So that's why “Poema” is hard to fit into a tanda...

El Garron and its downstairs cabaret hall Palermo, 6 rue Fontain, just off Pigalle (1925)

Most of of the practicing and aspiring Argentine tango DJs must have noticed that Francisco Canaro’s superb (and much overplayed) 1935 “Poema” doesn’t quite fit seamlessly into tandas (as sets of tango records played for the dancers, typically from the same orchestra and the same time, are called). “Poema” is quite singular in its gently melancholic, softly nostalgic flow, while other Canaro’s hits of the period tend to be more insistent and dramatic in quality, energetically driving rather than softly soothing.

One can’t help noticing a few more peculiarities about this hit. Its popularity peaks overseas, especially in Europe, and reaches the low point in Buenos Aires. And no other orchestras in Argentine recorded the piece.

Thanks to German Nemoljakin’s constant flow of stories from tango’s past, I got an intriguing glimpse of “Poema”’s special history, and couldn’t resist digging deeper into it. To sum it up:

The beautiful “Poema” isn’t quite an Argentine tango, it is as much a European tango, composed by the expat musicians who were singularly successful in transplanting tango to the musical scene of Paris.

Furthermore, “Poema”’s lack of acceptance in Buenos Aires wasn’t helped by the dark political undertones of its story, and the fact that its lyrics are a thinly veiled confession of a banished murderer.

“Poema” is undoubtedly the best composition of Eduardo Bianco, an Argentine who lived in Europe for nearly 20 years, and who mastered the art of making the tango of Argentina sound the Parisian way. The oft-retold story says that Bianco and Mario Melfi, aided by others in their band, composed it on a train during a 1932 tour of Germany. What is rarely mentioned is that Bianco’s lyrics tell his personal, and thoroughly suppressed, story from his final year in Buenos Aires. In 1924, Eduardo Bianco played the first violin in the orchestra of the famous Teatro Apolo at Avenida Corrientes. Bianco learned that his wife cheated on him with the pianist of the orchestra, and shot his rival to death in a fit of jealousy. As translated into English by Alberto Paz, Bianco’s stanzas tell us how a dream of sweet love ended up awakening the heart’s monsters, the chimeras which can never be fully grasped; the words “intenso mal” which Alberto Paz translated as “intense misfortune” may be better interpreted as “overpowering evil”:


Francisco Canaro - Roberto Maida, Poema (1935)

Fué un ensueño de dulce amor, horas de dicha y de querer, fué el poema de ayer, que yo soñé, de dorado color, vanas quimeras del corazón, no logrará descifrar jamás, nido tan fugaz, fue un ensueño de amor y adoración. Cuando las flores de tu rosal, vuelvan mas bellas a florecer, recordarás mi querer, y has de saber, todo mi intenso mal. De aquel poema embriagador, ya nada queda entre los dos, doy mi triste adiós, sentiras la emoción, de mi dolor…

It was a dream of sweet love, hours of happiness and loving, it was the poem of yesterday, that I dreamed, of gilded color, vain chimeras of the heart, it will not manage to never decipher, so fleeting nest, it was a dream of love and adoration. When the flowers of your rose garden, bloom again ever so beautiful, you'll remember my love, and you will come to know, all my intense misfortune. Of that one intoxicating poem, nothing is left between us, I say my sad goodbye, you'll feel the emotion, of my pain…

Eduardo Bianco was jailed and tried for murder, and acquitted - according to José María Otero, owing to political connections of Bianco’s influential rich friend, Martin “Macoco” Álzaga Unzué, a race driver, bon vivant, and night club owner whose circle included top entertainers, aristocrats, and mobsters. But the acquitted violinist had to leave Argentina. Soon, he sailed for France.


In Paris, Bianco with the bandoneonist Juan Bautista Deambroggio “Bachicha” assembled Orquesta Típica Bianco-Bachicha, which started to play in the downstairs cabaret of the famed Argentine-themed Montmartre boîte, “El Garron”, and toured Europe, the Americas, and Middle East. He continued cultivating relationships with the rich and powerful, even dedicating his tango compositions to kings and queens, and (twice) to Benito Mussolini, and boasting of praise from Stalin and Hitler. It was the 1926 “Plegaria”, dedicated to Spanish king Alfonso XIII, “symbol of Spanish democracy” (who fled after the electoral victory of the Republicans, and supported Franco with the outbreak of Spanish Civil War), which brought Bianco most infamy.



Orquesta Típica Argentina “Eduardo Bianco”: Plegaria. Span. Refraingesang: Mario Visconti. Telefunken, Die Deutsche Weltmarke, E 2861, March 1939

The most detailed account of Bianco’s European years has been provided in Enrique Cadícamo’s 1975 La historia del tango en París (and summarized in a recent El Litoral article). Cadícamo, who toured Europe with the already presented Gardel, advised his tango friends to avoid discussing politics with Eduardo Bianco because Bianco supposedly informed for Gestapo (the French police detained and investigated him in 1937, but released him). Bianco associated himself with Eduardo Labougle Carranza, Argentine ambassador in the Third Reich Berlin and an avowed antisemite. They supposedly convinced Goebbels that tango should take place of the “racially tainted” Jazz music, and were invited to perform in Berlin’s “La scala”. Then, at an Argentine asado reception at the Embassy, Bianco’s orchestra got to entertain Hitler himself (even with a bandoneon player personally grilling meats for him), and the Führer asked for an encore performance of “Plegaria” (“Prayer” in Spanish). The sentimental monster must have enjoyed the play between the solemn sound of the piece and the frivolous, erotic perception of the word “tango”, because soon, he found a horrible use for Bianco’s score. In a short time, “Plegaria” would be dubbed “Tango of Death”, as the death camp prisoner bands were ordered to play it when the camp prisoners were led to execution. The horror of “Tango of Death” has been immortalized in the verses of Paul Celan under his post-war impressions of Lwów’s Janówska death camp (here it is read by himself in German). Although the Romanian translation of the poem, published before the German original, still had “tangul” in its title, in the final German version “Plegaria” turned into “Todesfuge”, “The Death Fugue”!

(A personal side note here … this is how I got to understand another allusion in Psoy Korolenko’s Ilimsky Ostrog, an amalgamation of quotes and allusions of three centuries of Russian and foreign classic poetry, folk song, pop and rock, where peeling off the layers of meaning never ends … “Meine Todesfuge” is heard near 4:55 in this concert record)

The Jewish members of the Lwów Philharmonics playing the “Tango of Death” in Lwów’s Janówska death camp (more about it here)

Mauthausen, 30. June 1942. Yad Vashem Archive, 2AO7

The WWII broke out, and Ambassador Labougle returned to Argentina to champion the cause of South American neutrality in the war, the cause which must have been largely anti-American and anti-Brazilian, rather than pro-Axis, in Argentina, since it traditionally allied itself with Great Britain, its main export market, and, after the Great Depression-era unfair trade treaties went into effect, also Argentina’s main supplier of manufactured goods. The United States, in the meantime, practiced the ideology of continental domination, the Manifest Destiny, and armed Argentina’s regional arch-rival, Brazil. Although truth be said, Argentine leaders sought to emulate many aspects of the Axis, from nationalist fervor to regional expansion plans (Argentina even covertly installed a friendly, pro-fascist government in Bolivia in a 1943 coup). But time was running out for the open sympathizers of the Reich, and in January 1944, Argentina had to break relations with Nazi Germany (although it didn’t declare war until a year later). In the meantime, Bianco played across occupied Europe for the Nazi troops, and on the Third Reich radio stations. As it’s become clear that Argentina will sever relations with the Reich soon, he left on a Spanish visa from King Alfonso’s times, and faced a lengthy investigation by the British intelligence services – Bianco himself wrote that he was only cleared owing to his investigator’s appreciation of the music of tango. He finally returned to Buenos Aires in 1943, at the peak of Tango’s Golden age, amid insane richness of tango orchestras. Bianco tried hard but has never succeeded in competing against the local talent; his remained a purely export version of Argentine tango.

Baron Tsunayoshi Megata, son of famed Japanese diplomat Tanetaro Megata, came to Paris in 1920 to cure a disfiguring blood vessel tumor on his face, and stayed until 1926. “El Barón” Megata, a playboy and accomplished ballroom dancer, first discovered El Garron, when Manuel Pizarro’s tango orchestra was paying here. Soon Megata has become a regular, and learned to dance. On return to Japan, he packed cases of tango records from Paris – Pizarro, Bachicha, Bianco… – and organized a dance school for the aristocracy, who were taught that tango was a Parisian dance.

Before we return to 1935, and to Canaro, let me mention that “Poema” has been recorded by one more Parisian band, the Orquesta Típica Auguste-Jean Pesenti du Coliseum de Paris (A.-J. Pesenti was a bandoneonist from Colombia known to us largely owing to the Japanese collectors; in fact pre-WWII tango dancers and listeners in Japan played French tango records of Bianco, Bachicha, Pizzarro, and others, and generally believed that tango was a genre of French music)

Canaro, of course, also famously chose Paris to be his base after 1925 (embarking on tours to New York, Berlin, Hamburg, and Madrid, and to a family roots discovery trip to Italy, from France). Sometimes people say that Canaro stayed abroad for a whole decade, and supposedly didn’t make a comeback to Buenos Aires until 1935! Technically, it’s very untrue, and yet in terms of Francisco Canaro’s legacy and influence, it may be true that the decade between 1925 and 1934 was the low-key part of his tango carrier. He tried diversifying into other genres – rancheras, maxixe, foxtrot, jazz, and even recorded such Americana pieces as “Red Red Robin” as “Francisco Canaro Jazz Band”. He toured the provincial towns, played a lot for the radio stations, launched a series of comedy musicals, and appeared in a movie with Gardel, all to regain his fame and to secure the grand dance halls of BsAs for himself again. Perhaps it was the chilling effect of the Great Depression on the porteño party scene. Or Canaro’s affiliation with the recording company Nacional Odeon, which pitted him against the more prominent RCA Victor. Or it could have been the continuing echo from yet another fatal gunshot story which may have played a role in Canaro’s departure to Paris in the first place.

This is a story which began almost exactly 100 years ago, in September 1914. Francisco Canaro’s lucky break into the ranks of most-listened-to tango orchestras was catalyzed by his invitation to highlight Primero Baile del Internado, the First Ball of Medical Interns, which marked the end of the spring break in the School of Medicine. The interns of Buenos Aires found their inspiration in Paris, in traditional medical students Bal de L’Internat held at Bullier Hall. To this rancorous celebration at the famous Palais de Glace, Canaro premiered a tango titled Matasano, “The Slayer of the Healthy” (as the medical students were humorously called), dedicated to Hospital Durand in Caballito neighborhood. The following year, Canaro premiered tango “El Internado”, “The Intern”, at the Intern’s Ball.

The tradition continued for 11 years, with many pranks and with tango titles such as “Aquí se vacuna” (”Immunizations shots here”, dedicated to Public Health Office), “Anatomia”, “Cloroformo”, “El termómetro”, “La biblioteca” (”The Medical Library”), “Hospital Durand”, “Mano Brava” and “Qué muñeca” (dedicated to outstanding surgeons’ hands), “La inyección” and “El microbio” (continued with tangos about specific pathogens, “El dengue” and “Ae. Aegypti”), even “Paraiso Artificial” (”Artificial Paradise”, obviously a tango about drugs). The tango which premiered in 1924 was titled “El once: el divertismento” – “The 11th: let’s have fun”.


But soon after the 1924 celebration, the medical students took part in a prank gone horribly wrong, and an intern Ernesto O’Farrel was shot and killed by an administrator at Hospital Piñero, triggering a physician strike at all municipal hospitals. The Baile del Internado was never held again. And Canaro’s memoirs mourn the things tango lost after 1924...

Yet Canaro’s tango also gained from being exposed to the music of the European expats, and he kept returning to the scores from Paris, starting from a 1928 recording, with Charlo, of “Bandoneón arrabalero”, a tango Canaro re-recorded several times. The 1925 score is signed by Juan Bautista Deambrogio Bachicha himself, although Enrique Cadícamo says in La historia del tango en París that it was Horacio Petorossi, a guitar player in Bianchi-Bachicha orchestra, who sold the score to Bachicha for a thousand franks. The 1935 recording of Bianco’s Poema continued the trend of cross-fertilization of Parisian and BsAs tango music, but failed to impress the listeners in Argentina.
The most powerful admission of Parisian influences Canaro himself made is his 1938 record of “El Garron”, “Tango Criollo-Parisian”:


Quinteto Don Pancho (Francisco Canaro), El Garron (Tango Criollo-Parisian) (1938)

Layers of time / Escrito en el tiempo

Ghost inscriptions of restaurateurs following each other in the same place, in Abbazia, the most elegant resort place of the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Who knows more about them?

Letras fantasmas que se resisten a desaparecer y emergen unas sobre otras en Abbazia, el lugar de descanso más elegante de la antigua Monarquía Austro-Húngara. ¿Quién sabe alguna historia de esta esquina de Europa?

Still a villa suburbana at the turn of the century (enlarge here), today at the corner of Veprinački put and ulica Joakima Rakovca.

Era aún una villa suburbana a la vuelta del siglo (ampliar plano), hoy languidece en la esquina del camino de Veprinac con la calle Joakim Rakovec.

Diluvio

El cuadradito amarillo que vemos en la frente del desvaído rostro de esta bruja es Bobowa, al sureste de Polonia, en las estribaciones de los Cárpatos. Aquí estamos, justo en el ojo más pequeño del ciclón que nos ha rondado por dos días vertiendo agua sin parar sobre la zona del Diluvio de Sienkiewicz. Nos dirigimos a este antiguo shtetl que alberga uno de los más hermosos cementerios judíos intactos de Polonia. Las tumbas miran desde lo alto de la colina elevada sobre el pueblo hacia el valle de Biala, por lo que ni la Wehrmacht, ni la población local tuvieron ánimo bastante para ponerse a destruir o reciclar las lápidas, como sí hicieron en tantísimos otros cementerios.


Pasado Gromnik la carretera gira hacia el valle por donde corre el río. En ambas riberas ya apilan sacos de arena, las bombas de achique están en funcionamiento y el tramo inferior del camino empieza a inundarse. Tenemos que apresurarnos a cruzar el cementerio antes de que el camino de vuelta quede completamente cortado.


Al parar en Ciężkowice para fotografiar el cementerio militar austro-húngaro, truena con violencia por Gorlice, detrás de Bobowa, como el cañoneo en la Ofensiva de  Gorlice de 1915, donde cayeron el Capitán de Caballería Oswald Richthofen y sus sesenta y tres húsares húngaros. Algunos de los caídos no pudieron ser identificados y en sus tumbas solo se lee: Ein tapferer ungarischer Krieger: un valiente guerrero húngaro.


La tormenta nos pilla justo antes de llegar a Bobowa. Con el aguacero descargando sobre el parabrisas avanzamos más despacio que si fuéramos a pie. A lo largo de la calle principal del pueblo, por donde una vez galoparon los jinetes jasídicos para saludar al gran tzadík Ben Zion Halberstam, baja ahora un torrente.


Para cuando llegamos al final del pueblo, desde donde se discierne el blanco del ohel del tzadik y el punteado negro de las pequeñas lápidas en la cima de la colina, la riada se ha vuelto amarillenta y arrastra piedras. De todas partes, desde los bordes de los jardines, las calles laterales, el camino de montaña que lleva al cementerio, desde ambos lados del valle, la turbia avalancha parduzca vierte agua sobre la carretera. Tenemos que volver atrás, antes de quedar atrapados en el pueblo inundado, como nos ocurrió hace muchos años en el Csíkmenaság transilvano. Dejando el valle Biała a nuestras espaldas y volviendo la vista desde la orilla del río Dunajec que ruge con fuerza, vemos que la tormenta ha comenzado a descargar de nuevo por encima de las montañas de Bobowa.


Tuvimos que dar media vuelta antes de llegar a nuestra meta pero esperamos que en cosa de un mes, cuando estemos aquí de nuevo, el tiempo en Bobowa será mejor. Con todo, la conducción a lo largo del Dunajec bajo la lluvia nos proporcionó una recompensa inesperada. En el pueblo de Zakliczyn, en una tranquila calle secundaria, dimos con un pequeño cementerio militar de la época de la Ofensiva de Gorlice. Es el único cementerio militar judío del país. Yacen aquí once judíos que lucharon del lado austro-húngaro y uno del lado ruso. No sabemos en cuál descansa cada uno pues las doce tumbas son anónimas.

Sobre el cementerio militar nr. 293, diseñado al igual que otros varios cementerios de la Primera Gran Guerra en esta región por el arquitecto militar austríaco, teniente Robert Motka, nos informa Két Sheng de que también dan noticias algunas postales contemporáneas en yídish (o más bien en alemán, escrito en carácteres hebraicos). Una de ellas, publicada por el Kriegsgräberfürsorge de Viena, nos ofrece la lista de nombres de las unidades militares de los soldados judíos caídos.

«Vestgalitsisher kriegsfriedhof / Izraelitisher friedhof Zaklitshin»

Deluge

The yellow square on the forehead of the witch-face turned aside is Bobowa in southeastern Poland, at the Carpathian foothills. Here we are, just in the smaller eye of the cyclone, which has been rotating around for two days, incessantly pouring rain on the site of Sienkiewicz’s Deluge. We are heading to the former shtetl, one of the most beautiful intact Jewish graveyards of Poland. The graves look down from a high hilltop over the village to the valley of Biała, so that neither the Wehrmacht, nor the local people were later in any mood to mess with the removal and recycling of the stones, as they did in many other cemeteries.


After Gromnik, the road turns down to the river valley. On its two sides they are already piling up the sandbags, pumps are running, and at its lowest point, the road is already half-flooded by the river. We must rush through the cemetery, before the way back is completely closed to us.


As I stop in Ciężkowice to photograph the Austro-Hungarian military cemetery, it is already thundering forcefully from Gorlice beyond Bobowa, like the guns of the 1915 Gorlice breakthrough, where Cavalry Captain Oswald Richthofen and his sixty-three Hungarian hussars fell. Some of the fallen were no longer recognizable, and so their graves bear only this much: Ein tapferer ungarischer Krieger, a valiant Hungarian warrior.


The storm meets us just before Bobowa. We can only move forward at walking speed, with the rain pouring onto the windshield. Along the main street of the village, where once Hassidic riders galloped to greet the great Tsaddik Ben Zion Halberstam, now water is running deep.


By the time we get to the end of the village, from where one can already discern the whitewashed ohel of the Tsaddik and the first, tiny black gravestones on the hilltop, the flood has become yellowish and rolls stones. All around, from the edges of the gardens, the side streets, the mountain road leading to the cemetery, from both sides of the valley, the troubled yellow river is pouring onto the road. We have to turn back, before we become trapped in the flooded village, as happened many years ago in the Transylvanian Csíkmenaság. Leaving the Biała valley behind us, and looking back from the bank of the loudly roaring Dunajec river, we see that the storm has begun again above the mountains of Bobowa.


We had to turn back before the our goal, but we hope that in a month, when we come here again, the weather will be better in Bobowa. However, driving along the Dunajec in the pouring rain, we have an unexpected compensation. In the village of Zakliczyn, a small military cemetery appears on a quiet side street, dating from the time of the Gorlice breakthrough. It is the only Jewish military cemetery in the country. Buried here are eleven Jews, who fought for the Austro-Hungarian side, and one for the Russian side. We do not know which of them lay where, as all twelve graves are anonymous.

About the military cemetery nr. 293, planned, similarly to several other WWI cemeteries of the region, by the Austrian military architect Lieutenant Robert Motka, writes Két Sheng, some contemporary Yiddish-language postcards (or rather German-language ones in Hebrew letters) also gave news. One of them, published by the Kriegsgräberfürsorge of Vienna, also lists the names of the military units of the fallen Jewish soldiers.

“Vestgalitsisher kriegsfriedhof / Izraelitisher friedhof Zaklitshin”

The spirit of Odessa

Published in Szombat 2013/3 before our travel to Odessa organized with the Hungarian Jewish Cultural Association

The sleek white silhouette of the Vorontsov Lighthouse – slim candle, extinguished at dawn, as Vera Imber described it from her window –  was the last thing that Hayim Nahman Bialik saw of Odessa. The Ruslan steamer, which in 1919 had already carried the cream of the Odessan Jewish intelligentsia off to Jaffa, now, two years later could set sail again through the intervention of Gorky, with the rear guard of Jewish literary life in Odessa, the authors, journal editors, textbook writers, book publishers on board. The passenger Bialik’s chests also held the manuscripts of the publisher Dir, which he had recently founded, and which upon arrival at the destined shore would take the name Dvir, and become the leading book publisher of Palestine. Bialik would become the national poet of Israel.

If he raised his eyes, he could still see the Giant Stairs, as they were then known, before Eisenstein’s stroller tumbled down its length a few years later during the climactic scene of rebellion in the film Battleship Potemkin. The gigantic stairway then still reached down to the water, they had not yet built the wide thoroughfare that now separates the monumental umbilical cord linking the city with the sea, from which she was born. At the apex of the two hundred stairs, he could still discern the toga-clad figure of Duke Richelieu, the planner of the city, the first monument of Odessa, erected by the Jewish population in gratitude to their governor, thanks to whom, for the first time, they could feel themselves equal with any other inhabitant of the Russian empire.



The rest was already hidden in the trees. Only in the imagination could he follow the Primorsky boulevard, where he so often walked in the late afternoon, when the changing wind starts to blow in from the sea, and when the city livens up, from the Pushkin statue in front of the white columns of the Duma to the stone lions in front of the white columns of the governor’s palace, the rigid cadence of the neoclassical promenade, of which all the rest of Odessa is merely an appendix. And perhaps even in the imagination, he did not want to go beyond the Richelieu monument, to Catherine’s Square which opened just behind it, where now the statue of the empress who founded the city was covered with a red cloth. As Babel wrote in the last chapter of his Odessa Tales, it was in this square’s building number seven, the new headquarters of the Cheka, that they had just at that time wound down the kingdom of Benya Krik and Froyim Gach, the Jewish underlords of the Moldavanka underworld.

The monument to Catherine the Great, with the Giant Stairs and the sea in the background, 1910 (above), and in a 1931 photo by Branson DeCou (below, from here)

Beyond Catherine Square, behind the magnificent opera house stood the Literaturka, Prince Gagarin’s former palace, which stood as the center of the literary life of Odessa, a meeting place of writers, critics and editors around the clock, and today the museum of the literature of Odessa. If anything still tied the emigrants to Odessa, then it was this club, the city’s alter-ego and the essence of her life. But the club had been closed for two years, and its members scattered throughout the world. Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky, the celebrated essayist and Jewish civil rights activist of Odessa remembers it like this in The Five, the most Odessan novel, which he wrote in his Paris exile:

“The headquarters of the literary club was a separate palace. I do not remember whose it was and who lived there before that, but obviously some rich aristocrat. It stood in the best place of the city, at the border of two worlds, the aristocratic downtown and the merchant town. If I close my eyes, even today I can evoke it in my imagination – albeit only through the fog of the past, which blurs the details – the large space, the relic of the noble architecture of early 19th-century overseas masters, and of the quietly noble, archaic taste of the first city-builders: Richelieu, De Ribas, Vorontsov, and the first generation of the merchants and smugglers with Italian and Greek names. Directly in front of me, the colonnade of the city library, and to the left, in the forefront of the wide, almost shoreless bay that of the town council: neither of them would be a disgrace to Corinth or Pisa. To the right, the first houses of the Italian Street, which in my time already bore the name of Pushkin, who wrote here the Onegin. Behind me, the building of the English Club, and further to left, the facade of the City Theater. All these were built in different times, but with the same love to the foreign, Latin and Greek genius of the city of the incomprehensible name. And right here, at the palace of the Literaturka – which looks exactly like the villa I saw in Siena – began one of the steep roads down to the port, and on calm days you could hear from there the murmur of the loading bridges.”

The Gagarin Palace, today home of three – the archaeological, literary and naval – museums

On the other end of the main street, the Deribasovskaya, opposite the City Park, just a quarter-hour walk from the Literaturka, stood the Passage, the luxurious symbol of the trade of the city, built in 1899. Jabotinsky himself made this trip daily, because the Passage was also the center of the press. Here they published the dailies of Odessa, including the Odessa News, to which Jabotinsky and many other eminent authors were daily contributors.


The predecessor of Odessa News was published with the title Rassvet, that is, Dawn, by Joachim Tarnopol and Osip Rabinovich, founders of the “Society for spreading culture among the Jews”, with its offices at Richelieu street 11. The company set itself the goal of the cultural emancipation and assimilation of the Jews, and its members sought to promote Jewish culture and history in the Russian language both among the Jews of Odessa and the Russian audience. They included the historian Semyon Dubnov, founder of the historical and ethnographic society of Odessa, and of the library of Judaic and Hebrew studies, whose The history of the Jews was the first book on this topic in Russia. They also included Semyon Frug, whose poems and short stories were immensely popular, as the Jewish intellectuals saw in them the first real expression of the Jewish spirit of Odessa. His poems were set to music, they became folk and pub songs, and due to his extravagant life, he also became a hero of the city’s folklore. His funeral was at the same time a demonstration of solidarity with the Jews of Odessa. As Zvi Rama writes in her memoirs:

“The students, holding hands, lined up along the boulevard, separating the funeral procession from the passers-by on both sides of the road. Still there echoed in our ears the poems and songs of this great poet of our people, which we read and sang hundreds of times, and which were understandable to everyone, because they were written in Russian, and were so close to our hearts, because, nevertheless, they spoke in Jewish.”

The third great figure of Russian-language Jewish literature in Odessa was Semyon Yushkevich, the most renowned Jewish author of prose and theater in the 19th century. His pieces, which, in accordance with the spirit of the Society, mainly spoke about the conflict of innovation and tradition, were staged throughout Russia, and his novels – like The taylor, or images of Jewish life – became bestsellers. It was his merit to introduce to the Russian public the topic of Jewish life, and at the same time Odessa, whose unmistakable language is spoken by his characters.

The members of the Society also included Mordechai Ben-Ami, who for the first time represented provincial Jewry in Russian literature, and the everyday life of the shtetls, in a satirical, ironic spirit. His writings were very popular not only among Jewish, but also Russian readers, and they created a genre – as well as its audience – which would be further developed by so many later authors and with much great success, not only in Russian, but also Yiddish and Hebrew.

The first, and at the same time the best-known representative of this genre, Sholem Aleichem already belonged to the generation which, after the pogroms of 1881-1884 and the anti-Semitic laws of 1882, gave up the apparently futile efforts to assimilate, and who set itself the goal of creating cultural autonomy and the cultivation of the Yiddish language. He started his literary career in the Odessa newspapers, and, under the influence of Ben-Ami’s short stories, he wrote his first story, Menachem Mendl. This writing, just as in his later works, clearly reflect the sly Odessan sense of humor, which made him – as his contemporary critics said – “the Jewish Chekhov”, or – as he was later known – “the Jewish Mark Twain”.

The other great Odessan author writing in Yiddish, who portrayed provincial Jewry in an original way, was Mendele Mocher-Sforim, “the grandfather of Jewish literature”, as Sholem Aleichem called him. He came from a poor Belorussian family, studied in yeshiva, but in his adolescent years he wandered around in the world of the Belorussian and Lithuanian shtetls as the attendant of a beggar named Lame Avreml. This latter became the model of the protagonist of his novel Lame Fishke, which became a bestseller of contemporary Jewish literature, just like his other picaresque novel, The travels of Benjamin III, the “Jewish Don Quixote”, which introduced the troubled life of the medieval Spanish Jew Benjamin of Tudela, as well as the world of Sephardic Jews to Yiddish-speaking readers.

The outstanding figures of the literary life in Odessa, 1905. Sitting: H. Czernowitz, M. Lilienblum,  
H. Ravnitsky, Achad ha-Am, Mendele Mocher-Sforim, E. Levinsky.
Standing: A. Borokhov, I. Klausner, H-N. Bialik

Along with the Society, which represented the spirit of the Jewish Enlightenment, after the pogroms of the 1880s they also established the society of the lovers of the Hebrew language and literature in the same building at Richelieu street 11. Its aim, in addition to the cultural emancipation of the Jews, was more and more centered on their political autonomy. Its founder and leader was the philosopher Josif Klausner, initiator of the Hebrew Encyclopedia, editor in chief of  Ha-Siloah and Sholem Aleichem, the first Hebrew- and Yiddish-language newspapers in Odessa. He, too, sailed to Palestine on the Ruslan steamer – he was the sole person permitted by the Palestine Committee to take with him his entire library, which occupied the places of four other people – and he would later found the Hebrew department of Jerusalem University. His literary salon was maintained at Osipova street 9, which became the most important center of Jewish intellectual life in Odessa, and was described by his brother’s grandson, Amos Oz, in the autobiographical novel Love and Darkness:

“Uncle Yosef, who at twenty-nine inherited from Achad Haʻam the position of editor in chief of Hasiloah, the leading journal of modern Hebrew culture (the literary editor was the poet Bialik himself), directed Hebrew literature from Odessa. It took him only a word to elevate or to destroy an author. To the “soirées” of his brother and sister-in-law, he was also accompanied by Aunt Zippora, who made sure to carefully wrap him in woolen scarves, warm coats and ear muffs. Menachem Usishkin, the leader of the Lovers of Zion, which can be considered a forerunner of Zionism, commanded silence with his mere appearance. Elegantly dressed, he puffed up his chest to the size of a buffalo, and his rough voice competed with that of a Russian governor, as it made a fiercely murmuring sound next to the samovar. Respect for him cut off all conversation, and always there was someone who jumped up to offer his own seat to him, while Usishkin would then march across the room with a general’s steps, and sit down, spreading his thick legs, and tapping twice with his cane, would thus indicate that the conversation could go on. The regular visitors of the salon also included Rabbi Czernowitz (penname Rav Cair). […] Even Bialik appeared some nights, sometimes pale and trembling from the cold and anger, while other times on the contrary, he was the center and soul of the company. […] He was like a spry kid. A real scoundrel. Full of daring. He had no scruples, for sure. Sometimes he joked in Yiddish, until the ladies blushed. […] Bialik liked to eat and drink, he loved to have fun. He stuffed himself with bread and cheese, then he devoured a lot of cakes, drank a glass of piping hot tea and a small glass of liqueur, and then he sang entire serenades in Yiddish on the wonders of Hebrew. […] They had fierce debates on the rebirth of Hebrew language and literature, the points of connection of the cultural heritage of the Jews and of other peoples, the Bundists, the supporters of the Yiddish language, […] on the recently established agricultural settlements in Judea and Galilee, the old problems of the Jewish farmers in Kherson or Kharkov, Knut Hamsun and Maupassant, the great powers and socialism, the question of women and the land question.”

Another leading figure of the Hebrew society was the physician Leon Pinsker, who was invited as a professor of the recently founded Hebrew school in Odessa thanks to his fundamental works on Sabbatai Zvi and the Karaim. He represented the political direction of the new Hebraist generation. In his famous pamphlet Auto-Emancipation, published after the pogrom of 1881, he proclaimed the need of the political autonomy of the Jews, and the return to Palestine. In 1890 he initiated the establishment of the Palestine Committee with the aim of supporting the Jews living in Palestine and promote emigration. An outstanding representative of this trend was Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky who, aside from

Jabotinsky monument on the wall of his birthplace, Jewish street 2, with the figure of Samson on its top

his brilliant satirical essays published under the pen name Altalena, contributed to Odessan literature two books, written already from emigration. In Samson, the Nazir (1927) he formulated that active and bold idea of Jewish life that he pursued for his entire life, while The Five (1935) is a nostalgic, detailed evocation of one-upon-a-time Odessa.

The polyglot Jabotinsky translated into Russian the poems of the greatest representative of the Hebrew trend, Hayim-Nahman Bialik. Bialik came from Volhynia to Odessa, and it was in the literary milieu of the city that he became the greatest figure of modern Hebrew poetry. As a publisher, he also played an important role in the strengthening of Hebrew literature. The Moriah house, which he founded, published the most important Hebrew classics and textbooks, while his collection of folk tales and sayings scattered in the Talmud, the Sefer HaAggadah (1908-11) was a huge success, and often published worldwide bestseller.

The civil war of 1918-20 put an end to this thriving, diverse Jewish cultural life in Odessa. Whosoever could, in time fled to Europe, Berlin or Paris. And the Jewish cultural elite which remained in place until the last moment, was finally taken away by two round-trips of the Ruslan steamer to Palestine, where they offered a decisive contribution to the foundation of modern Hebrew literature and scholarship.

It is a wonder of Odessa, that precisely then, after the disappearance of the Jewish cultural and literary elite, followed that second efflorencesce of Odessan Jewish literature, which is the best known and most appreciated today. It is then that Isaak Babel writes his Odessa Tales, immortalizing and ennobling into a legend the world of the Jewish slums of the Moldavanka and Peresyp, and Ilf and Petrov give form, in the character of Ostap Bender, to the Odessan scoundrel who always prevails due to his cunning, humor and insolence. This world and this character, which were introduced into literature by Semyon Frug, Mordecai Ben-Ami, Mendele Mocher-Sforim and Sholem Aleichem, and this vibrant, absurd and clever spirit of Odessa, created by a century in the life and literature of the city. Babel and Ilf grew up on this literature, embraced this spirit, and set up a memorial to it, after it had said goodbye to Odessa.

Sites mentioned in this article: a) Vorontsov Lighthouse; b) Richelieu monument
on the top of the Giant Stairs; c) the Duma and Pushkin’s statue, one end of
the Primorsky promenade; d) the other end of the promenade, the palace
of the governor; e) statue of Catherine the Great; f) Gagarin Palace;
g) the Passage; h) Richelieu 11, center of the Jewish cultural
societies; i) Osipova 9, Josef Klausner’s literary salon