The author and essayist Eliezer Steinman summed up the years he spent in Odessa with a categorical “that’s what Odessa was like.” But he added, without pausing, “Was it really like that? Maybe that is how it was revealed to me in my memory, in a retrospective vision?”
Odessa was a myth even before it was a memory. A wealthy city, fun-loving, frivolous and sinful. That is how Jews in the Place of Settlement pictured Odessa in the late 19th century. Literature enhanced and fostered the myth: Mendele Mokher Seforim and Shalom Aleichem portrayed Odessa through the wide eyes of newcomers from the shtetl, like Fishke the Lame and Menahem-Mendel. Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky in his novel Piatero (“They were five”) and Isaac Babel in his Odessa Tales contributed to the city’s frivolous image through their descriptions of various facets of Odessan Jewry: the former in his depiction of the Jewish bourgeoisie which had adopted Russian culture; the latter in his stories about the Moldavanka suburb and the Jewish underworld.
In the three exhibitions that compose our “Homage to Odessa”, we were looking for the relationship between the mythical image of the city and a very different image – Odessa, the capital of modern Jewish literature (an identification that itself developed into a myth of sorts). In many senses, the Hebrew authors of Odessa constituted a closed and isolated entity, as described by Y.D. Berkowitz: “The Odessa writers lived as on an enchanted far-off island, strolling among the frivolous, fun-loving Odessans; they viewed these Odessans, who had integrated in their own unique way into Russian culture, as if they were hospitable yet spiritually remote natives.”
We found the thread that runs through these different worlds in the attempts of artists and writers to relive the unique character of the city; this character, as it emerges in their memoirs, literature, and art, is elusive and nebulous, while at the same time distinct and tangible. This is exemplified in Yefim Ladizhingsky’s series, Growing Up in Odessa; his paintings constitute a journey through his memories to the city where he was born and grew up, to its bustling streets, its sun-drenched parks, and boulevards, its colorful markets, beaches, residential compounds and houses, its coffeehouses. Ladizhinsky portrays Odessa through the eyes of the child he once was, but also through the prism of the adult artist. His paintings reach out in longing for that vanished world by eschewing perspective leaving us outside the picture, removed from the space it defines. “We are merely looking,” he remarked of his pictures, “not taking part in them… Never again will we find ourselves sitting beneath the striped awning of the coffeehouse, wearing tennis whites, or crowding around the band in the park.”
The same clear, mischievous spirit in Ladizhinsky’s Odessa may be found in the fiction of Babel, Mendele, Shalom Aleichem and Jabotinsky. It is also found in the memoirs of many of those attracted in the early 20th century to Odessa, where they hoped to find a place in its circle of Hebrew writers. The writers of these memoirs take walks on the beaches, around the Fontaines, in Alexander Park; they converse about lofty matters while treating themselves to ice cream in a coffeehouse of cracking watermelon seeds on the boulevard. They are wrapped in the same sense of ease and belonging that is radiated by Ladizhinsky’s paintings.
The excerpts from memoirs and belles-lettres that are incorporated in the three exhibitions complement one another. They open another window through which we observe that unique quality of Odessa: a carefree, whining, and open city, where, for a brief moment, Jews could feel at peace and at home in the earthly order. Even when they chose to preserve or to cultivate their distinct identity, as did the Hebrew writers of Odessa, they did not become the classic “other”; they became just one more hue on the city’s multicolored palate. Perhaps it was no a coincidence that in this most modern, liberal and multinational city in the Russian Empire it was possible to dream about the revival of a national culture that would be both Jewish and modern, and to try to turn that dream into reality.
Where do memories end and myths begin? Or in Steinman’s words, “Was it really like that?” Did those who frequented the coffeehouses and strolled on the promenades really wear only white in summer? Where the Hebrew writers really a band of brothers who spent entire days in extended conversations in the parks and on the boulevards? Was there really a spirit of tolerance and mutual respect among the many nationalities living in Odessa?
Debbi Cooper’s photographs of Odessa close the circle and return to contemporary Odessa in quest of the lost golden age. Jewish Street, Vorontsov Palace, Nikolayevsky Boulevard, Bialik’s house, the building where Jabotinsky lived – these are mere relics of past glory that is no more. Today, little is left of this enchanted setting, yet the peeling buildings retain a charm of their own. Something of the mischievous and ironic spirit of Odessa is sensed in Cooper’s photos. Perhaps it is only the myth of the glorious past that lends its glamour to the impoverished present. Perhaps it exists in the eyes of the beholder, in our own eyes.
Rachel Arbel, curator