Arabic for beginners

At Odessa Airport, a multilingual greeting welcomes the traveler: Peace with you. In most of the languages featuring here, this greeting is not colloquial, so probably this is the same situation as in the previous post: that in Odessa, “foreigner” means “Israeli”, and their שָׁלוֹם עֲלֵיכֶם shālôm ʻalêḵem is translated into the other languages.

In most languages this is fine, at least on the level of raw translation. Except for Arabic. Here, the eye accustomed to Arabic writing sees a startling mishmash instead of the correct السلام عليكم as-salāmu ʻalaikum. If you start to spell it, you will soon find out what happened: someone typed the letters of the greeting one by one, and they did not join together in the usual cursive writing. Each letter displays the “stand-alone” form from the four possible (initial, medial, final, stand-alone). And what is even worse: it all is from left to right.


It is likely that someone typed the greeting in an Arabic word processor, and the file was then read in Odessa in a graphic editor of European language, which isolated the letters, and turned the text from left to right. That no one ever bothered to check it, is the shame of the airport.

And it’s a great luck that the greeting was translated from Hebrew and not Yiddish, because in this case it would have rendered Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich in all languages :) Imagine this in Arabic, left to right, with isolated letters…

In another city of Ukraine, in Lemberg, the large café on Ruska Street has the word “coffee” written in a different language above each window. The Yiddish version – קאַווע kāve – was written with the same mistake: not only was it written in reverse, but the patah, the small line under alef, indicating the vowel “a”, was typed as a separate letter. Probably due to a similar word processor incompatibility error. By now, someone has alerted them, so the word figures now right-to-left and with the patah under alef, but the sunlit traces of the old mistake are well visible on the frame of the window.



The actuality of the problem is illustrated by a very current cartoon. Here, Erdoğan, dressed in ISIS uniform, who has marched into northern Syria to commit genocide, is about to cut the throat of a female figure symbolizing the Kurdish people, whose face is borrowed from the Syrian Kurdish politician Hevrin Khalaf, executed two days ago by the pro-Turkish militia. Meanwhile, Putin is washing his hands, Trump turns away, and the EU puts its head in the sand. The smallest problem with this constellation is that the name of the region represented by the Kurdish figure is written on her chest in the same mistaken way, with isolated letters, and moreover incorrectly, as Kudristan, instead of the correct form, which is

كوردستان

Postscript. As the Lumen blog pointed out, Erdoğan has personally requested the deletion of this post at Google, apparently due to the above cartoon. That’s all he got from it. Google did not comply with the request – and we live in times where I could not add “of course” in this sentence. So I have to be grateful to both Google for their exceptional courage and Erdoğan for the unsolicited publicity. It is amazing how much nothing escapes the dictators’ attention. Of course, in Turkey this is a tradition.

And, while we are at the Turks, let me enrich the collection of fucked-up Arabic inscriptions with this one, which I harvested from the side of an Istanbul kiosk (köşk). It is amazing that it has not yet leapt to the eye of any Turk, who should, in principle, read the Qurʿan in Arabic.

Bath Number Four

Kazimir Malevich: In the bath, 1911-1912

The Повѣсть времѧньныхъ лѣтъ, “Chronicle of Bygone Times”, composed in Kiev in 1113, in which its author, the monk Nestor, summarizes the history of the Eastern Slavs from the Tower of Babel to his own time, states that the apostle Andrew, during his missionary journeys, also visited the Eastern Slavs, from the later Kiev to the later Novgorod. Here he saw, among many other miracles, that pecular institution of the Slavs, the bath.

“Wondrous to relate, what I saw in the land of the Slavs. … I noticed their wooden bathhouses. They warm them to extreme heat, then undress, and after anointing themselves with tallow, they take young reeds and lash their bodies. They actually lash themselves so violently that they barely escape alive. Then they drench themselves with cold water, and thus are revived. They think nothing of doing this every day, and actually inflict such voluntary torture on themselves. They make of the act not a mere washing but a veritable torment.”

The art of Slavic self-torture has not changed much since Saint Andrew, or at least Nestor. In the hot chamber of the bath, water is poured on the heated stones, and in the intense steam they lash themselves with veniks, thin branches cut from birch, oak, or, more recently, eucalyptus tree, to stimulate blood circulation. When they sweat well, they bathe in cold water – in a lake, river or in the cold chamber of the bath – or roll in the snow. Then they take a break until the next sweat-lashing, spent over tea, beer, conversation or chess. The traditional bath is one of the most important scenes of Russian social life.

Boris Kustodiev: Russian Venus, 1925

Zinaida Serebriakova: Bath, 1913

Tamara De Lempicka: Women in the bath, 1929

However, the palaces for this traditional art have largely disappeared during the past century. On the one hand, the Soviet system tried to restrict these centers of uncontrolled social life, and on the other, they were replaced by the bathrooms that had appeared in most apartments. In Odessa, where at the turn of the 20th century there were more than 400 community baths, now there is but one traditional bath still active, and since 1861: Bath Number Four at the edge of Moldavanka, at 6 Astashkin Street.




At the end of a courtyard overgrown with grapes, beneath the stairs leading up to the bath, young men are standing and chatting. “Shalom”, they greet us: apparently, foreigners here automatically means a former compatriot coming back from Israel. We reply in Russian, and social life immediately starts. They draw our attention to the black marble plaque on the courtyard wall. This commemorates “Karabas”, the local mafia boss shot in 1997 here, “on the stairs, as he was coming down from the bath”, they point out. “He was like Mishka Yaponchik”, they say with reverence, although they were not personally directed by him, they only heard of him from their older colleagues. Mishka Yaponchik, the Jewish gangster boss of the early 20th century, who was the model for Isaak Babel’s Benya Krik, the “King” of Moldavanka, in his Odessa Tales, lives so fresh in the memory of the posterity of Moldavanka, to an extent that we, readers of Odessa Tales, would never think.

“On 21 April 1997, here was treacherously killed Viktor Pavlovich Kulivar. Your memory remains bright in eternity, Karabas. From your friends and associates. – Consecrated to V. P. Kulivar, our neighbor in Old Slaughterhouse (Kuibishev) Street, on the memorial day of his death.”

The courtyard wall of the bath is made of glass brick to provide light inside, and the top row’s first glass brick has been knocked out, so you can see who’s out there. The botched equipment of the downstairs boiler room, by which the bath is heated, evokes the golden years of socialism. Pushed among the hot surfaces, oak branches are being dried. In the courtyard, an elderly man is tying the branches for the bath. “Jó napot”, good day, he greets us in Hungarian. After so many previous similar cases, I ask him straight: “Did you serve in Hungary?” “Yes.” “Where?” “In Tamási, between 1962 and 1964.” “What was it like?” He lifts his eyes in nostalgic reverie to the vine tendrils covering the courtyards. “Heaven.” I should interview the Soviet soldiers who served in our land, while they are still alive.

Scene from the bath. From Dmitry Khavin’s documentary “Quiet in Odessa”

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

Odessa

Sometimes I feel the need to simply pick out and insert here some pictures from the flow of news. Not as if I could add anything to what is flooding anyway at such times from the mass of news, blogs, commentaries. Rather as a milestone only. And because I cannot write about anything else instead, since everything that I could write about seems too insignificant in comparison.


This was the Greek Square, with the Greek bookshop, where you could browse the recent literature of the city, and with small brasseries around, where you could sit out even after midnight in the warm, noisy Odessan night, smelling of the sea. Only a few steps away, to the left, is the Gambrinus, where they still play old Odessan pub songs every evening, and that is already the corner of the City Park and Deribasovskaya, the crowded promenade. In the background, the Afisha passage and department store where the demonstrators fled, and the building on the corner, on which the fire bomb is thrown, is the Smiley internet café, which often helped me out when the net did not work in my room.

This enormous socialist realist temple was the headquarters of the trade unions in Kulikovo park, opposite the train station, next to the Japanese bargain hotel with small claustrophobic sleeping niches, converted from the old tram depot. Further along the rails, the Middle Mills from Kataev’s A white sail gleams, and beyond it, the Moldavanka, with Khmelnitsky’s statue at the beginning of the Jewish street, and in Khmelnitsky street with the house of Benya Krik and its hundred-year-old dovecotes described again and again by Babel.


In recent months it has become increasingly palpable, that in the Ukraine an era has come to an end. This has become definite with the latest tragedy in Odessa. The extended socialism, the twenty-year delay of adulthood, which this eternal borderland has overslept, during which it has not become either East or West, and which now awakens to the prospect of its fate being decided independently by the East and the West, as has happened so many times over the course of history. A world frozen in a dream, anachronistic and surrealistic, and yet captivating. I am grateful that at least in its final years it was allowed for me me to see some of it and also to show it to others.

Endgame

Rather than in Vienna and Budapest, the old Monarchy can be found in Lemberg and Czernowitz, where since the collapse of the empire most of the houses have preserveed their condition of a hundred years ago, frozen into a Sleeping Beauty sleep, and where nowadays, when they renew some of them, with a lucky hand they try to restore the feeling of the Monarchy again. And of course in Odessa, on the flea market of the port city, where the waves sometimes still wash ashore the remains of the shipwrecked empire. Like these few postcards from last week’s loot.

Őnagysága Pozdnik Paula úrleánynak, Kispest, Üllői út 220-22, Teudloff-Dietrich gyár.
Tátraszéplak, 1916 (?) X. 14. Feladó Ritter J. hadapródjelölt. Tátraszéplak,
hadikórház, Tivoli pavilon. Üdvözletét küldi kézcsókkal Ritter József.

The Hotel Palace Tivoli, where Cadet József Ritter was recuperating (Not my postcard)

In the peacetime idyll of the postcard sent from the resort hotel Palace Tivoli in Tátraszéplak under the Tatry mountains, the recently opened electric railway is slowly jogging towards Csorba Lake / Štrbské Pleso. The Gerlach Peak, the highest point of the former Hungary still bears the name of Franz Joseph, and in fact Franz Joseph is still alive. But the war had been going on for two years, this is why Cadet József Ritter sends his postcard from the military hospital established in the resort hotel to Mademoiselle Paula Pozdnik to the town of Kispest, in the Teudloff-Dittrich iron foundry and fire engine factory. The time seems impossibly far when Tátraszéplak would get the name of Tatranska Polianka, the peak that of the Czech Legionaries and later of Stalin, the iron foundry that of the Hungarian State Railway Engine and Machine Factory, and Kispest would merge into Budapest.

Wielmożna Iza Lewicka. Kraków/Krakau, Rakowicka 19. II. 1918. II. 20.
Who could transcribe the Ukrainian-language message?

The postcard representing the Franz Joseph Square in Olmütz/Olomouc was sent by Volodimir to the Polish Krakow, but he makes excuses in Ukrainian for having to spend a few more days than planned in Moravia: this constellation in itself is a faithful impression of the Monarchy. However, the real protagonist of the card is the tramway, for the sake of which the whole composition was pushed slightly to the left. The tram started in Olmütz on April 1, 1899, and the local Czech press treated in detail and with pleasure the dangers of the “German” vehicle: “Beware of the tram! It destroys wagons and kills people!”

The same tram from the other side, the Elisabeth Square (Not my postcard)

“The first victim of the Olmütz electric railway!”

The atmosphere turned only when the name of Franz Joseph Square changed for Masaryk, and the exclusively German inscriptions of the tram were changed for exclusively Czech. By then the Ukrainian-Polish couple probably also lived in Eastern Poland, which shortly afterwards, with the shift of the borders to the west, became Ukraine: maybe this is how the postcard then found its way to Odessa.

“Hurra!” Fräulein Lena Hock, Hier [Offenbach], Goethestr. 78. 1917. III. 15.
Liebe Lena! Sende Dir hiermit einen herzlichen Tagesgrüß. War gestern auf der Suche nach Dir, konnte Dich aber nicht finden, hatte auch sehr wenig Zeit. Heute haben wir Nachtübung und dabei wird es auch spät werden. Nächste Woche geht ein kleines Transport ins Feld bin nicht dabei weil 98er. Grüßst Dich herzlich Dein Seppl [?] – Herzlichen Grüß an Deine Mama. Ob ich Morgen kommen kann weiß ich noch nicht.

Not a postcard of the Monarchy, but it just could be: the genre of “before the leaves fall, our soldiers will be back home” was characteristic of all Europe at the outbreak of the war. We also want to publish a nice collection of them with Natasha Gaidarova from the Great War blog. It is strange that the postcard was popular even three years later, although it is true that Seppl from Offenbach was just about to leave for the great journey.

“Polnische Wirtschaft”. Der Krieg 1914/15 in Postkarten. Abteilung: Das deutsche Heer. 11. Serie: Soldatenleben im Felde. Reinertrag für die Ostpreußenhilfe 1915

And here he already arrived. Although, according to its title, this item of the postcard series by Lehmann Publisher in Munich represents a “Polish farm”, the fruits of this farm are already enjoyed by the German soldiers, most probably after the Gorlice Breakthrough in the spring of 1915, somewhere in Galicia.

„Uniform austryjacki szary. Kołnierz […] na nim gwiazdki białe” (Reading by Tamás Deák)
We kindly ask our Polish readers to help us in reading the rest of the texts.

And here are the former owners of the farm, enlisted in the Monarchy’s army. The owner perhaps wrote in remembrance on the picture which clothes he was wearing at that time: “Austrian field-gray uniform. Tube ring collar […] and white stars on it.” The reminder was truly necessary, because the uniform would change soon.



The celebrated protagonist of the photo already wears the uniform of the newly formed independent Polish army. His three standing companions compensate with a grim posture for the lack of uniform, and demonstrate that when the home will call them, they will stand up. Soon it will be necessary.

I gladly hand over the photos and postcards bought on the Odessa flea market for just the purchase price + postage costs to anyone who would really appreciate them. Numbers 003 and 009 already have their masters.