Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (30 page)

During the concert season, the Opera and the Philharmonic, which had taken up residence in the grand and Moorish commercial exchange, were packed with Soviet citizens being reminded that here, in the Soviet south, high culture and the beach could come together in ways that the capitalist West could never imagine. “Tourism is one of the best forms of relaxation,” noted a typical Soviet brochure on the city. “Travel along tourist routes always enriches man’s mind, helps him to become more deeply acquainted with the Motherland of yesterday and today, and provides a major aesthetic delight…. That is why from year to year in our country an army of tourists continues to expand.”
¹⁹
The army could be seen each evening at sunset, ambling disheveled and sunburned up and down the slight incline of Deribasovskaya Street.

Fresh fruits and vegetables could be purchased a short distance away in the Privoz market all year long, something unheard of in other Soviet cities. Giant flea markets flourished in Moldavanka, even at times when such unofficial commerce was frowned upon by the Soviet state. But the visitor’s experience in the city was a carefully managed one. Crime remained a problem. If you were a Soviet tourist, you knew that you could be mugged or stabbed even in the city center, a relative rarity in other urban areas. If you happened to stop by a local library, you would not find many books on the city’s Jewish heritage, since zealous librarians would have removed most of them for fear that they were actually Zionist tracts at odds with the message of Soviet universalism.
²⁰
The city’s wavering relationship to its Jewish identity remained even after few Jews were left to argue the case.

The roots of Odessa’s brand of nostalgia lay in the nineteenth century; the sense that the best of times had already passed was a feature of its artistic and cultural life already in Count Vorontsov’s day. But “Odessa-Mama”—the appealing and warm mother-city that Soviet crooners and writers extolled—now became a surrogate for the knotty realities that had defined the city in the first half of the twentieth century. The Soviet version of Odessan patriotism covered a darker and more recent past: the inescapable fact that the Jewish heritage celebrated mainly in code—in countless stories, novels, plays, films, joke books, concerts, musicals, and other ribaldries—had been actively erased in the living memory of those who now sought to re-create it.

T
ODAY THE EPICENTER
of tourist Odessa is still Deribasovskaya Street. Its hipster cafés, Ukrainian restaurants, ice cream vendors, and street artists share space with the shock troops of globalization: an Irish pub, a McDonald’s, and—that universal marker of twenty-first-century cosmopolitanism—a band of Andeans with panpipes. It has been transformed from its cleaner and more restrained Soviet-era version, but even then Deribasovskaya was a destination, the place to which you repaired when you had had enough of the beach and the obligatory stops at the sites of sacred patriotic memory.

Some of the excitement and tumult of postwar tourism can still be felt just off Deribasovskaya in the City Park, a small and manicured green space shaded by some of the most beautiful and stately trees in town. The park was laid out not long after the city’s founding. It anchors the vibrant street life in the old center as it has done for more than two centuries. In the warmer months, wedding parties promenade there. A brass band gives concerts in the gazebo. Young people ogle and flirt on the benches. But there are two attractions that are post-Soviet in vintage.

One is an empty chair, the other a statue of a round man seated on a small bench. Both, in their way, are monuments to the power of dreams and invention. The former recalls Ostap Bender, the fictional swindler of Ilf and Petrov’s novels
The Twelve Chairs
and
The Golden Calf
, a literary character immortalized as typically Odessan: a person of Oriental cunning and larger-than-life ambitions, whose picaresque exploits involved the search for a set of dining chairs thought to contain a magnificent treasure. The latter is the jazzman Leonid Utesov, his arms outstretched toward any visitor who wants to sit down for a rest or a snapshot.

Although both monuments were erected only after the Soviet Union collapsed, they shine from the people who have clambered over them or patted their bronze surfaces for good luck. The Bender and Utesov monuments are among the few places in Odessa—perhaps in all of Ukraine—where visitors habitually stand in polite and orderly queues, lining up to capture a picture that will link them with two of the city’s most famous native sons. But in the short space between the two, between a wholly invented life and an energetically embellished one, lies the past of the real Odessa—a city that, like Utesov’s klezmer-infused music, remains largely improvisational, shifting wildly between the solo and the communal and always threatening to slip out of control.

Odessa in Brooklyn: Russian veterans of the Second World War, many wearing their medals, march along Coney Island Avenue in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, in commemoration of Soviet victory day, May 2009.
Photo by Todd Maisel/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images.

O
n the Brighton Express from the Atlantic Avenue station, I sat down beside an elderly man with a veined and bulbous nose, a small Pekingese dog standing primly on his lap.

“Is this the train to Sheepshead Bay?” he asked in Russian—“Shipskhit Bey”—as the brick mid-rises and small frame houses of outer Brooklyn sped by. I told him it was and that I would let him know when we were getting close to his station.

“Ah, you speak Russian,” he said. “I could see that you were a Russian.” He waved his open hand in circles in front of his face. “Not like them.” He crinkled his nose and flicked his wrist toward three lanky Caribbean men, in sunglasses and dreadlocks, who had been talking loudly in the seats opposite.

The man said he had emigrated from Odessa ten years ago but never really needed to learn English in his new home. He had started out just down the subway line in Brighton Beach, where it was easy to thrive in a Russian-only environment, but had moved some time ago.

When we reached his stop, he waddled slowly, dog in tow, toward the opening subway doors. He said people were more “aristocratic” in his new neighborhood. The old one now had too many people like them, he whispered, still in Russian, tilting his head toward the Caribbean men across the aisle.

One stop down the tracks, though, and Brighton Beach seemed to be full of people like him.

On the boardwalk, elderly neighbors, pink-skinned already on a hot day in spring, sat in silence on wooden benches, the men with their shirts open and legs splayed, the women with their eyes closed and faces turned to the sky. Floppy beach hats and plastic nose shades discouraged the April sun. A cool breeze swept occasionally across the flat, damp sands, blowing eastward from the towers and roller coaster humps of Coney Island. A Russian shop sign advertised “
Morozhennoye na lyuboi vkus
,” rendered below in liberal and pregnant translation as “The Tasteful Ice Cream in Town.”

“In Odessa you can smell Europe,” Pushkin once wrote. In Brighton Beach, you can smell Odessa. It hits you as soon as you step down from the elevated train platform onto the avenue: the fishy sea air, a whiff of old cooking oil, the sweetness of overripe fruit, dark traces of motor oil and axle grease, the tang of dill and parsley, the alcoholic sting of cheap perfume, and the assertive revival of vintage sweat, all braided like a garland of garlic, silent as to source or cause. Odessa’s oddities and incongruities are there too. A Starbucks sits uneasily between the Detsky Mir toy store and the Tel Aviv Fish Market. A parade of granny carts trundles beneath the overhead trains.

Tourist T-shirts now market Brighton Beach as “Little Odessa by the Sea,” but that would have seemed bizarre to the neighborhood’s founder. William A. Engeman knew a good deal when he saw it. A wealthy railway man and arms dealer who had profited by selling weapons to both sides during the American Civil War, Engeman arranged in 1868 for the purchase of several hundred acres of ocean-front property near the village of Gravesend in Brooklyn. The area had already begun to develop shortly after the war, when New Yorkers, seeking a respite from the grime and gloom of Manhattan, were drawn to the unspoiled beaches lying at Brooklyn’s southern tip.

Engeman was slow off the mark, however. Coney Island and Manhattan Beach were already developing as major destinations. Sandwiched between the two, Engeman’s project had little hope of overtaking the more established resorts. He needed a gimmick, and he ended up with several. In addition to a pier, hotels, and eventually a boardwalk, Engeman built entertainment venues: a music hall, a pavilion, a theater billed as “the handsomest seaside theatre in the world” located at the end of the quarter-mile pier, and, through his connections to Tammany Hall, a racetrack. Engeman’s genius was not to compete directly with his neighboring developments, which always offered bigger headliners. His strategy was to provide affordable entertainers just glitzy enough to draw a crowd. As the destination became more and more popular, Engeman staged a public contest to name the development. The winning entry was “Brighton Beach,” after the famous resort town on the southern coast of England.

By the time of Engeman’s death in 1897, people were arriving in droves—but not exactly from the source that the old developer would have expected. Engeman had intended Brighton Beach to be a more family-friendly environment than its rival Coney Island: an entertainment venue open to middle-class New Yorkers but free of the riffraff that had caused other parts of coastal Brooklyn to acquire seedy reputations. For Engeman, this meant informally excluding Jews, among other undesirables. But over the next century, whenever the neighborhood looked in peril of decline, with dropping house values and a sliding population, a new wave of Jewish migrants always rescued it just in time.

Jews from the Lower East Side had already begun to make their way to Brighton Beach at the turn of the century, seeking an alternative to the cramped quarters of Delancey Street. Boarding houses and bungalows sprouted along the neighborhood’s three major avenues, butting up against each other in the small but airy fifteen blocks that defined its boundaries. A greater influx of Jewish immigrants arrived following the 1903–1905 pogroms in the Russian Empire, especially those fleeing Odessa and the borderlands of Ukraine. By 1918 the old Brighton Beach Music Hall, which had featured some of the greatest performers in vaudeville, had become a theater specializing in Yiddish-language plays, the first summer Yiddish theater in the United States. The renowned Odessan actor Jacob Adler performed there, as did the tragedienne Jennie Goldstein, the leading man David Kessler, and scores of other performers, such as the twenty Jewish chorus girls who shared the stage of the old music hall, and the composer and pit conductor Joseph Rumshinsky, billed as the “Irving Berlin of the Yiddish stage.”
¹

Further waves of Jewish immigration followed: one after the Holocaust, when survivors found Brighton Beach both a haven and a melting pot for Jews from across Europe, and another after the end of the Soviet Union, when Jewish and non-Jewish immigrants from Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, and other former Soviet states were able to re-create, on a smaller scale, something of the societies they had left behind. Russian replaced Yiddish on the avenues and connecting streets. New York cops were soon sitting in voluntary Russian-language classes at the local YMCA.
²

By one estimate, about three-quarters of Brighton Beach’s new immigrants came from Ukraine, mainly from Odessa and other Black Sea cities.
³
Already in the late 1970s, journalists were calling the place “Little Odessa,” and like its namesake it became a font of intellectuals who looked back with mixed emotions on their hometown. Neil Simon’s play
Brighton Beach Memoirs
is the most famous of the products of Engeman’s old neighborhood, but the local Abraham Lincoln High School educated other makers of culture, both high and low, from Arthur Miller and Joseph Heller to Mel Brooks and Neil Diamond. “They send us their Jews from Odessa,” the violinist Isaac Stern reportedly remarked about immigration and cultural exchange with the Soviets, “and we send them our Jews from Odessa”—in the form of American-trained musicians, writers, and artists with distant (even imagined) Odessan roots.
⁴

Achievement and weirdness were as much a part of Brighton Beach’s identity as they were of the original Odessa’s. In the early twentieth century, the summer crowds that followed the newly extended train tracks to the coast found a place of mud and dust, with unpaved streets but plenty of people still pouring through Brooklyn to take in the sea air and a show. Seaside evangelists set up shop to rescue the beachgoers from themselves. The
Brooklyn Eagle
reported solemnly in the late summer of 1916 that a total of 379 people had accepted Christ and another 762,352 had heard the gospel in the last four years as a result of open-air proselytizing by a team featuring “Miss Marion Bushnell, cornetist.”
⁵
(The low rate of return did not seem to discourage Miss Bushnell and her associates.) Even through the peaks and troughs of the neighborhood’s development—the flourishing Yiddish culture of the 1920s, the population growth at mid-century, the urban blight and out-migration of the 1960s and 1970s, and the Russian invasion of the perestroika years and after—the mixed and colorful street life remained. Even the crack-addled eccentrics and performers who roamed Brighton Beach Avenue in the 1980s—known to some locals as the
mishe goyim
, or the “crazy gentiles”—were said to speak at least a little Yiddish.

Pedestrians walk along a street beneath the elevated train tracks in “Little Odessa,” the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, 1994.
Stephen Ferry/Liaison/Getty Images.

Today Brighton Beach resembles Odessa even more than its marketers might realize. It is still a place of loud voices and too much food, where the freezing mist of a January stroll along the empty boardwalk is as much a part of city life as the crowds of beachgoers on a July afternoon. The smells of knishes, khinkali, and a dozen other combinations of meat, dough, and root vegetables waft down the avenue, just as on Deribasovskaya. But it is also a place perched between reality and memory. It is mainly a retirement neighborhood, at least in the off-season, with perhaps the largest collection of walkers and scooter chairs outside Florida. All old seaside towns live partly in twilight, always on the far side of some golden age, but on the crowded or empty boardwalk, with the lights of Coney Island flickering through the sea breeze, the shadows of Little Odessa’s forebear appear in stark relief.

O
DESSA, TOO
, is now in many ways a twilight town, sitting uneasily inside a new country and more comfortable marketing its distant past than presenting itself as a city of the future. But over the last two centuries, Odessa managed to produce a local culture woven from uneasiness, a way of living that may hold lessons about the creative and destructive power of being in-between. Richelieu and Vorontsov saw in Odessa a plain palette on which they could realize their enlightened visions of modernity and culture. Pushkin found the scent of the exotic. Jabotinsky and Babel sought both to escape their origins and to reshape them. The likes of Alexianu worked to erase the landscape altogether, to possess a desirable city while conveniently ridding it of many of the people who happened to live there. Mark Bernes, Leonid Utesov, and countless lesser comics and musicians raised nostalgia to an art form. Frontiers are places that get reshaped, again and again, according to the ideals, both laudable and terrible, of those who seek to control them. But there is something about such places that remains steadfastly resistant to the best-laid plans for their reengineering.

Odessa is now undergoing yet another transformation. It is the most important passenger port of a relatively new country, Ukraine, which emerged from the rubble of the Soviet Union in 1991. The city’s administrators are far more benign than those of earlier ages. In many ways, they embrace the city’s multifarious past rather than seek to cleanse it. They have discovered, like their Soviet predecessors, that nostalgia sells. But the old impulses are still there. School textbooks, even in this quintessentially mixed city, tell a story of straight lines and definite end points, of the emergence of a distinct Ukrainian people since antiquity, its oppression by Russians and Soviets, and its glorious reemergence with its own independent country at the end of the twentieth century.

Odessa, true to form, has resisted. Russian-speakers prefer to use their own language rather than learn the official language of state, Ukrainian. Museums still portray a decidedly local vision of the past that is at odds with the more triumphal, more national, versions found in the capital. When the people of Kiev rose up against corrupt politicians and rigged elections in 2004—a peaceful change of government now termed the “Orange Revolution” (after the colored scarves and T-shirts worn by the protestors)—Odessans remained noticeably quiet. It wasn’t that they didn’t support the protestors—although plenty of Odessans were skeptical. It was just that they had never paid much attention to what was going on in Kiev anyway.