kvetching and carousing under communism: old odessa as the soviet union’s jewish...

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Kvetching and carousing underCommunism: old Odessa as the SovietUnion’s Jewish city of sinJarrod Tanny aa Department of History , Ohio University , USAPublished online: 17 Nov 2009.

To cite this article: Jarrod Tanny (2009) Kvetching and carousing under Communism: old Odessaas the Soviet Union’s Jewish city of sin, East European Jewish Affairs, 39:3, 315-346, DOI:10.1080/13501670903298237

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East European Jewish AffairsVol. 39, No. 3, December 2009, 315–346

ISSN 1350-1674 print/ISSN 1743-971X online© 2009 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/13501670903298237http://www.informaworld.com

Kvetching and carousing under Communism: old Odessa as the Soviet Union’s Jewish city of sin

Jarrod Tanny*

Department of History, Ohio University, USATaylor and FrancisFEEJ_A_429997.sgm10.1080/13501670903298237East European Jewish Affairs1350-1674 (print)/1743-971X (online)Original Article2009Taylor & Francis393000000December [email protected]

Odessa has often been branded a “Jewish city.” Much like their counterparts inNew York and Warsaw, Odessa’s Jews have historically played a fundamentalrole in the city’s demographic makeup, economic life and culture. But Odessa isunique among Jewish cities because it has been mythologised as a city of sin, afrontier seaport boomtown whose commercial prosperity and balmy climateattracted legions of adventurers, gangsters and swindlers seeking easy wealth andearthly pleasures. Old Odessa was the Russian Jew’s golden calf – gilded, wickedand ostentatious in its intemperance. Odessa’s carnivalesque environment wasfertile ground for the blending of different cultures, and the Jews spearheaded thisprocess, adopting a Yiddish-inflected Russian as their language for celebratingtheir profligate city. By the 1917 Revolution the foundations had been laid for theemergence of Isaac Babel, Leonid Utesov, Mikhail Zhvanetskii and the manyother Jews who subsequently left Odessa for Moscow and the Soviet interior.They would go on to disseminate the Odessa myth using literature, comedy andmusic, and their immense popularity ensured that Odessa was indelibly marked asa Jewish city of sin, inhabited by comical rogues whose colourful escapades wererooted in an idiom of Jewishness.

Keywords: Odessa; Jewish; gangsters; jazz; Babel; Utesov; Black Sea; Yiddish;criminals; myth; Soviet Union; Russia

In 1911, the Russian humourist Arkadii Averchenko published a description of hisrecent journey by steamship to Odessa. Having never visited Odessa, Averchenkostruck up a conversation with a fellow passenger, as he wanted to hear all about thecity from an authentic Odessan (odessit). Averchenko relates the following dialogue:

“Excuse me,” I said turning to him, “are you an Odessan?”

“Why would you think such a thing? Perhaps I stole your hat and put it on instead of myown?”

“Uh of course not, what are you talking about?”

“Perhaps you think,” he asked with alarm, “that I surreptitiously slipped your cigarette-case into my pocket?”

“What are you talking about? Cigarette-case? I’m just asking if you are from there?”

*Email: [email protected]

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316 J. Tanny

“Really, that’s it? Well, then, yeah, I’m an Odessan.”

“Is it a nice city – Odessa?”

“You’ve never been there?”

“I’m going there for the first time.”

“Hmm … You look like you must be thirty years old. What have you been doing all theseyears that you haven’t seen Odessa?”

Averchenko’s shipmate then went on to describe how Odessa had the most beautifulstreets in Russia, the best theatre, the most talented actors, the beer, the restaurants,the climate and everything else that could exhibit Odessa as Russia’s magical seasideparadise. When Averchenko asked whether Odessa’s women were pretty, hisshipmate gravely threw his arms into the air and hung his head in a great show of pity,making it clear that such ignorance about Odessa was utterly unacceptable.1

Averchenko’s conversation with an “authentic Odessan” did not turn out to be thecongenial tête-à-tête he had envisioned, and readers cannot possibly fail to notice thatthe author ascertained next to naught about the city he was nearing. Readers also learnnothing about the odessit himself – his career, his ethnic background or his religion.Yet despite the paucity of substantive details in this passage, there is much that can begleaned from the speech and mannerisms of the Odessan. Averchenko was, in fact,able to capture the Odessa myth in all its complexity and texture, suggesting a city thatwas opulent, criminal and, in an important sense, Jewish in character.

Odessa has often been branded a “Jewish city,” a label used with reverence anddisdain depending on one’s perspective. Much like their counterparts in New York,Warsaw, Vilnius and many other cities in America and pre-Holocaust Europe, theJews of Odessa played a fundamental role in the city’s demographic makeup,economic life, and culture. But Odessa is unique among Jewish cities because it hasbeen mythologised as a gilded city of sin, a frontier seaport boomtown on the BlackSea whose commercial prosperity and balmy southern climate attracted legions ofadventurers seeking easy wealth and earthly pleasures. Along with the many otherimmigrants of diverse ethnic backgrounds, Odessa’s Jews allegedly pursued dreamsof opulence and immoderation, exhibiting a passion uninhibited by the weight of atraditional culture rooted in non-violence and moral rectitude. Old Odessa was theRussian Jew’s golden calf – gilded, wicked and ostentatious in its intemperance.

Old Odessa was mythologised as a Jewish city of sin, but the city’s unique Jewish-ness does not end with its crime and debauchery, as Odessa is also depicted as a landof wit and irony, where thieves and lowlife induced laughter through their crooked anddissolute behaviour. Odessa’s Jewish criminals are notoriously funny, but it is a brandof humour that was not native to Odessa, having been brought to the city from theYiddish-speaking shtetls of Eastern Europe. Along with the Jews themselves, Jewishhumour found a new home in Odessa, where it quickly became the dominant mode forarticulating what may be called the myth of old Odessa – the celebration of a pleasure-drenched seaside frontier town whose inhabitants were proud of their chiselling andgiddy merrymaking.

Late nineteenth-century Odessa’s multi-ethnic and carnivalesque environmentproved to be fertile ground for the blending of different cultures, and the Jewsspearheaded this process, adopting a Yiddish-inflected Russian as their language for

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East European Jewish Affairs 317

communication and for celebrating their infamously profligate city. By the time of the1917 Revolution the cultural and linguistic foundations had been laid for theemergence of Isaac Babel, Il’ia Il’f, Leonid Utesov, Mikhail Zhvanetskii and the manyother Odessan Jews who subsequently left Odessa for Moscow and the Soviet interior,where they went on to disseminate the Odessa myth throughout the USSR usingliterature, comedy and music. Their immense popularity ensured that Odessa wasindelibly marked as a Jewish city of sin, inhabited by comical rogues whose colourfulescapades were rooted in an idiom of Jewishness.

*

Old Odessa is myth, the folklore of a secular age, rooted in fantastic imagery ofheroes, outlaws and enchanted cityscapes ranging from the idyllic to the apocalyptic.2

Myth, however, need not imply falsehood (and hence fiction), and should not beviewed as a category separate and distinct from reality (and hence empirical history).History and myth are not fundamentally at odds with each other; their relationship iscomplex and fluid, a bond that Bo Strath likens to “a Venn diagram of two overlap-ping discourses,” linked by the narrative technique employed to order and connectdisparate events, people and places.3 And it is a relationship that is far from obvious.Many of the self-professed fictional tales written about old Odessa depict Jewishgangsters who actually lived, debauched festivities that actually took place andhumorous words that were actually spoken. Conversely, many accounts that purportto be historical contain an obvious element of invention, involving fabricateddialogue, the conflation of discrete events, and the appropriation of folkloric motifsthat developed in other times and other places far removed from the city’s social andpolitical context. But there is a striking parallel in how narrative in both these genresis constructed, the way the story is told, the language that is used, the discursive blue-print that governs every tale of old Odessa. It is not so much a question of whether ornot what is being described really took place; a particular tale is part of the myth ofold Odessa because of the rhythm, intonation, language and themes that are deployedin the act of narration.4

Old Odessa and its colourful characters have appeared in memoirs, music, jokes,novels, films, newspapers, dictionaries, guidebooks and histories at various points intime. Each instance of these sources is a distinct mythological artifact, yet similar toevery other such artifact inasmuch as it has the capacity to encapsulate the myth’sspirit. A three-sentence anecdote, a stanza or melody from a two-minute criminalfolksong, or the combination of words in a newspaper headline was often rich enoughto symbolically represent the Odessa myth in its totality. As the Soviet era progressed,the act of mythmaking became more sophisticated, and the myth’s articulation tookplace with greater brevity and implicitness. Such subtlety allowed the myth of oldOdessa to survive the assault wrought by the ideologues of proletarian culture, whichlasted from the Stalin era until the collapse of Soviet socialism.

*

Before the Bolshevik Revolution, the Jews formed the most numerous ethnic group inOdessa after the Russians.5 By the 1890s, 33% of the city’s population were Jewish,and Odessa had the largest Jewish community in the Russian Empire outside Warsaw.The Jews played a leading role in the city’s social, economic and cultural life, working

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as merchants, intellectuals and journalists. Many of Russia’s most prominent Jewishwriters and political activists either lived or temporarily sojourned in Odessa,including Sholem Aleichem, Mendele Mokher Sforim, Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky,Chaim-Nachman Bialik, Leon Pinsker and Simon Dubnov. Even after the economyfaltered during the early twentieth century, Odessa continued to exert a magneticattraction upon the Jews of the cramped Pale of Settlement; the city remained an imag-ined gilded paradise by the sea – Russia’s Eldorado – practically within breathingdistance of the Mediterranean. That most migrants found poverty rather than affluencedid not cause Odessa’s Jews to repudiate their beloved “Odessa-Mama” in largenumbers, as their unvarying demographic presence demonstrates. Inhabiting thecrowded and dilapidated Moldavanka district, many of Odessa’s Jews turned to thecity’s underworld, where they operated as forgers of currency and documents(poddelka, fal’shivomonetchiki), pickpockets (karmanniki, marovikhery) in themarkets, pimps in the many brothels and fences for stolen goods.6

Jewish criminals were a conspicuous presence in Odessa during the late imperialand early Soviet periods, and there is ample documentation to demonstrate their leadingrole in the city’s underworld; old Odessa’s infamy as a Jewish city of sin appears tohave been well deserved.7 Yet the relationship between myth and reality is far morecomplex than police reports, court records and newspapers may suggest. A largepercentage of the Jewish thieves and gangsters arrested in Odessa during the early twen-tieth century had come to the city from elsewhere in the Pale of Settlement, much likeOdessa’s Jewish community as a whole. Odessa may have become such a haven forthe delinquents and thieves of Russia precisely because of its reputation as the empire’sEldorado, where the wealthy could easily be plundered and the dreamers of wealthcould be hoodwinked and ensnared into elaborate scams. And the belief that Odessawas the capital of crime may have further impelled the corrupt and the crooked intoseeking out existing networks of like-minded people. The myth of Odessa’s Jewishcriminality may have been complicit in producing reality, with Odessa’s notoriousreputation shaping the city’s crime-ridden economy and its villainous social composi-tion just as much as the reality of crime had given rise to the myth in the first place.

Odessa thus entered the Soviet era as a city whose recent past had been fundamen-tally shaped by its large Jewish presence. Yet demography and socio-economic reali-ties do not sufficiently explain why observers often labelled Odessa a “Jewish city.”Odessa was the first important centre where Jewish writers adopted the Russianlanguage for the production of novels, feuilletons and anecdotes without abandoningtheir native Yiddish culture. The multi-ethnic immigrant character of the city was anideal venue for the Jews to become more like their neighbours and for their neighboursto become more like the Jews. A reciprocal exchange of culture took place, and theresulting Judaeo-Russian hybrid served as the linguistic basis for the depiction ofOdessa as a fabled city of humour, gangsters and sin.8 This dynamic process of fusionand cultural production did not cease with the 1917 Revolution, Civil War and theNew Economic Policy (NEP) era of the early 1920s. The mythmakers of the Sovietperiod emerged during this era of turmoil, and, in many respects, the intersection ofwar, politics and rapid economic change with culture enriched their sketches of oldOdessa; Odessa furnished them with their raw material and with an environmentconducive to cultural exchange and the production of an inimitable brand of fiction,music and humour.

Soviet-era mythmakers depicted old Odessa as a Judaeo-kleptocracy – a city ruledby Jewish gangsters – the successive regimes of the late tsarist and revolutionary

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periods governing in name only.9 In Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories, Benia Krik is “theKing,” and “level headed people” insist that “the police end where Benia begins,”suggesting that the former are powerless to act without the latter’s sanction.10 Thepolice want to decimate Benia Krik’s army of gangsters, but they are afraid that anyattack will fail and much “blood will flow.”11 Benia’s gangsters are the ones infusedwith “blue blood,” not tsarist officialdom.12 Memoirists likewise portray MishkaIaponchik, the real-life gangster who supposedly served as Benia Krik’s prototype, asthe “King of Odessa.”13

Old Odessa was not a Judaeo-kleptocracy simply because its gangsters happenedto be of Jewish descent. Mythmakers connected Judaic practices with criminality intheir depictions of the city and its people, thus making Odessa into a veritable“Jewish” city of sin. Having been arrested for revolutionary activity in 1902, Vladimir(Ze’ev) Jabotinsky describes the intersection of the sacred and the illicit, the coopta-tion of the Hebraic by the criminal, in Odessa’s prison. Jabotinsky fondly recalls hisexperience in jail amongst Odessa’s thieves as “one of the most pleasant and dearestof my memories,” due to their kindness and generosity.14 The prisoners constructed anelaborate “telephone” to exchange books and other objects between cells, which theywhimsically called lechah dodi , also the name of a Friday evening prayerthat is traditionally sung to welcome the coming of the Sabbath. For Jabotinsky,lechah dodi is a testament to “the Jewish influence on this unique people and on theirlingua franca,” a Hebrew-inflected thieves’ cant.15

The intersection of Judaism and Jewish discourse with criminality reaches its great-est apogee (and irony) in Babel’s Odessa Stories. In one instance, Benia’s thugs use amock Jewish funeral procession as a cover to ambush their rivals from a differentneighbourhood. In the film Benia Krik, the gangsters are bribed with money hiddeninside precious and beautifully embroidered Torah scrolls. In a parody of a sacredsynagogue ritual, Benia’s accomplice Froim Grach takes the Torah and, as he slowlyunwinds its parchment containing the hallowed words of God, tsarist rubles cometumbling out.16 In “Liubka the Cossack,” one shady character views his forced deten-tion in a brothel in biblical terms, insisting that “I still have some faith in God whowill lead me out of here, the way He led all the Jews first out of Egypt and then outof the desert!”17 Illicit sex and Judaism converge in Liubka’s brothel, where theprocuress reads The Miracles and Heart of the Baal-Shem [Tov] to Liubka’s infant son,suggesting that Hasidic piety is not the antithesis of sinful transgression.18 Whereastraditional shtetl Jews are often depicted as perpetual victims who invoke their historyand faith in God to rationalise their passivity, in Odessa Judaic narration is a sourceof criminal empowerment, a place where Benia the King commits his robberies whiletelling “stories from the life of the Jewish people.”19 Odessa’s gangsters speak Jewish,exude Jewishness and manipulate Judaism to achieve and sustain their ascendancy.

Pre-revolutionary writers in Odessa had used Yiddish inflections, Jewish expres-sions and Hebraic words in their Russian texts to give the Odessa myth its Jewishflavour, a tradition that Babel continued in his Odessa Stories, but with greatersubtlety and refinement than his predecessors.20 On a few occasions Babel usesRussianised Jewish words in his tales, such as trefnoi, derived from the Hebrew tref,which means “unkosher food.”21 Some of his characters speak grammaticallyincorrect Russian, thus marking themselves as ethnic minorities.22 But Jewishnesscomes out in Odessa Stories through narrative style more than vocabulary. Thesestories are told with a Talmudic rhythm, unfolding through repetition, effusivequestions and answers, and circular dialogue, as in the following instances:

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And the gangsters called a council together to decide about Benia Krik. I wasn’t at thecouncil, but the word has it that they did call together a council.23

Grach listened to him patiently, but then interrupted him, because he was a simple manwith no tricks up his sleeve. “I’m a simple man with no tricks up my sleeve,” Froimsaid.24

They said they would be back in about a half an hour. And they were back in half anhour.25

“Where do the police begin and Benia end?” he wailed. “The police end where Beniabegins …”26

Although it is mentioned on several occasions that “Benia talks little,” he actuallyspeaks in a stereotypically Jewish manner, replete with verbosity and an endlessstream of questions, somewhat reminiscent of Sholem Aleichem’s garrulous charac-ters.27 On one occasion, Benia uses a traditional Jewish expression, “may she live tobe a hundred and twenty,” which Yiddish speakers superstitiously insert into dialoguewhen wishing others good health.28 Babel’s Russian-speaking Jews can kvetch(complain) as well as their cousins in the shtetl, who, like many of Sholem Aleichem’sfemale characters, practise kvetching to justify their behaviour by making others feelguilty.29 Despite his immense wealth, Babel’s Rubin Tartakovskii rejects Benia Krik’sextortion letter by citing the alleged suffering he perpetually endures. He writes toBenia that he is

sick and tired of having to eat such a bitter crust of bread and witness such trouble afterhaving worked all my life like the lowliest carter. And what do I have to show for mylife sentence of hard labor? Ulcers, sores, worries, and no sleep!30

Odessa’s gangsters often have family names derived from Yiddish words. “FroimGrach” may be translated as “Froim the hot-head”; Liubka the prostitute is ironicallynamed “Shneiveis,” meaning “snow-white”; Iosif Muginshtein’s name derives frommogin, which is Yiddish for “stomach” – an allusion to his subsequent murder duringBenia’s robbery.

Life in giddy old Odessa was not exclusively about robbery, and the mythologisedJewish criminals sought out the festive merriment for which the city of sin was noto-rious, in the brothels and in the beer halls, where indigent Jewish musicians enter-tained the sailors, vagabonds and gangsters with their criminal folksongs.31 Odessa’srevelry, however, transcended the tavern and evenings of wild music and ecstasy werecharacteristic of more traditional Jewish events such as weddings. Jewish weddings,by definition, were occasions for merriment, replete with lavish food and alcohol evenamong the most impoverished Jews in Eastern Europe. In their influential study on lifein the shtetl, Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog maintain that

a wedding is the most joyous and most elaborate festivity in shtetl life. It represents thefulfilment of the individual, who becomes fully adult only when he marries, and the basisfor the perpetuation of the Jewish people, according to the commandments of God. It isthe archetype of all festivity and rejoicing, the symbol of joy and completion … Anespecially successful celebration is “as merry as a wedding.”32

But merriment did not imply excess, and “any wedding guest who became reallydrunk would be an object of outraged disgust.”33 Still, the wedding represented the

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ultimate celebration in Jewish culture, even the most traditional Jewish communitiespartaking in the music, dancing and feasting.34

Odessa’s Jews revered the Jewish wedding as much as their more traditional cous-ins in the shtetl, but in Russia’s city of sin, crime, debauchery and anarchy were at thevery core of the festivities. Semen Iushkevich first unveiled the Odessan Jewishwedding in his novel Leon Drei, where the party’s abundance and wild ecstasy servedas an instrument for the manipulative protagonist to advance his swindling.35 Soviet-era mythmakers further developed this theme, portraying the Odessan wedding as aconfluence of crime, dissipation, Judaic ritual and, in some cases, political conflict.

The chaotic Jewish wedding often appears in Odessan street songs produced in the1920s. Perhaps the most famous one is “Svad’ba Shneersona” (Shneerson’sWedding), composed in 1920 by Miron Iampol’skii, a native-born Odessan, andrecorded much later by Arkadii Severnyi.36 The song begins in an infernal state ofanarchy:

There is an awful racket in Shneerson’s houseEverything’s running wild, all hell has broken loose

Uzhasno shumno v dome ShneersonaSe tit zikh khoishekh – priamo dym idet.37

A cacophony of music plays, emanating from three different gramophones. The guests“all dance around in wild ecstasy [v ugare dikom], shaking the house’s foundations.”38

The party, however, is nearly shut down by the newly installed Soviet officials, whounexpectedly show up and berate the happy couple for not receiving “officialpermission” for the marriage, threatening to annul it the following day. But the groomsaves the day by punching the official in the teeth; joy is restored and everybodyresumes dancing.

Though written in Russian, “Shneerson’s Wedding” abounds in Yiddishisms, mostnotably “se tit zikh khoishekh,” which means “all hell has broken loose,” and “shpilit,”which is used instead of the Russian “igraet,” for “playing.” The song’s characters oftenhave partially or entirely Yiddish names, including “Abrasha der Molochnik” (Abe theMilkman) and, most comically, “Khaim Kachkes,” which may be translated as “Khaimthe Duck.” With its interspersed Yiddish phrases and inflections, “Shneerson’sWedding” captures the Jewishness of Odessa, and with its pandemonium, profusionof food, and violent overtones the song captures the Odessanness of its Jews.39

The most infamous Odessan Jewish wedding in Soviet literature and film is thewedding of Benia Krik’s immense and unattractive sister Dvoira, a lavish affair,where “turkeys, roasted chicken, geese, gefilte fish and fish soup in which lakes oflemon shimmered like mother-of-pearl” are served.40 Liquor flows profusely, withincessant toasting “to life” (lechaim!), and, in the film Benia Krik, the intoxicated andgluttonous guests are shown storming the dance floor. They may be dancing the tradi-tional Jewish horah – arm in arm, rapidly swirling in circles – but the revellers areanything but traditional Jews; Benia’s gangsters lead the way and Liubka’s prostitutesentertain the guests, while a one-man band furiously pounds away on his drums andblares his trumpet. Trouble ensues, however, when the police chief shows up at thewedding in advance of a massive raid planned against the gangsters, the policeassuming that a drunk and distracted underworld could be nabbed in one fell swoop.But the joke is on them. Benia’s men are aware of the impending assault and launch

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a pre-emptive strike against tsarist officialdom, burning the police station to theground. The wedding thus concludes with the Jewish criminals ending up on top; it isa euphoric celebration for all, except for the police, and perhaps the groom, an unfor-tunate-looking little Jewish man who is last seen being smothered and devoured by hisenormous bride.41

Benia Krik’s wedding is emblematic of old Odessa. It is a realm of empowermentwhere weak shtetl Jews are magically transformed into gigantic and fierce gangsterswho control their own destiny and tower above the Gentile authorities. It is a realmwhere traditional Judaic practices, Jewish speech and Jewish mannerisms areironically manipulated for criminal ends. And it is a realm where merrimentprevails in every situation, regardless of the danger and violence, lacking the solem-nity one would expect in a time of rampant criminality, revolutionary upheaval andantisemitism.

*

Not every mythologised odessit caroused and chiselled within the confines of his cityof sin, as the dislocations caused by the Revolution and Civil War often impelledcarousing sinners to become nomadic, seeking out other venues to practise their rogu-ery and indulge their thirst for sensuous pleasure. Il’ia Il’f and Evgenii Petrov under-took the ironic Sovietisation of the odessit in their novels The Twelve Chairs and TheGolden Calf, through the persona of Ostap Bender, who, despite his repeated claimsof Turkish descent, likely spent his formative years in Odessa’s Moldavanka district,keeping company with Benia Krik, Mishka Iaponchik and other Jewish charlatans.42

In both novels, Ostap Bender uses his vivid imagination, charm and intellect toconcoct elaborate schemes to acquire untold wealth and to end his impoverishedexistence as a wanderer in a rapidly changing Soviet Union.43 In The Twelve Chairs,he gets involved with a former marshall of the nobility, Ippolit (Kisa) Vorobianinov,who has recently learned that his mother-in-law hid the family jewels inside a chairfrom their dining room set before fleeing the Bolshevik takeover of their town. In TheGolden Calf, Bender allies himself with three dim-witted companions to hunt downand extort money from an alleged millionaire named Aleksandr Koreiko. The USSRrather than old Odessa serves as the landscape of knavery and humour in both novels,and, despite the ultimate failure of Bender’s missions, he repeatedly exhibits along theway all the qualities that mark him as an odessit reared and educated in the infamousJudaeo-kleptocracy known as old Odessa.

Ostap Bender never professes to be from Odessa, but his appearance, demeanourand fraudulent strategies firmly root him in the city’s traditions. When first introducedto the reader, Bender is described as dashing and robust; he contemplates becoming apolygamist, “since his virility and good looks were absolutely irresistible to theprovincial belles looking for husbands.”44 Like his forerunner Leon Drei, Benderviews marriage as a device for enrichment, and, in one instance, he seduces and wedsa widow merely to steal one of Vorobianinov’s former chairs, which she had earlieracquired. Bender rarely resorts to violence, and, like Benia Krik, he uses carefullycrafted and articulate extortion letters to rob Koreiko, his intended victim. He isintimately familiar with the Odessan underworld; he avows his superiority to thelegendary nineteenth-century Jewish criminal Son’ka Zolotaia Ruchka (Sonia theGolden Hand), and at one point he contends that “all contraband is made in littleArnaut Street in Odessa.”45 He occasionally uses Russian thieves’ cant of Hebraic

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origin, such as khipes, a commonly used expression for the act of robbing somebodywhile he is with a prostitute. The term comes from the Hebrew verb khipes ,meaning “to search.”46 Much like Leon Drei and Benia Krik, Bender is described as awild animal, seen pacing “up and down like a leopard [bars],” whose “long and noblenose” ably catches “the scent of roast meat [zapakh zharenogo]” when a potentialtarget enters the room.47 Like Benia Krik, Bender wears vibrantly coloured clothing,including a similar pair of “raspberry-coloured shoes.”48 His radiant attire is both areflection and a source of his strength. “No chair can withstand these shoes,” Benderinsists, and, upon declaring his intention to marry the widow Gritsatsueva, he polishes“his crimson shoes with the sleeve of his jacket.”49 Quite literally, Ostap Benderfollows in the footsteps of Benia Krik, the gangster king of Odessa.

Bender is a master dissimulator; he achieves control over others and compels themto do his bidding through psychological chicanery, linguistic manipulation and theassumption of false identities. Despite Vorobianinov’s distrust of Bender, he is power-less to refuse Bender’s demands, “losing his own personality and rapidly beingabsorbed by the powerful intellect of the son of a Turkish citizen.”50 When cajolingKoreiko to hand over his money, Bender speaks “in the atrocious manner of a pre-revolutionary attorney-at-law [v skvernoi manere dorevoliutsionnogo prisiazhnogopoverennogo], who catching hold of a little word, does not let it out of his teeth, anddrags it after him through the ten days of a great trial.”51 Bender destroys others bytaking their weaknesses and hyperbolically inflating them; he repeatedly calls Voro-bianinov the “gentleman from Paris” (gospodin iz Parizha), even though Vorobiani-nov has never left Russia.52 But as a former nobleman Vorobianinov is by definitionan alien in the Soviet proletarian state, and calling him an émigré is both a plausiblecharge and tantamount to branding him a traitor. Bender relishes impersonatingothers, particularly Soviet officials: as a fire inspector who (absurdly) cites articlesfrom the criminal code he is able to search an old people’s home for one of Vorobi-aninov’s missing chairs; as a grandmaster chess player (who has never played chessin his entire life) he is able to dupe an entire provincial town into financing his esca-pades; and as an artist (who can neither draw nor paint) he joins a theatre troop andwins free passage aboard their ship. Bender is usually unmasked as a fraud, but notbefore he flees the scene of his scam, confident of his enduring success as a Sovietcharlatan.

Bender’s charlatanism implicitly marks him as an odessit, with all the attendantattributes and cultural baggage characteristic of a swindler from Russia’s city of sin,including his indelible Jewishness. Although he is never described as Jewish, neverclaims to be Jewish and shows no particular affinity for the handful of patently Jewishcharacters who appear in the novels, Jewishness is embedded in Bender’s verylanguage – in the way he minces words, morally justifies his activities and bombasti-cally portrays himself as a misunderstood genius suffering at the hands of others.Despite the near total absence of Yiddishisms and Judaism in Bender’s speech andbehaviour, the Jewish origins of the archetypal odessit subtly emanate throughBender’s very demeanour.

Ostap Bender is the Soviet version of the schnorrer, the classic Jewish moochwho uses erudition, guilt and fundamentally flawed logic to manipulate others intosupporting him.53 But whereas the traditional Jewish schnorrer employs the Judaiclaw of the Talmud as his instrument of deception, Bender uses a secularised (andSovietised) variation. He regularly professes his entitlement to a share of Vorobiani-nov’s jewels by proclaiming his indispensability and his perpetual toil. “You see

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how I suffer, Kisa,” Bender kvetches, “and what risks I run for your chairs.”54

Vorobianinov’s repeated objections to Bender’s demands are countered by thelatter’s self-aggrandisement and his devaluation of the former’s own abilities.Bender berates Vorobianinov for allegedly “living off me for the last three months.For three months I’ve been providing you with food and drink and educating you.”55

Bender preaches his own morality to refute his villainy on many occasions; “Irespect the criminal code … [and] this is my weakness.”56 Like the schnorrer, whoprofesses his integrity through Talmudic logic, Bender cites his principles and hisidealism, juxtaposing them to the alleged crookedness of those around him. “I, forexample, am fed by ideas. I don’t stretch my paw for the sour rubles of some Execu-tive Committee. My aim is higher. As for you,” he chastises one of his collaboratorsin The Golden Calf, “I see that you are in love with money for its own sake.”57

Bender has mastered the art of the sanctimonious guilt trip, which he demonstrates inhis first encounter with Vorobianinov:

“You’re a rather nasty man,” retorted Bender. “You’re too fond of money.”

“And I suppose you aren’t?” squeaked Ippolit Matveevich in a flutelike voice.

“No, I’m not.”

“Then why do you want sixty thousand?”

“On principle!”58

And through his avowed principles and unmatched aptitude for deception, the“smooth operator” Ostap Bender inveigles a reluctant but powerless Vorobianinovinto promising him 40% of his wealth, should they actually succeed in finding it.

In the tradition of Sholem Aleichem’s characters, Ostap Bender perpetuallyexhibits his long-windedness. His ramblings are incessant, meandering without endand seemingly without a point, much like a Talmudic tractate or the well-knowngossiping of the shtetl matchmaker. For instance, Bender subjects Vorobianinov, the“gentleman from Paris,” to his tortuous tongue when first introducing himself:

Carefully locking the door, Bender turned to Vorobianinov, who was still standingin the middle of the room, and said:

“Take it easy, everything’s all right! My name’s Bender. You may have heard of me!”

“No, I haven’t,” said Ippolit Matveevich nervously.

“No, how could the name Ostap Bender be known in Paris? Is it warm there just now?It’s a nice city. I have a married cousin there. She recently sent me a silk handkerchiefby registered mail … Which frontier did you cross? Was it the Polish, Finnish, or Roma-nian frontier? An expensive pleasure, I imagine. A friend of mine recently crossed thefrontier. He lives in Slavuta, on the other side, and his wife’s parents live on the other.He had a row with his wife over a family matter; she comes from a temperamentalfamily. She spat in his face and ran away to her parents across the frontier. The fellowsat around for a few days but found things weren’t going well. There was no dinner andthe room was dirty, so he decided to make it up with her. He waited till night and thencrossed over to his mother-in-law. But the frontier guards nabbed him, trumped up acharge, and gave him six months. Later on he was expelled from the trade union. Thewife, they say, has now gone back, the fool, and her husband is in the workhouse. She isable to take him things … Did you come that way too?”59

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But even meandering monologues serve a manipulative purpose, and, just as theproverbial marriage broker’s verbosity helps bring about a mendacious business trans-action, Vorobianinov was ultimately “driven to despair by the stories of Bender’sfriends, and seeing that he was not getting anywhere, gave in” to the smooth opera-tor’s relentless demands.60

Bender’s ancestry thus traces back to the shtetl, but his schnorring, kvetching andverbosity have been transformed by a period of incubation in old Odessa. The tradi-tional schnorrer’s bombast, moral rectitude and purported value to the Jewishcommunity are ultimately absurd; he is a parasitical consumer of others’ resourceswho contributes nothing in return, other than assuaging the guilty conscience of hisbenefactor, which he, the schnorrer, is responsible for having produced through hiskvetching in the first place. But as an odessit who is fortified by the magic radiatingout of Russia’s Eldorado, where Jews physically and psychologically reign supreme,Bender is actually a source of strength and an invaluable asset to his criminal collab-orators. The jewels belong to Vorobianinov by right of inheritance, yet the formernobleman is utterly incapable of manoeuvring through the Soviet system. Bender’sclaim to have fed and educated Vorobianinov may be egotistical (to put it mildly), butit is not far from the truth. Vorobianinov and his roguish counterparts in The GoldenCalf need Ostap Bender because he is a veritable Odessan, who knows how to achievehegemony by using his good looks, his charms and his Jewish wit to achieve hiscriminal ends. Andrei Siniavskii is only partly correct in writing that Ostap Bender isthe most successful charlatan because “he is a Soviet man, wise to all the ways of –and ways out of – the new system.”61 Siniavskii confuses cause with effect; Bender isa “Soviet man” who can manipulate the system because he is an Odessan Jewishswindler nurtured on the bountiful bosom of “the Moldavanka, our generous mother,a life crowded with suckling babies, drying rags, and conjugal nights filled with big-city chic and soldierly tirelessness,” as Isaac Babel had earlier put it.62

Yet there is an even greater irony in Bender’s place as an odessit cast adrift in theworld of Soviet socialism. Despite his chutzpah and his histrionic pomposity, Benderoccasionally reveals his alienation and a personal sense of worthlessness. He bemoanshis fate as a schnorring swindler in a proletarian state:

“How pleasant it would be,” he remarked thoughtfully, “to work with a legal millionairein a well-organized bourgeois state with ancient capitalist traditions! There a millionaireis a popular figure. His address is known to everybody. He lives in a private house some-where in Rio de Janeiro. You go to him to keep an appointment, and in the hall itself,after the very first greetings, you take some money away from him. And all of this, bearin mind is done in a kindly way, politely: ‘Hello, sir. Excuse me. I’ll have to trouble youa bit. All right. That’s all.’ And that is all!”63

There is little room for a roguish Odessan in Soviet society. “You know, Vorobiani-nov,” Bender dramatically philosophises when their luck seems to have run out,

that chair reminds me of our life. We’re also floating with the stream. People push usunder and we come up again, although they aren’t too pleased about it. No one likes us,except for the criminal investigation department, which doesn’t like us either. Nobodyhas any time for us. If the chess enthusiasts had managed to drown us yesterday, the onlything left would have been the coroner’s report.64

Bender’s self-perception reflects that of the Diaspora Jew, a paradoxical fusion of thesense of entitlement of a divinely chosen nation with the self-denigration of a hapless

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people abandoned to their suffering in an unjust world. The juxtaposition of entitle-ment and suffering is at the core of the Jewish exilic condition, and it is a cultural tropethat is reflected in modern Jewish humour through the practice of kvetching.65

Bender’s Zion, however, is not the gilded city of Davidic Jerusalem, but rather theJewish city of sin on the shores of the Black Sea.

*

The myth of old Odessa was nearly a casualty of Stalinism, particularly during thefinal decade of the General Secretary’s rule, a period that marked a devastating turningpoint for Soviet Jewry. The anti-Cosmopolitan campaign of 1948–53 ravaged theSoviet Jewish culture that had flourished in the 1920s and 1930s.66 The MoscowYiddish theatre was shut down, leading Soviet Yiddish writers were executed andJewish doctors were accused of attempting to murder Stalin himself. Conmen withJewish family names were routinely “unmasked” on the pages of Soviet newspapers.67

Even Ostap Bender, whose indefatigable wit, charm and deceptions had made him ahero to many, was now attacked; a publication ban on both Il’f and Petrov novels wasput into effect, and only rescinded in 1956.68 Jewish criminality was omnipresent inthe official rhetoric of these years, but it was a grave and treasonous criminality thatallegedly aimed at annihilating the Soviet Union, not the frivolous delinquency of oldOdessa. Old Odessa was the antithesis of what Stalinist culture had become and themyth was accordingly silenced. But silence need not imply extinction, and the Odessamyth merely lay dormant during these years. Forcing the myth deep undergroundironically increased its potency, as Soviet discourse branded Odessa-Mama sinful anddeviant, even though it was the city of sin’s deviance that had made it so alluring inthe first place.

Although the state-sponsored antisemitism of Stalin’s final years in power largelyended under his successors, Jewish culture in the USSR never fully recovered thevibrancy of the pre-war years.69 Public discussion of anything relating to the Jews andtheir place amongst the Soviet nations had been effectively eliminated.70 There was nolonger a “Jewish question” to debate, according to the regime, as the Soviet govern-ment had ended centuries of persecution with its destruction of the old order and thecreation of a workers’ paradise rooted in “the friendship of all peoples.” Jewish suffer-ing during the Holocaust was denied any uniqueness, and the memory of their slaugh-ter was subsumed into the commemoration of all those who perished at the hands ofthe Nazis.71 The many political leaders, cultural figures, soldiers and scientists ofJewish descent whose achievements were celebrated had no nationality attached totheir names. “Jews,” writes Yuri Slezkine, “were aliens; Soviet heroes who happenedto be Jews were either not true heroes … or not true Jews.”72 Jewish charactersincreasingly vanished in post-Stalinist Soviet literature, and those who surfacedtended to be old. “The younger Jews,” writes Maurice Friedberg, “were thought to becompletely assimilated to the point where they could no longer be recognized, or tobe precise, should no longer be identifiable.”73 The Jews were not systematicallypersecuted under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, but they largely remained an awkwardnation amongst the socialist nations, denied most of the collective benefits enjoyed byother Soviet peoples, but burdened with many of the liabilities of a definable groupseen as separate and distinct from the Russian majority.74

The peculiar and ambiguous place of the Jew in the Soviet Union during the post-Stalin era is reflected in much of the humour produced, particularly (but not

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exclusively) in the anecdotes that proliferated and circulated. The following jokeunderscores the “anational” status of Soviet Jewry:

The director of the new Soviet International Symphony Orchestra is introducing hismusicians to some foreign journalists:

“This is Fedorov – he’s Russian; here’s Murzenko – he’s a Ukrainian; Saroian – anArmenian; Chikvili – a Georgian. And that is Rabinovich – a violinist.”75

Equally popular among Jewish musicians in the conservatory and those playingklezmer music in seedy taverns, the violin was often seen as the quintessential Jewishinstrument and as a marker of Jewishness. Another joke suggests the indelibility ofJewishness in the USSR, regardless of one’s chosen identity:

A telephone is ringing in the communal apartment.

“May I talk to Moishe, please,” the voice says.

A neighbour responds: “We don’t have anyone like that here.”

Another phone call: “May I talk to Misha?”

The neighbour shouts: “Moishe, it’s for you.”76

The Jew did not fit into the Soviet scheme of things, much as nineteenth-centuryEuropean Jewry also were an anomaly – God’s Chosen People divinely elected forredemption, but abandoned to their suffering amidst a sea of Gentiles. And just as theshtetls of Eastern Europe proved to be fertile ground for the genesis of traditionalJewish humour, the Soviet Union offered a secularised environment where it couldcontinue to flourish.77

Given that Odessa – the epicentre of Russian Jewish humour from the early twen-tieth century onwards – had a reputation as a Jewish city, the attempted elimination ofthe Jews from Soviet discourse fundamentally influenced the ways in which peoplewrote and talked about the city and its people, be it in fiction, in humour or in schol-arship. Soviet history books about Odessa almost completely effaced the Jew fromtheir narratives, inasmuch as it was possible to ignore a community that had consti-tuted 33% of the population for nearly a century.78 Where Jews had to be discussed,they were mentioned in passing, and fashioned to fit an appropriate Marxist–Leninistframework for a Russian-speaking city located in the Ukrainian Soviet SocialistRepublic. For V. Zagoruiko, Odessa was the site where “the working class of the twofraternal nations [dva bratskogo naroda] – the Ukrainians and the Russians” – unifiedagainst the capitalist bourgeoisie “largely made up of Greeks and Jews.”79 The Jewswere not credited with any of Odessa’s contributions to either local or national culture,and, conversely, they were not mentioned in conjunction with the city’s notoriouscriminality which had abetted the production of the Odessa myth.80 Even Sashka, theiconic Jewish fiddler who had famously entertained thieves and sailors in AlexanderKuprin’s semi-fictional story “Gambrinus,” vanished into oblivion: entertainment inthe seedy tavern was now credited to a “Romanian orchestra.”81 The denial ofOdessa’s Jewishness was ridiculed in Soviet anecdotes, much as they satirised Jewishlife in the USSR in general. In one such anecdote, an Odessan Jew is asked,

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328 J. Tanny

“Can you tell me, what is the composition of Odessa’s population?”

“Ten percent of the people are Russians; Ukrainians – also ten percent; Moldovans makeup five percent. And the rest – they are all locals [mestnoe naselenie].”82

In rendering the Jews of Odessa nameless they were ironically rendered the mostauthentic Odessans, for to be without ethnicity was to be a local, and thus a native ofthe city. Odessa was implicitly a Jewish city, even if the Jews were expunged from thehistorical record.

But the myth of Odessa continued to grow during this era precisely becauseimplicit Jewishness had been one of its defining qualities from the late nineteenthcentury onwards. Jewishness diffused in Odessa and the city of sin’s mythmakersweaved elements of Jewish culture into their stories, humour, memoirs and music. Tobe an odessit was to be Jewish, regardless of one’s name or one’s (real or professed)ethnic descent. Ranging from subtle to unambiguous, markers of Jewishnessabounded in the tales of old Odessa which circulated during the post-Stalin era, andthey are apparent in the speech, gestures and appearances of the (usually shady)characters who dotted the imagined landscape of Russia’s Eldorado.

The imagined odessit of the pre-1939 era had already been imbued with the behav-iour of the stereotypical East European Jew: verbosity, endless digressions, the tendencyto answer a question with another question, incessant kvetching about one’s health, andthe use of rapid and erratic gesticulations to accompany one’s words.83 All of theseattributes continued to be ascribed to the archetypal odessit of the post-Stalin era, andthey were usually presented in a humorous fashion, as in the following anecdotes:

“Is it true that Odessans love to answer a question with another question?”

“Why are you interested in knowing?”84

How is a restaurant in Odessa different from one in London?

In London you see people eat and hear them speak, whereas in Odessa you hear peopleeat and see them speak.85

A visitor arrives in Odessa and approaches a little old man carrying a watermelon.

“Excuse me, can you tell me how to get to Comintern street?”

“Please hold my watermelon.”

Once the little old man has emptied his hands he parts them and replies:

“How should I know?”86

The odessit is marked as Jewish, though he exudes elements of Jewishness that are notrooted in traditional Judaic practices and rituals.

Such markers of Jewishness have also figured prominently in the humour ofMikhail Zhvanetskii, a successful comedian from Odessa. In one of his sketches,written in the 1960s, Zhvanetskii contrasts the mannerisms of people in Riga, Tbilisi,Moscow and Odessa with the odessit speaking as one expects a stereotypical Jew tospeak, with some grammatically incorrect Russian thrown in for good measure:

And here’s how it is in Odessa:

“Can you please tell me, how can I get to Deribasov Street?”

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“Where you come from? [A sami s otkudova budete?]”

“I am from Moscow.”

“Really? What’s going on over there?”

“Nothing. What specifically are you interested in?”

“Nothing. … I’m just interested – you’re from Moscow, they’re from Voronezh, and weare in Odessa, may we all be healthy [chtob my byli vse zdorovy] … Do you work?”

“Of course I work, but really, I’m asking you: where is Deribasov Street.”

“Young man, why the rush? People stroll leisurely on Deribasov Street.”

“But you must understand, I need Deribasov Street …”

“I do understand, believe me I understand – I’ll take you there myself, even though Ihave such severe rheumatism. …”

“Listen, if you don’t know where Deribasov Street is, I’ll ask somebody else!”

“You are offending me. You have already offended me. Such a cultivated person asyourself – I can tell by your appearance. I don’t have such traits. I’ve worked for myentire life. Right from the cradle to work [priamo s gorshka na rabotu]. Oy, we had it sorough, our mother had eight children. Would you let yourself have eight kids? Mymama let herself have eight. She had absolutely no education, but now my children areattending university, and my poor mama, she’s now lying in the grave with my brotherand uncle. Why not go there now?”

“But you must understand, I need Deribasov Street”

“I understand, but really, is that any way to treat one’s parents? If your children don’tcome and visit you in the cemetery would they be right, do you understand me? Whereare you going? Deribasov is around the corner.”87

In another sketch, also from the 1960s, Zhvanetskii describes how Odessans alwayscarry on conversations with their hands, quipping that “a woman carrying a baby isincapable of telling you anything.”88 But it is ultimately Odessa’s unique discoursethat makes the city so appealing and exciting, which is why “there are so many writersin Odessa, because they need not invent anything. To write a story, one simply needsto open his window and transcribe what he hears.”89

Yet Jewish verbosity is not merely funny and thrilling; it is also a source of powerand strength. Through linguistic manipulation the odessit is able to gain control of anysituation, like the character Buba Kastorskii, an entertainer from Odessa who doublesas an undercover Bolshevik partisan in several Soviet films from the late 1960s whichare set during the Civil War.90 In The New Adventures of the Elusives (Novoyeprikliucheniia neulovimykh), Buba’s voluble banter, his exaggerated movements andhis comical singing all serve as his means for assisting his fellow partisans – four boyswho are trying to undermine the control of the White Army in southern Russia. WhenBuba is brought to White headquarters on suspicion of espionage, he turns the tableson his interrogator by annoying him with a long-winded (and utterly nonsensical)scheme to further the cause of the anti-Bolshevik forces:

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330 J. Tanny

“Colonel, I am just the man you need!”

“I don’t understand.”

“I am sure you are wondering how you can employ me in your cause. Of course it isentirely up to you to decide, it is your right. But I have a proposition for you, and believeme, I’m your man: working as an agent abroad. I’ve been studying Spanish and I canwork for you, say in Argentina. I could work undercover in the guise of a night clubagent? So? Have no doubt that I can play this role. You’ve seen me work on stage?”

“I’ve seen you.”

“OK, so let’s suppose someone comes to me looking for work and he says to me ‘do youneed a waiter?’ and I’d answer ‘sorry we’ve already got waiters.’ Then he says ‘I’m auseful guy,’ and I answer in Spanish ‘Buenos Aires shlimazl besa me mucho.’ Clever,no? And then in the evenings, while dancing I’ll be passing on information to you. Here– how about like this [Buba starts dancing around the Colonel’s office.] And this willmean, in other words, that it is dangerous to come here, no? And I’m fantastic at keepingsecrets! I’ll tell you a story and then it will all be clear. When I was 16 years old I gaveprivate lessons —”

“Are you not capable of being quiet?!”

“Yes, of course … Still, I think I’ll tell you the story anyway. I gave geometry lessonsto the wife of a butcher. To be honest, actually it wasn’t his wife, but his son. His wifeonly came into the picture later. … But really the butcher’s wife she was beautiful likea goddess, and she loved me like Juliet loves Romeo, you’ve heard that story haven’tyou? —”

“Will you please be quiet!”

Buba is eventually released but refuses to part without returning to his unfinished tale:

“I should really tell you the rest of the story about the Butcher’s wife. This way you’llbe convinced that I can undertake any sort of serious mission.”

“Some other time. I’m extremely busy now, believe me.”

“Good, I’ll come back tomorrow.”

“No, please leave already.”

“Ah, understood, understood, I’ll be summoned in secret. I’m an odessit, I’m fromOdessa, greetings to you.”

“Goodbye Mr. Kastorskii!”91

Buba Kastorskii’s duplicity is made possible through his storytelling, his use of theword shlimazl being the sole explicit indicator of Jewishness. “I’m an odessit, I amfrom Odessa, greetings!” (Ia odessit, ia iz odessy, zdras’te!) is Buba’s motto, a mottothat is laden with a deeper significance, for in declaring himself an odessit Buba isimplying that he is a Jewish charlatan from Russia’s gilded city of sin. And, like BeniaKrik, Ostap Bender and other Odessans, Buba Kastorskii is empowered by his Jewishcharlatanism.

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Most depictions of Odessa’s criminals during this era are replete with either mean-dering monologues or references to the thieves’ penchant for speeches filled withhyperbole, complaints and self-aggrandisement. Much like Ostap Bender, LevSheinin’s devious Odessan character known simply as “Admiral Nelson” speaks inmetaphors (“The ambassadors have arrived! Strike up the band! … Let us rise tohonour the ages!”).92 “There was no stopping the ‘Admiral,’” Sheinin observes. “Hehad had several shots of vodka and washed them down with a large beer, and nowengulfed us with his eloquence. … We were showered with philosophical platitudesand boastful reminiscences of an old safe-cracker.”93 Admiral Nelson repeatedlybemoans his own sufferings – which are always endured in the service of others –including a near death experience:

By 7 a.m. there was not a doctor who would have given a copper for my life, that’s howbeat up I was. By eight I had one foot in the grave and could smell the dampness. Myheart was barely beating and I had no pulse. Manka the Flea, the owner of the joint, justsobbed as she looked at me and wailed: “My poor dear ‘Admiral,’ what’ll we tell themin Odessa? … How will we ever explain why we couldn’t save your life? They’ll set myplace on fire!”94

Similarly, Leonid Utesov describes a speech given by Mishka Iaponchik, gangsterking of the Moldavanka, in 1919, which Utesov, as a member of Odessa’s artisticcommunity, felt the need to attend:

In those days Odessa’s artists all knew Iaponchik. The thieves and bandits invited us totheir meeting, where the King gave a speech. His speech was filled with an unbelievablemixture of different languages and jargons, densely interspersed with intricate andflorid cussing. No professional writer, including myself, could possibly convey his oration,as it was so far beyond the bounds of literature. Even a great master like Babel, who inthose days was so enamoured by the language of these people, needed to soften andembellish it.95

Bad language it may have been, but Utesov and Odessa’s other mythmakers continuedto feel attracted to the rhetoric, bombast and cursing of the archetypal odessit, anddelighted in sharing these stories with their eager audiences.

As a master of words, the odessit is particularly adept at cursing, a practice whoseorigins trace back to Yiddish.96 In form and in content, the Yiddish curse survived thetransition to Russian in Odessa, and in many stories, films and anecdotes the curseserves as a marker of Jewishness. Yiddish curses always begin with “may you” (zolstu),usually rendered in Russian as chtob ty, and its presence at the beginning of a phrasealerts the reader that a verbal invective is likely to follow.97 The following anecdotesuggests that cursing, Jewishness and criminality are inseparable in Odessa:

The worst possible curse in Odessa [Samoe strashnoe proklatie v Odesse]:

“May you have to live only on your salary!” [Chtob ty zhil tol’ko na svoiu zarplatu!]98

Odessa is a city of thieves and to not have an illicitly acquired supplementary incomeis to suffer humiliation. Cursing and criminality also cross paths in KonstantinPaustovskii’s memoirs of Odessa during the revolutionary era, in his description ofAunt Khava, who unleashes her verbal abuse upon the gangster Simon Lop-Ear(Sen’ka Visloukhii), after he murders her crib-spotting husband:

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May you, Simon, get drunk on vodka with rat poison and die in your vomit! And mayyou kick your own mother Miriam, the old viper [gadiuka], for giving birth to such aprogeny, such a fiend of hell! May all the Moldavanka boys sharpen their pen-knives andcut you into pieces during twenty days and twenty nights! May you, Simon, burn andburst in your own sizzling fat!99

According to Paustovskii, Aunt Khava was to be taken away to an asylum for herostensibly lunatic ravings. But she is, in fact, speaking the universal language of theodessit, which is comically rooted in the verbosity, kvetching, bombast and cursingthat governed discourse in old Odessa.

Language was by far the most common marker of Jewishness employed byOdessa’s mythmakers during the post-Stalin era. But there were others, includingbehaviour, physical appearances, and subtle allusions to infamous Odessans of formertimes. Jewish complaints about one’s health have historically been associated withparticular diseases and conditions, such as diabetes (which in nineteenth-centuryEurope was thought to be a “Jewish” illness), heart problems and a general anxietyover one’s well-being.100 One popular joke describes how:

The Frenchman says, “I’m tired and thirsty. I must have cognac.”

The German says, “I’m tired and thirsty. I must have beer.”

The Russian says, “I’m tired and thirsty. I must have vodka.”

The Scotsman says, “I’m tired and thirsty. I must have whisky.”

The Jew says, “I’m tired and thirsty. I must have diabetes.”101

“Jewish illnesses” come up repeatedly in the depiction of Odessan characters. InHryhorii Plotkin’s play Na rassvete one of Mishka Iaponchik’s lieutenants is almostforced to eat fish soup (ukha) against his will, but cries out for salvation from thisterrible fate, insisting that he suffers from diabetes and the soup will cause him severeagony.102 Similarly, Mikhail Zhvanetskii’s sketch “A Wedding for 170 People” isfilled with Odessans who are either complaining about their own health or discussingother people’s ailments. It seems as if all 170 guests are suffering from “heart condi-tions” (infarkt, mikroinfarkt), kidney problems, sclerosis and stomach pains, and,when it is revealed that one of the guests is a doctor, he is immediately inundated bythose seeking free medical advice. But this is still Odessa and, like all Odessanweddings, it is a frenetically paced chaotic event with swarms of people, a profusionof food, and endless toasting, implying that the abundance and glitter of Eldorado arenot incompatible with the Jewish ailment.103 Other exemplary Odessans suffer fromneuroses, including Buba Kastorskii, who tells his interrogator, “I’m an artist, I can’tstand nervous tension. I can’t have a breakdown before I go on a big mission.”104

Whereas the archetypal odessit of the inter-war era usually transcended the traditionalimage of the Jew as weak, sickly and neurotic, his post-war successor was lessremoved from this legacy of the shtetl.105

The odessit’s physical appearance is often a marker of Jewishness (and equally ofOdessanness). In Plotkin’s Na rassvete, Mishka Iaponchik’s two lieutenants arenamed Nosatyi (“Big-nosed”) and Ryzhii (“Red,” presumably because of his red hair),both of which are rooted popular Jewish stereotypes.106 Lev Sheinin’s Admiral Nelson

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is described as being red-headed and one-eyed, which is likely a direct reference notonly to the British naval leader but also to Babel’s character Froim Grach, whopossessed both these attributes. Buba Kastorskii’s Odessan-Jewish genealogy is alsosuggested by his little white poodle which accompanies him around town, a probableallusion to Aleksandr Kuprin’s Sashka the Fiddler, whose closest companion was alsoa small white dog. The odessit is usually marked as both Jewish and charlatan, and themythmakers of the post-Stalin era inherited a set of images, idioms and signs that theywere able to deploy without explicitly revealing where they had originally come from.

Some of these Odessan characters do in fact have Jewish sounding names, such asPaustovskii’s Aunt Khava and her husband Tsires (whose unlikely name means“Afflictions” in Yiddish), and the aunt of the bride in Zhvanetskii’s “A Wedding for170 People,” named Gerda Iakovlevna Likhtenshtullershpillershtil’.107 But therelationship between one’s name and one’s ethnicity in old Odessa is frequentlyconvoluted, which is fitting for a community known for its fusion of different cultures.A presumably Jewish name is often presented in conjunction with an improbablenationality, as with Ostap Bender, whose claim of descent from Turkish janissaries ispatently absurd.108 In Mark Zakharov’s film The Twelve Chairs, Bender’s biographyis presented through a series of still images, beginning with his “Papa” a rather severe-looking bearded man wearing a fez. This is followed by shots of Bender’s “manyprofessions,” which include a cart driver, a dentist, a convict, the conductor of anorchestra, and an aviator. Bender is depicted as the classic Jewish luftmensch (jack ofall trades) taken to ridiculous extremes, with his stint in prison transforming him froman ordinary luftmensch into a crooked odessit.109 Bender’s professed Mediterraneanorigins is a theme that surfaces elsewhere, most notably in the criminal folksong “Ianaletchik Benia-Khuligan” (I am Benia-hooligan the bandit), whose narrator Beniaclaims to be half Greek and half Turkish (Ia i Grek i Turok popolam) notwithstandinghis Jewish name, an obvious allusion to Babel’s Benia Krik.110

At other times, however, shady characters from Odessa with markers of implicitJewishness have names that are clearly not of Jewish origin. In the film, Svad’ba vMalinovke (A Wedding in Malinovka), which takes place during the Civil War in asmall village in southern Russia, one of the principal characters is a charlatan fromOdessa named Popandopulo, a stereotypically Greek name. In the tradition of theodessit, Popandopulo dances, sings about his beloved city of sin and boasts that beforethe Revolution “I had lots of professions, that’s why the Odessa criminal investigationdepartment had me on record” (Ia imel mnogo spetsial’nostei; za chto i sostoial nauchete v odesskom ugolovnom rozyske).111 The Revolution ostensibly swept away hisformerly sordid life in Odessa, and he is now on the road, employed as an assistant toa Cossack Ataman named Grisha, in whose service he bombastically proclaimshimself the “Minister of Finance and Aide-de-Camp Popandopulo from Odessa.”Popandopulo presents himself as a tough thug, but nobody takes him seriously. Hismovements are awkward, effeminate and abounding in exaggerated gesticulations. Hefails at the one task his boss assigns to him: to induce a young peasant woman (whois already betrothed to another) to marry Grisha. In one instance, Popandopulo’sattempt to capture the intended bride is frustrated when she batters him with a bigstick. Pleading with her to stop, Popandopulo cries out that he is “shell-shocked” (nenado Ia kontuzhennyi) and suffers from his fragile “nervous system.” And in a nod toIl’f and Petrov’s The Little Golden Calf Popandopulo is last seen fleeing with a goosehe has stolen, just like one of Ostap Bender’s unlucky partners in crime, MikhailSamuelovich Panikovskii, an old Jewish thief from Kiev. Implicit Jewishness

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pervades Popandopulo’s behaviour, and in proclaiming himself to be a crook fromOdessa he is admitting to his Jewish pedigree: a corrupt cousin of the equally corruptLeon Drei, Benia Krik, Mishka Iaponchik and Ostap Bender – his relatives ineverything but name.

The intersection of implicit Jewishness with Odessa’s criminality and revelryreached its pinnacle in Leonid Utesov’s memoirs, particularly the final volume,Spasibo, serdtse!, originally published in 1976.112 The book is a tour-de-forcehomage to old Odessa and combines all the elements and approaches used tomythologise old Odessa during the previous half-century. Although he mentions hisown Jewish upbringing on a few occasions, Jewishness is never explicitly imputedto any of the many tales he includes about the city’s markets, gangsters, musiciansand writers. His very style of writing, particularly in his lengthy opening chapter,“The Odessa of My Childhood,” bears all the hallmarks of Russianised Yiddish (orperhaps Yiddishised Russian) discourse, with its frenetic pace, meandering mono-logues, and intonation. All these techniques are harnessed by Utesov to sellRussia’s Eldorado to his prospective readers, to demonstrate that there should beroom to celebrate a city of merrymakers in their socialist motherland. Perhaps remi-niscent of Sholem Aleichem’s Menakhem-Mendl when he first arrives in Odessaand marvels at its wonders, Utesov feverishly depicts this implausible oasis on theBlack Sea:

Do you know what is Odessa? No you do not know what is Odessa! There are manycities in the world, but none with such beauty. Look at Odessa from the sea, heaven!From the shore! Exactly the same. It cannot be denied [da chto i govorit]! WhenOdessans want to say that somebody lives well, they say: “he lives like God in Odessa[on zhivet, kak bog v Odesse].” Try saying this in Odessa: “He lives like God, let’s sayin New York.” They would make a laughing-stock of you or you would be sent to anasylum. This is Odessa!113

Utesov had once lived and thrived in paradise, just as Menakhem-Mendl’s wife hadearlier accused her husband of doing, “living like God in Odessa” (lebt zikh op, vi gotin ades), and Utesov adopts this popular nineteenth-century Yiddish expression tomake his point.114

For Utesov, old Odessa’s marketplace was saturated with all the boisteroushaggling, kvetching and cursing one finds in Zhvanetskii’s dialogues. “Haggling is themost important thing,” writes Utesov, a practice illustrated in the following scene:

Customer: How much?Seller: Thirty.Customer: What?Seller: Rubles.Customer: I thought you meant kopecks.Seller: Ok then, twenty?Customer: What?Seller: Rubles.Customer: Two.Seller: Unreasonable, may you be healthy.Customer: Ok, an additional fifty.Seller: What?Customer: Kopecks.Seller: May I not see the sun at night, less than fifteen I cannot doCustomer: An additional five.

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Seller: What?Customer: Kopecks.Seller: May I live this way with your wife, I can’t do less than ten.Customer: An additional five.Seller: OK five, let’s shake on it and we’ll be done.Customer: Five what?Seller: Rubles.Customer: Knock off two and all is in order.Seller: I’ll knock off one …115

Utesov insists that such haggling at the market is necessary because “it is an art form[iskusstvo],” one of the many artistic achievements of old Odessa’s inhabitants.

And there were other artistic achievements. Utesov (facetiously) creditsimplicitly Jewish Odessans with the invention of jazz music, an assertion he hadinitially made through one of his comedic sketches and subsequently recorded in hismemoirs, in a piece dubbed “How Orchestras Play at Weddings in Odessa.” Utesovtells the story of a customer who needed to procure a cheap orchestra, and thoseselected by the musician’s employment office were incapable of reading music,knowing only various melodies. “And these musicians,” who were incapable ofreadings notes,

each performed as a soloist, in an original free and improvisational manner. This curiousway of playing later became popular in America ten to fifteen years later – those smallamateur Negro bands in New Orleans. Like those poor Odessan musicians, those in NewOrleans did not use musical scores and freely and at times with inspiration, playedvariations of well-known melodies.116

Jazz was thus invented in Odessa – not in New Orleans – by impoverished “wedding”musicians and, although Utesov does not mention their ethnicity, it is clear that theyare supposed to be Jewish: many of the popular Soviet jazz musicians were Jews whohad come from southern Russia during the inter-war era; Jewish klezmer music is animprovised genre of music characterised by wailing fiddles and clarinets, whichUtesov had played in his youth and subsequently used in his renditions of criminalfolksongs; and, finally, Odessa had already been mythologised as a city of deviantJewish musicians who performed in the brothels, bars and taverns.117 Accordingly,Soviet jazz was invented by the crafty odessit, whose musical “originality” was actu-ally the product of his expertise in feigning technical proficiency.

But the Jewishness of this tale may in fact be deeper than its oblique references toJewish musicians and klezmer music, for Utesov’s skit bears a striking resemblanceto a Jewish folktale from the nineteenth century about scheming Jewish musicians.Seth Rogovoy relates this story in his study of the history of klezmer music:

In the small town of Pitovska … there was a sugar-processing plant owned by Potovsky,an absentee Polish nobleman. Potovsky sent a message to his local overseer to preparefor a visit to the plant by the owner and a coterie of his fellow noblemen. In the scrambleto put together a welcoming party, the only musicians available to perform for theoccasion were the famed klezmorim of Zaslaw.

The overseer called on Yankel the Fiddler, the leader of the Zaslaw troupe, and hired himto provide the music for the party, but only on the condition that the musicians read fromsheet music. Conditions in the Pale being what they were, Yankel could not very wellturn down the well-paying gig, and so he agreed to the conditions and assured the over-seer that he could supply him with everything as requested.

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When he told them about the upcoming gig in Pitovska, Yankel’s klezmorim were allvery excited, not only to be playing for such a distinguished crowd, but for the handsomefixed sum they would receive, instead of just the usual table tips. But when Yankel toldthem that in order to make the gig they had to read music, they were crest-fallen, as noneof them could read, or even owned, any music.

Yankel told them not to worry. “Go to the market and buy some music stands, and bringthem to the gig along with a Bible or prayer book,” he said. When they got to the party,they set up their music stands, opened their books on them, and began to play. They allkept their gazes focused on the Hebrew characters in the books in front of them. As themusic played, the guests danced, and the party was a great success.

One of the guests, however, an amateur pianist from Warsaw, grew suspicious. He hadheard that Jewish musicians were untrained amateurs who played strictly by ear. Whenthe musicians took a break, he walked over to where they were and peeked at their music.“What strange notation,” he said to one of them. “Is this some sort of witchcraft?”

The musicians panicked, but without skipping a beat, Yankel took control of the situa-tion. “Ah,” he said, “You see our special kind of musical notation, known only to Jewishmusicians.” The nobleman looked again at the odd squiggles on the page and, not recog-nizing the Hebrew alphabet, merely shrugged and nodded and walked away. Themoment of crisis passed, the party resumed, and the klezmorim walked away withenough rubles to get them through the lean part of the musical season.118

The Jewish musicians of Zaslaw were not only clever swindlers, they were also adeptat achieving their acquisitive ends by employing props of Judaic origin, much asBabel’s gangsters use their Jewishness to further their criminality.

It is impossible to know whether or not Utesov had ever heard this story, but itwould not be the only time that he borrowed from Jewish folklore in his writings. Inanother instance, Utesov draws on a well-known story from the tales of “the WiseMen of Chelm,” a community of Jewish schlemiels whose misadventures werepopular among nineteenth-century shtetl dwellers and remain so today in Americaand Israel. The original tale is about a Chelmite who leaves his town to go and visitWarsaw, but he gets lost and unwittingly returns home, where he lives out theremainder of his days thinking that he is in fact in Warsaw, amongst people whomerely happen to resemble the Chelmites he left behind.119 Utesov uses this story indescribing Babel and his alleged longing to return to Odessa, which he left in theearly 1920s. That the story stems from Jewish folklore would be unknown toUtesov’s readers unless they were well versed in the escapades of the Wise Men ofChelm.120

Utesov grew up in Jewish Odessa, and, just as he had previously used his music tocelebrate Odessa as a Jewish city of sin, his memoirs served as his chosen medium inthe post-Stalin era.121 Through his writings, Utesov effectively reconstructed oldOdessa as a Jewish city, using a Yiddish-inflected narrative style pervaded withJewish characters, fables and witticisms. But it is an implicit Jewishness, an approachthat had been used by many of Odessa’s mythmakers before Utesov. Utesov merelyrefined this technique and ultimately perfected it during the mid-1970s, a period oftenconsidered to be the nadir of Soviet culture in general and Soviet Jewish culture inparticular.

And perhaps Utesov’s success at writing Jewish stories about old Odessa withoutany Jews helps explain the fate of the 1968 film Interventsiia (Intervention), whichwas not released until 1987. The story follows a plotline that is characteristic for the

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Odessa myth, since it takes place during the Civil War and depicts how Bolshevikforces combated the foreign interventionists who sought to use Odessa as a base torecapture control of Soviet Russia and terminate the Revolution. Like Plotkin’s Narassvete, the movie features Odessa’s archetypal gangsters, who dominate parts of thecity, supply opposing forces with weapons and fashion themselves as both revolution-aries and loyalists to the old regime, depending on the exigencies of the givenmoment. But unlike most of the depictions of old Odessa that date from the post-warera, the city is explicitly (and entirely) Jewish: the scores of musicians who appear invarious scenes – all playing the violin – are improbably dressed in Hasidic garb; thelittle old pharmacist is Jewish (and also a violinist); Filipp the bandit admits to havingbeen in the synagogue (apparently to hear the choir sing); and the elusive revolution-ary, played by Vladimir Vysotskii, is named Evgenii Izrailevich Brodskii. EvenMadame Ksidias, who is from a prominent merchant family and is presumably Greek,is familiar with the local idiom – Judaeo-Russian thieves’ cant – a fact revealed toviewers when she ironically shouts “Sha! Sha! Sha!” at her son after he declares thathis father had been a thief.122 Interventsiia’s old Odessa is undeniably a Jewish city,and the different characters come together at the point where revolution, criminalityand entertainment intersect with one another.

Miron Chernenko, who worked in the Soviet film industry, maintains that Inter-ventsiia was not released – could not have been released – in 1968 because it was tooJewish.123 For Chernenko, Soviet Jewish culture was a casualty of Stalinism. But sucha conclusion is misleading: although Soviet Jewish culture during the post-Stalin eradid not flourish as it had before World War Two, it was far from extinct. And in manyrespects the Odessa myth served as a surrogate channel through which Jewish culturecould be produced and disseminated; old Odessa was marked as a Jewish city and itsdepiction entailed the use of embedded idioms of Jewishness. An analysis of theOdessa myth demonstrates that a rich Jewish culture continued to exist in the USSR,so long as it remained within certain boundaries, subtle and implicit, whether it bethrough Yiddish-inflected monologues, comically shady characters, certain physicalfeatures, or references to folkloric motifs that had originally developed at other timesand in other places.

AcknowledgementsI would like to thank Sam Johnson, Managing Editor of East European Jewish Affairs, as wellas the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback. I would also like to thank Alli-son Rosen, Larry Tanny, Yuri Slezkine, David Shneer, Olga Gershenson and Nicole Eaton,who each read various incarnations of this essay.

Notes on contributorJarrod Tanny is currently the Schusterman Post-doctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at OhioUniversity. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, focusing onRussian-Jewish history. Originally from Montreal, he completed an MA at the University ofToronto and a BA at McGill University. His dissertation examined the city of Odessa, theSoviet Union’s version of New Orleans, where Jewish gangsters, thieves and jokesterstransformed the streets into a land of decadence and merriment. Dr Tanny also specialises inthe study of Jewish humour and the impact that traditional Yiddish culture has had on popularculture in America and the USSR. He is presently teaching courses on all aspects of Jewishhistory and culture, as well as working on the further development of Ohio University’s JewishStudies Certificate Program.

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Notes1. Averchenko, “Odessa,” 323–4.2. Anthropologists and folklorists have often sought to distinguish the “myth” from the

“legend” and from the “folktale.” Many scholars have argued that myths deal with gods,monsters and supernatural events, often before the beginning of time. Legends and folk-tales, conversely, take place within time and usually involve human beings. See, forinstance, the essays by William Bascom and J.W. Rogerson, as well as Alan Dundes’s intro-duction, in Dundes, Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth; and Stith Thomp-son, “Myth and Folktales,” in Myth: A Symposium, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok. Otherscholars, however, suggest that such distinctions do not always work and advocate a moreexpansive definition of myth. Robert Segal points out that every academic discipline holdsmultiple theories of myth and mythology. In Myth: A Very Short Introduction, Segalprovides a historical overview of the different ways in which myth has been approached,relating it to science, philosophy, religion, psychology and other fields. See alsoSienkewicz, Theories of Myth; and Von Hendy, The Modern Construction of Myth. More-over, many scholars have demonstrated how the themes of traditional myths rooted in thesupernatural have been transfigured to fit a secular and scientific epoch. See, for instance,Eliade, Myth and Reality, 183–4. In “The Myth of Washington,” in Dundes, Sacred Narra-tive: Readings in the Theory of Myth, an essay by Dorothea Wender demonstrates howGeorge Washington, a “real man” has been transformed by American cultural tradition intoa mythical being, into what she calls a “faded god,” and the many legends surrounding himare replete with pagan symbols and motifs. Simcha Weinstein similarly argues that tradi-tional Jewish folklore fundamentally influenced the creation of twentieth-century comicbook superheroes, such as Superman, Batman and the Incredible Hulk. See Weinstein, Up,Up, and Oy Vey. On the nation and its fundamental connection to myth construction, seeStrath, “Introduction,” 20. The distinction between “myth,” “legend” and “folktale” is notalways obvious, and, accordingly, I use the terms interchangeably in this essay.

3. Strath, “Introduction,” 37.4. It would be both presumptuous and naive of me to suggest that my own analysis is some-

how objective and located outside the realm of the Odessa myth. My imagination wasinitially piqued through Isaac Babel’s exotic Jewish gangsters and Sholem Aleichem’sfantasies of Eldorado; I spent hours wandering the streets of Odessa, wondering whereold Odessa was and whether it had ever existed at all. I embraced every sign and everyclue that spoke of old Odessa and probably rejected many of the city’s aspects that didnot fit my vision. Nevertheless, I have tried to provide a sober assessment of how sucha myth – certainly unique in imperial Russia and the USSR, and perhaps unique in theworld – could and did develop. And I hope I have provided adequate context for eachera to help explain why mythmakers may have constructed their old Odessa in theirparticular fashion, using specific imagery, language and tone.

5. On the history of Odessa’s Jews before the Revolution, see Kotler, Ocherki; Polishchuk,Evrei Odessy; Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa. For a general history of Odessa, seeHerlihy, Odessa; and Atlas, Staraia Odessa. See also Tanny, “City of Rogues andSchnorrers,” chaps 2–3. Although the census of 1897 did not include questions about“nationality” or “ethnicity,” the demographic makeup of Odessa can be discerned withrelative accuracy by looking at the data relating to mother tongue. While Russian speak-ers made up 50% of the city’s inhabitants, 33% declared Yiddish to be their mothertongue. Other ethno-linguistic communities included Ukrainians (6%), Polish (5%),German (2–3%), and Greek (1–2%). See Herlihy, Odessa, 242.

6. On Odessa’s Jewish criminals during the pre-revolutionary era, see Tanny, “City ofRogues and Schnorrers,” chap. 3; Sylvester, Tales of Old Odessa, chaps 1–2; andGerasimov, “‘My ubivaem tol’ko svoikh’.”

7. Although the 1920s are not documented as well as the tsarist period, archival evidencesuggests that the patterns of Jewish criminality of the pre-revolutionary era largelycontinued during the early years of the NEP, despite the Bolsheviks’ attempt to decimatethe city’s underworld. See Tanny, “City of Rogues and Schnorrers,” chap. 4.

8. See ibid., chap. 3.9. During the revolutionary era and Civil War (1917–21), power changed hands eight times

in Odessa. See Taubenshlak and Iavorska, Gde obryvaetsia Rossiia, 21.

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10. Babel, “How Things Were Done in Odessa,” 151.11. Babel, “The King,” 134.12. Ibid., 137.13. On Mishka Iaponchik’s life and the many different portrayals of him, see Shkliaev,

“Mishka Iaponchik”; Savchenko, “Mishka Iaponchik – ‘korol” odesskikh banditov”;Kravets, Kto takoi Mishka Iaponchik; and Tanny, “City of Rogues and Schnorrers,”chaps 3 and 5.

14. Jabotinsky, Povest’ moikh dnei, 43.15. Ibid.16. Benia Krik, dir. Vladimir Vil’ner, 1926; Babel, “Benia Krik,” 930.17. Babel, “Liubka the Cossack,” 156.18. Ibid. The Baal Shem-Tov was the founder of the Hasidic movement in the eighteenth

century. See Rosman, Founder of Hasidism. In his cycle of stories Red Cavalry, Babeldepicts the victimisation and suffering of Hasidic Jews during the Civil War. See Babel,“Gedali” and “The Rabbi.”

19. Babel, “How Things were Done in Odessa,” 151.20. On Babel’s Yiddish inflections, see Cukierman, “The Odessa School of Writers”; Sicher,

Style and Structure, chap. 6; and idem, Jews in Russian Literature, chap. 3.21. Babel, “Korol’,” 123.22. At the very beginning of “Korol’,” a messenger says to Benia, “Ia imeiu vam skazat’

paru slov” (I have a few words to tell you), rather than the correct “Ia dolzhen vamskazat’ paru slov.” Using the verb imet’ in this context is probably a direct borrowingfrom Yiddish or Ukrainian. See Babel, “Korol’,” 120.

23. Babel, “How Things Were Done in Odessa,” 147.24. Babel, “The Father,” 164.25. Babel, “The King,” 134.26. Babel, “How Things Were Done in Odessa,” 151.27. Ibid., 146. See, for instance, p. 150 for an example of Benia’s Yiddish-inflected speech.28. Ibid, 151. The Yiddish phrase is biz hundert un tsvantsik. According to Michael Wex,

120 is the ideal lifespan for a Jew because Moses allegedly lived to that age. Wex, Bornto Kvetch, 109.

29. Perhaps the most memorable (and colourful) kvetcher in Sholem Aleichem’s stories isMenakhem-Mendl’s wife, Sheyne-Sheyndl, who incessantly tries to shame her gallivant-ing husband into returning home, graphically describing how she languishes in Kasri-levke, “lying on her deathbed” with their kids “who have come down with every illnessthere is – their teeth, their throats, their stomachs, the whooping cough, diphtheria, allkinds of horrors I could wish on more deserving people.” Sholem Aleichem, The Lettersof Menakhem-Mendl, 40.

30. Babel, “How Things Were Done in Odessa,” 149.31. The most famous story set in Odessa about a Jewish musician who plays in a seedy

tavern is Aleksandr Kuprin’s “Gambrinus.” See Kuprin “Gambrinus.” The Russian textcan be found in Kuprin, Sobranie sochinenii v deviati tomakh, vol. 4. “Gambrinus” waswritten in 1906. In many stories about Odessa, there is often a fine line between musicianand gangster, the latter habitually entertaining others with his singing and stage perfor-mances. In Lev Slavin’s play Interventsiia, Filipp the bandit takes the stage in a tavernto sing criminal folksongs, after complaining that the resident musicians sing as badly asthe choir in the synagogue. Slavin, Interventsiia, 92–3.

32. Zborowski and Herzog, Life Is with People, 270.33. Ibid., 284.34. The only occasion in traditional Jewish culture when drunkenness is acceptable (and

even encouraged) is Purim.35. Semen Iushkevich wrote and published Leon Drei in three instalments: in 1908, 1913

and then as a complete novel in 1922. For an analysis of Leon Drei and his place in themyth of old Odessa, see Tanny, “City of Rogues and Schnorrers,” chap. 3; and Rischin,“Semen Iushkevich.”

36. “Svad’ba Shneersona” continues to be extremely popular in Odessa today, though fewoutside the city are familiar with Miron Iampol’skii. Konstantin Paustovskii mentionsIampol’skii and “Svad’ba Shneersona” in volume 4 of his memoirs. See Paustovskii, TheStory of a Life, 89–91. Arkadii Severnyi performed this song in the 1970s, recording it

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at least once, in Leningrad in 1974. It can be found on Severnyi, MP3: Zvezdanaia seriia.See Tanny, “City of Rogues and Schnorrers,” chap. 5.

37. Iampol’skii, “Svad’ba Shneersona,” in Arkanov, Odesskii iumor, 88.38. Ibid., 89.39. Ibid., 88–9.40. Babel, “The King,” 136.41. Benia Krik, see note 16.42. The Twelve Chairs (Dvenadzat’ stul’ev) was originally published in 1928; The Golden

Calf (Zolotoi telenok) was originally published in 1931. The surname Bender is generallyAshkenazic-Jewish and, given that Jewish surnames often derive from place names, itmay be derived from Benderi, a town in Bessarabia. Bessarabia is a region historicallylinked with Odessa. They were both part of New Russia (Novorossia) during the imperialera, and, despite Bessarabia’s acquisition by Romania at the end of World War I, theborder remained porous, smugglers and refugees posing a problem for the Soviet govern-ment. Moreover, Bender’s repeated claim to being “the son of a Turkish citizen” may nothave been pure gibberish. Bessarabia, like the Odessa region, had been under the controlof the Ottoman Empire until the turn of the nineteenth century, and smuggling ringsconnected Constantinople to New Russia and Romania via the Black Sea. Turkey is alsoconnected linguistically to Jewish culture through a popular Yiddish expression, optonoif terkish, which literally means “to deceive someone in the Turkish manner.”According to Charles Sabatos, a plague had originated near Benderi in the 1780s, andsubsequently spread to Moscow, which was known as the “Bender pox.” Rachel Rubinsuggests that Il’f and Petrov sought to connect Bender to Shmerl Turetskii Baraban(Shmerl the Turk), a Jewish gangster in Veniamin Kaverin’s novel Konets khazy. TheSoviet critics M. Odesskii and D. Fel’dman write that many Jewish merchants insouthern Russia took Turkish citizenship to avoid tsarist legal discrimination against theJews. It is also worth noting that Odessa’s first rabbi, appointed in 1809, came fromBenderi. All these possible connections between Ostap Bender and Turkey are purelyspeculative. Nevertheless, they collectively suggest that giving a conman named Bendera Turkish pedigree is an oblique reference to his Jewishness and his connection withOdessa. On Odessa’s first rabbi, see Kotler, Ocherki, 12. On the history of Bessarabiaunder Russian rule, see Jewsbury, The Russian Annexation of Bessarabia. On opton oifterkish, see Guri, Vos darft ir mer? I would like to thank the late Professor Eli Katz fordrawing my attention to this expression. On the “Bender pox” see Sabatos, “Crossing the‘Exaggerated boundaries’ of Black Sea Culture,” 93. On Kaverin’s Shmerl TuretskiiBaraban, see Rubin, Jewish Gangsters, 47. Odesskii and Fel’dman are cited inFitzpatrick, “The World of Ostap Bender,” 546, fn. 52.

43. Sheila Fitzpatrick insists that Ostap-Bender-like conmen and impostors were rampant inthe 1920s and 1930s, known as obmanshchiki and Moshenniki. The escapades of suchswindlers were reported regularly in newspapers, especially Izvestiia, in the 1930s,journalists even expressing delight at their elaborate schemes. See Fitzpatrick, Tear offthe Masks, chap. 13.

44. Il’f and Petrov, The Twelve Chairs, 44.45. Il’f and Petrov, The Little Golden Calf, 122; idem, Zolotoi telenok, 93; idem, The Twelve

Chairs, 57. Odessans today frequently mention Bender’s comment about contrabandwith pride, and it is not uncommon for tour guides to quote it when passing by LittleArnaut (Malaia arnautskaia) Street.

46. Il’f and Petrov, Zolotoi telenok, 93. Khispesnichestvo was a common crime in Odessa inthe early twentieth century. For examples, see Odesskaia pochta, 1 October 1911, 3; 4March 1912, 5. For a discussion of khipes and the Jewish influence on thieves’ cant, seeTanny, “City of Rogues and Schnorrers,” chap. 3.

47. Il’f and Petrov, The Twelve Chairs, 135, 45; idem, Dvenadtsat’ Stul’ev, 163, 80.48. Il’f and Petrov, The Twelve Chairs, 113.49. Ibid., 113–14.50. Ibid., 171.51. Il’f and Petrov, The Little Golden Calf, 248; idem, Zolotoi telenok, 179.52. Il’f and Petrov, The Twelve Chairs, 51; idem, Dvenadtsat’ Stul’ev, 84.53. William Novak and Moshe Waldocks define the schnorrer as “a Jewish beggar with

chutzpah [audacity]. He does not actually solicit help; he demands it, and considers it his

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right.” See Novak and Waldocks, The Big Book of Jewish Humor, 178. The schnorrerwas made famous in literature in a novel by Israel Zangwill, originally published in1894: The King of the Schnorrers.

54. Il’f and Petrov, The Twelve Chairs, 284.55. Ibid., 350.56. Il’f and Petrov, The Little Golden Calf, 25.57. Ibid., 23.58. Il’f and Petrov, The Twelve Chairs, 52.59. Ibid., 47.60. Ibid., 48.61. Siniavskii, Soviet Civilization, 177.62. Babel, “The Father,” 163.63. Il’f and Petrov, The Little Golden Calf, 26.64. Il’f and Petrov, The Twelve Chairs, 343.65. On the relationship between imagined chosenness and abandonment and its place in

Jewish humour, see Tanny, “City of Rogues and Schnorrers,” chap. 1.66. On the anti-Cosmopolitan campaign and the measures taken against Soviet Jewry,

see Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows; and Slezkine, The Jewish Century,275–329.

67. Fitzpatrick, Tear off the Masks, chap. 14.68. Ibid.69. On the revival of Yiddish culture during the post-Stalin era, see Pinkus, The Soviet

Government and the Jews, 259–85; and Shmeruk, “Twenty-Five Years of SovetishHeymland.”

70. On Jewish life in the USSR during the post-war era in general, see Slezkine, The JewishCentury, chap. 4; Levin, The Jews in the Soviet Union since 1917, vol. 2; and Pinkus,The Jews of the Soviet Union, chap. 4.

71. Nina Tumarkin contends that, “In Khrushchev’s cosmology, to admit the reality of theHolocaust – the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people – meant to deprive the larger Sovietpolity of its status as supervictim, par excellence, which was touted as a major source oflegitimacy.” Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, 121.

72. Slezkine, The Jewish Century, 338.73. Friedberg, The Jew in Post-Stalin Soviet Literature, 46.74. The Soviet government’s policies toward the Jews did not remain completely static

over the course of the three decades between Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” and thebeginnings of glasnost. A multitude of factors influenced the course of events, includ-ing the Cold War, elevated Jewish national consciousness (which swelled and waned atparticular moments), the Arab–Israeli conflict, the rise of the Jewish émigré movement,the mobilisation of international Jewry in support of prospective émigrés, as well asdomestic political concerns that were not directly related to the Jews. Soviet Jews incontact with relatives abroad remained perpetually under suspicion and the governmentregarded anyone who wished to emigrate as a traitor. The 1967 Arab–Israeli Warsignificantly increased the Soviet government’s anti-Zionist posture, branding Israel asa state with imperialistic ambitions. But despite the impact of such factors on Jewishlife in the USSR the central thrust of Soviet policy as it pertained to Jewish cultureremained the same, and, accordingly, these three decades may be treated as onecontinuous period.

75. Stolovich, Evrei shutiat, 41–2. “Rabinovich” was the name usually used to denote a Jewin Soviet anecdotes, much as “Ivan Ivanovich” was a generic name used to designate anethnic Russian.

76. Cited in Dreitser, Taking Penguins to the Movies, 130. Alice Nakhimovsky maintainsthat the indelibility of one’s Jewishness was a cardinal element of Soviet Jewish humour.In that sense, one could also argue that Odessa was indelibly a Jewish city. SeeNakhimovsky, “Mikhail Zhvanetskii.”

77. On the development of Jewish humour, see Tanny, “City of Rogues and Schnorrers,”chap. 1.

78. See, for instance, Odessa: Ocherk istorii goroda-geroia; and Zagoruiko, Po stranitsam.Most history books produced during this era focused on the “heroic” moments in thecity’s history – the Revolution and World War Two.

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342 J. Tanny

79. Zagoruiko, Po stranitsam, vol. 2, 4, 35. While it is true that the Jews and the Greeksmade up a significant portion of Odessa’s bourgeoisie, dominating the international graintrade, there was a substantial Jewish proletariat as well. See Weinberg, The Revolutionof 1905.

80. Zagoruiko, Po stranitsam, vol. 2, 43–4; and Odessa: Ocherk istorii goroda-geroia, 183.81. Zagoruiko, Po stranitsam, vol. 2, 54. On Sashka the fiddler and Gambrinus, see Tanny,

“City of Rogues and Schnorrers,” chap. 3.82. Kotov, Anekdoty ot odessitov, 230. Ironically, this joke imputes a greater share of the

population to the Jews than they ever actually had, as it implies 75% of the populationis Jewish.

83. For an analysis of Jewish stereotypes and their use by Jewish humorists see Tanny, “Cityof Rogues and Schnorrers,” chap. 1.

84. Arkanov, Odesskii iumor, 444.85. Kotov, Anekdoty ot odessitov, 144.86. Stolovich, Evrei shutiat, 145.87. Zhvanetskii, “Goroda,” 131–2. “May we all be healthy” (chtob my byli vse zdorovy) is

structurally a Yiddish expression. Yiddish speakers regularly intersperse their speechwith phrases that begin with “may you …” and they can either be blessings or curses.

88. Ibid., 226–7.89. Ibid., 224.90. Buba Kastorskii, played by Boris Sichkin, appears in Neulovimye mstiteli (The Elusive

Avengers) and Novye prikliucheniia neulovimykh (The New Adventures of the Elusives).Both movies were directed by Edmond Keosaian; they were produced in 1966 and 1968,respectively. The movies were based in part on a story from the 1920s called Krasnyed’iavol’iata, written by Pavel Bliakhin. Interestingly, Kastorskii is not a character in theoriginal story.

91. Novye prikliucheniia neulovimykh, dir. Edmond Keosaian, 1968.92. Sheinin, “Dinars with Holes,” 71–2.93. Ibid., 73.94. Ibid., 69.95. Utesov, S pesnei po zhizni, 84.96. On cursing in Yiddish see Wex, Born to Kvetch, chap. 6; Singer, May You; and Kumove,

Words Like Arrows.97. As already mentioned, “may you” in Yiddishised Russian (and Yiddishised English for

that matter) is used as a starting point for blessings as well as curses. Mikhail Zhvanetskii’ssketches are filled with phrases beginning with chtob, thus alerting the reader that thespeaker is either Jewish or an Odessan who has absorbed the prevalent speech patternsof the city’s Jews. See, for instance, Zhvanetskii, “Svad’ba na sto sem’desiat chelovek,”a piece from the 1970s.

98. Dreitser, Forbidden Laughter, 74–5.99. Paustovskii, Vremia bol’shikh ozhidanii, 136. My translation is based on, with some

modifications, Paustovskii, The Story of a Life, 127.100. On diabetes, as a “Jewish” illness, see Efron, Medicine and the German Jews, chap. 4.101. This joke has circulated in many variations and it dates at least from the early twentieth

century. A version from 1916 can be found in Moshkovskii, Evreiskie anekdoty, 13.102. Plotkin, Vstrechnye ogni, 12–13.103. Zhvanetskii, “Svad’ba.”104. Novye prikliucheniia neulovymikh.105. The distinction between the inter-war and the post-Stalin odessit in this regard is not

entirely black and white. Ostap Bender, despite his vigour, regularly complains about hishealth, as do many of Babel’s characters. But in images of the odessit of the 1960s and1970s there is certainly more of an emphasis on health-related problems, and this oftenserves as an effective marker of Jewishness.

106. The Jewish big nose stereotype is, of course, widely known. Red hair is a less well-known stereotype, but it is one that has been around for a long time, originally associatedwith depictions of Judas tracing back at least to the thirteenth century. See Felsenstein,Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, 31; and Rosenberg, From Shylock to Svengali, 22.

107. The word “afflictions” in Yiddish, , is normally pronounced “TSO-res.” It is ofHebraic origin and in modern Hebrew it is pronounced “tsa-ROT.” The expression is

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commonly used in the English spoken by North Americans of Jewish descent. Likhten-shtullershpillershtil’ is a name that is as improbable as Tsires. In Yiddish (and, for thatmatter, German) it literally means “Light-chair-player-quiet,” but its Yiddish flavour isrooted in Zhvanetskii’s alliterative use of “sh.”

108. Even if there may be a rational basis for Ostap Bender’s claim to be the son of a Turkishcitizen, it is highly unlikely that his lineage stems from the janissaries, the OttomanSultan’s elite corps of officials.

109. Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev (The Twelve Chairs), dir. Mark Zakharov, 1977. Working as a cartdriver was a common Jewish profession in tsarist Russia. It was also considered to bestereotypically Jewish because Sholem Aleichem’s character Tevye the Dairymanworked as one for a living. It was also the profession of Mendl Krik, Benia Krik’s violentand regularly inebriated father.

110. Although the narrator mentions that he does not know where he was born, he insists thathis escapades are well known in Odessa. Lyrics to this song can be found in Dzhekobsonand Dzhekobson, Pesennyi fol’klor GULAGa, 451–2.

111. Svad’ba v Malinovke (A Wedding in Malinovka), dir. Andrei Tutyshkin, 1967.112. Leonid Utesov published four memoirs: Zapiski aktera (first published in 1939); S

pesnei po zhizni (first published in 1961); “Moia Odessa” (first published in the journalMoskva in 1964); and Spasibo, serdtse! (first published in 1976). “Moia Odessa” is ashort essay, much of which was subsequently included in Spasibo, serdtse!

113. Utesov, Spasibo, serdtse!, 13.114. Sholem Aleichem, Menakhem-Mendl, 46.115. Utesov, Spasibo, serdtse!, 68–9.116. Utesov recounts this story with only slight variation in two of his memoirs: S pesnei po

zhizni, 76, and Spasibo, serdtse!, 110–11.117. The relationship between Odessa, Jewish musicians and Soviet jazz is discussed in

Tanny, “City of Rogues and Schnorrers,” chaps 3–4.118. Rogovoy, The Essential Klezmer, 28–9.119. There are many versions of this story. One can be found in Simon, The Wise Men of

Helm.120. Utesov, Spasibo, serdtse!, 173. In using this story, Utesov is probably trying to suggest

that Babel never really left Odessa spiritually. Interestingly, Utesov had already includeda variation of this story in his earlier memoirs, S pesnei po zhizni, except in that instancehe uses it as an analogy for his own life. Old Odessa was an intrinsic part of Utesov’sidentity and indeed, as he seeks to demonstrate with his memoirs, an indelible part. SeeUtesov, S pesnei po zhizni, 150.

121. Utesov regularly performed and recorded criminal folksongs in the 1920s and 1930s,including “S odesskogo kichmana” (From the Odessa jail), “Bubliki” (Bagels) and “Gopso smykom.” Although legend has it that Stalin enjoyed Utesov’s bawdy, klezmer-influ-enced songs, many puritanical proponents of Soviet culture severely criticised Utesov forplaying them, and by the mid-1930s he’d stopped recording them. Utesov’s versions ofthese popular songs are collected on the compact disc, Gop so smykom, which containshis recordings from 1929 to 1933. It has been reissued on Utesov, Sobranie luchshikhzapisei. For an analysis of Utesov’s music, see Tanny, “City of Rogues and Schnorrers,”chap. 4.

122. Sha! is colloquial Yiddish for “Quiet!” and it is also considered to be Russian thieves’cant. It is usually included in Russian criminal slang dictionaries.

123. Chernenko, Krasnaia zvezda, 222.

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kvetching and carousing under communism: old odessa as the soviet union’s jewish...

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