingly well. A Russian officer wrote that

everyone is younger and having more fun in Odessa. A yid walking along the street doesn’t cringe as much or look over his shoulder, and a foreigner looks you more squarely in the eye. On the boulevard people stand around chatting and laughing and eating ice cream. They smoke on the streets.

This is confirmed by an anonymous Jew from Lithuania, quoted in Steven Zipperstein’s The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History praising the “dignity and stateliness of the community, the calm way they walked along the streets, conversed in the Café Richelieu, enjoyed music at the Italian Opera House, and conducted religious services showed how at ease they felt.”

A particular way of being, and a particular language: by the beginning of the twentieth century Odessa was becoming known as a preserve of the grotesque, and for its distinct style of humor, jokes peppered with Yiddish phrases. This is the warm south, where everything is more theatrical and histrionic, where street runs seamlessly into street, and house into house. The sea and the port were the ideal backdrop in a town where everything followed the comedic principle that the scaffold of the joke existed only to deliver the punchline . Lightness of touch, tethered to the ground but always pulling at those tethers (like a hot air balloon) — these were the necessary conditions of life in Odessa. Their flair for criminality stemmed from these conditions, and they cultivated it, enjoying their Wild West image — young hotheads, indulging in hotblooded violence as a natural process and therefore somehow an acceptable one. The gangsters of Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories gave generations of readers a warm fond feeling: this was humanity before it could be civilized by reading, and in its natural habitat: exotic beasts in a brightly colored zoo. Occasionally this happy-go-lucky sunlit life came undone, revealing its own ugly stuffing — and this began to happen more and more until it became an equal part of the bubbling pot of daily life. Violence racked the city like an involuntary convulsion. The port was full of arms and early in its history you didn’t even need permission to own a gun. Street fights crackled like Roman candles; striking workers and bombers were newspaper heroes. In the period February 1905–May 1906 alone, 1273 people died as a result of “terrorist activity” in the Odessa District: policemen, civil servants, factory owners, and bankers. Politically motivated requisitions were hardly any different from gangster heists. Expropriation became a popular cross-cultural sport. Everyone was at it, from Anarchists to Communists and groups of Jewish vigilantes in black shirts. Suicides were also in vogue — the number of suicides had dramatically increased in the years before 1900, and though the number of those who took their lives in little Odessa was hardly less than in Moscow or St. Petersburg, in Odessa it was done with theatricality: the victims shot themselves on balconies with a sea view, or on the smartest street in town, Deribasovsky. Other approaches included the following: “An actress from a minor theater had her hair done at the best hairdressers, put on perfume, a specially chosen dress and white satin shoes, and holding a ready prepared bouquet of flowers she climbed into a warm bath and opened her veins.”

All this happened in what you might call the public domain, spaces in this cosmopolitan metropolis that were set aside for theater; when you approached its white-hot nucleus, the town began dividing into tribes: “one’s people” and “strangers.” In Vladimir Jabotinsky’s novel The Five , there is a passage in which the narrator describes this phenomenon:

in our homes, it seems, we lived apart; the 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.

Jabotinsky also remembers that despite his secular upbringing he had no close childhood friends who weren’t Jewish. Pogroms and rumors about pogroms, the terrified chatter about what was coming and the much quieter conversations about what had happened, were everyday matters from 1882 onward (and up to 1905, when Odessa seemed even to frighten itself with the violence, and finally put a stop to it).

News of pogroms spread like wildfire around Southern Ukraine. It traveled on trains with the railwaymen, down the Dniepr with the ferrymen, jostled at hiring fairs, and served as a model for new outbursts of pointless cruelty: “Let’s do it the Kievan way!” All the towns with a connection to my well-heeled predecessors bore the traces of this violence. My grandfather Lyonya was born in Kakhovka in 1912, and could well have witnessed the pogrom there in 1915, initiated by retreating Cossack forces. Kherson, where the family owned a fine house with figures on the facade , saw its own pogrom in 1905. Death could come at any moment, it had not a shred of dignity, it was coupled with shame and horror. None of my relatives ever mentioned the pogroms. Were members of my family killed in Odessa in 1905? Were they among the dead, laid out in the streets, barely covered with sheets, their chins jutting out? Or among the ones who hid in attics, in basements and dog kennels, or sheltered by Samaritans? I will never know.

I do know other things now. In one of Lyodik Gimmelfarb’s letters from the front he adds, “I expect you know that Grandfather stayed in Odessa. I am very worried about what will happen to him.” Both Lyodik’s grandfathers were in Odessa and both were Jews. Israel Gimmelfarb, Lyodik’s paternal grandfather, was shot in October 1941, immediately after Romanian forces occupied the town. The other grandfather, father of Betya and Verochka, was called Leonty, or Leib. I only now realize that although I know the year and the day, and almost the hour of the deaths of my other great-grandfathers, I have never found out anything about him — he vanished, quite as if he had never existed. In youth he was incredibly beautiful with a waxen pallor; in pictures taken in the 1870s he looks as dapper an advert for a tailor. His daughters had no pictures of him in later life.

Lyodik’s note is perhaps the last time this man’s life floats to the surface. On the Yad Vashem database eighty-one people come up when I type in “Liberman, Odessa,” and only a few of these have first names. A few are listed with initials or short forms of their first name, Busya, Basya, Besya. Some of them crop up in lists of the evacuated, but most were killed: shot or hanged during the October roundups; burned to death in the munitions depot at Lustdorf or sleeping side by side in the ghetto at Slobodya; slaughtered in Domanevka, Akmechetka, Bogdanovka. By the end of the war Odessa, with its Polish, Greek, Italian, and Jewish streets, had no more than six hundred Jewish residents, and none of my family were among them.