The Russian Jerusalem (12 page)

Odessa is Isaac Babel's town.

The stucco has gone from the painted houses of the Moldovanka, and the streets are very poor; washing is pinned up outside the balconies of cheap flats; the courtyards are mean, with a standpipe for water in each of them. Few people are walking around. No sign of Babel's rumbustious carters, or his gangster hero Benya Krik, wearing a chocolate jacket, cream pants and red boots. But people still point out the place where Benya Krik held a party so large that it spilled across the pavement.

Not that Babel grew up in the Moldovanka. There is a plaque outside his parents' house in Richelevskaya Boulevard, a merchant's house, in the centre of town, and he spent his childhood in the Black Sea village of Nikolaev. After the Civil War, he lived in Moscow, dreaming of poppy seed bread and sunshine. But his stories gave Odessa a new image of itself, rather as Damon Runyon or Woody Allen gave a flavour to Manhattan.

In Babel's day the port attracted ships from Newcastle, Marseilles and Port Said. On the docks these days there are gangsters far less benevolent than Benya Krik, who could get what he wanted with soft words rather than violence and sometimes shot his bullets into the air. The new hoods kidnap pretty young girls and ship them across to Turkey to work as prostitutes. The novelist Andrei Kurkov, who wrote
Death and the Penguin
, once planned to make a TV film about the practice but was warned off sharply. Even after the Orange Revolution, the Ukraine is still run by the Mafia.
‘You don't bother them, they won't bother you,' I was told. Not all their activities are sinister. Odessa was once the centre of the illegal antiquities trade, and young men still hang around the archaeological museum offering impeccable forgeries of ancient Greek sculptures. There was even a time when wealthy gangsters supported pet writers or put money into Art Films. Such backing was not without risk. Kurkov told me of one director who took some of this Mafia money for his own use and was shot dead for his impudence.

In September 2005, I travelled to Odessa with my eldest son, Adam, and we stayed at the Londonskaya Hotel on Primorsky Boulevard, a cobbled esplanade at the top of the famous Odessa Steps. These lead down to Morsky Voksal, an ugly one-storey building from which ships leave for towns around the Black Sea. The main dock highway runs along the foot of the steps and the sea is nearly invisible behind the discoloured cement of the ocean terminals. People walk along Primorsky constantly. The centre of Odessa is built for strolling around and staring. From Primorsky it is only a few minutes to Deribasovskaya Street.

The Londonskaya Hotel itself was built in 1827 and has high ceilings, chandeliers and curving balustrades. Writers have always liked to stay there – Chekhov and Essenin among them – and the hotel proudly puts photographs outside the rooms they once occupied. It was popular with the NKVD in Soviet times, too; indeed, they commandeered the whole of the ground floor, and one of the poets we met – Boris Hersonsky – recalled two spells of interrogation there.

Odessa is a provincial city – the capital of the Ukraine is the ancient city of Kiev – but it has something of the
grandeur of a southern St Petersburg. It was built at the command of Catherine the Great. Joseph de Ribas, an adventurer and womaniser, conquered the land; French and Italian architects built the city on what was said to be the site of a Greek town called Odessos, after Odysseus. In fact, the Greek colony is farther along the coast and the city was probably named for Catherine's current Greek lover. There are other stories, but only one undisputed fact: at a court ball in 1795, Catherine declared that, since the city had been founded by a woman, it should be given a feminine gender.

So Odessa was born. A free port of traders: Greeks, Turks and Tatars; Cossacks too, a band of deserters grown into a people with their own tradition of freedom and ferocity. Jews from the
stetls
at the western edge of the Russian Empire were invited in by the Duc de Richelieu, the governor of the city from 1803 to 1814, who thought they would make good merchants. They soon understood that Odessa was a city of immigrants, rather like New York. Their children were allowed into Russian schools.

It is easy to see why Zaida loved the town. The climate of Odessa is benign. Some winters there is no snow, and spring always comes early. In the late afternoon, the air is warm and scented with Mediterranean flowers. There are cafés on the pavements of Deribasovskaya Ulitsa, an opera house, a theatre. In the centre, street life is rich and in Babel's day
luftmenschen
wandered through the coffee houses, trying to con a rouble or two from the patrons by some trick or other. There were Jewish women selling live chickens, Greeks selling coffee and spice, German
sausage-makers
, Rumanians playing music in the streets.

By the time Zaida reached the city, nearly half the population were Jews. Most were poor, but they were loud,
energetic, confident. A little later in the century, some owned newspapers; others wrote for them, like Vladimir Jabotinsky, the radical Zionist. By then there was a Bohemian, well-heeled Jewish middle class. Meetings of Zionists took place in a Viennese style building near the Opera House now called Hotel Mozart.

Adam and I, after our travels in northern Russia two years earlier, were bemused by the sunshine. On Primorsky Boulevard, the chestnut and plane trees were not yet autumnal. We met a man carrying two live rabbits in his arms and, as we stared, he advanced to sell them to us. Later, as we walked up towards the market, there were stranger creatures on offer: one resembling a baby crocodile, with a string securing its long mouth. Perhaps an unusual lizard? Perhaps the mythical salamander? A greeny-grey creature.

We sat in a café called Druzhya i Pivo (‘Friends and beer') with chessboards marked on its tables. There we ate herring and sliced onion, with glasses of chilled Stella Artois. There was an illusory sense of Western prosperity. The girls walking by were unexpectedly well-dressed, which must have been a matter of pride rather than spare cash, since most jobs are very ill-paid.

We had not expected there to be many Jews left in the Ukraine after the massacres, so the number of writers, teachers and television pundits with a Jewish history was startling. They were not survivors exactly, but people returning to the city and remaining there even when it was possible to leave. Even after 1989, when so many left for Israel – Haifa is a short boat trip away – the census recorded 69,100 Jews remaining. Even now there are more than 40,000 in the city and in September 2005 there was a Jewish
mayor. However, the majority of Jews are poor, old and dependent on soup kitchens for their food. These are largely run by synagogues, the most famous of which is the Brodsky Synagogue, a majestic building in Florentine Gothic at the corner of Pushkinskaya and Zhukovskaya Streets. It was named after Jews from the town of Brody in the
Austro-Hungarian
Empire, a Reform congregation. The cantor was said to have a splendid voice, and there was a choir and an organ – this last forbidden to an Orthodox community. Mussorgsky once came to listen to the music there, and it was the preferred synagogue of the Jewish intelligentsia until 1925, when the Soviet authorities closed it down along with other places of worship. Then it fell into disuse. The building has been restored with the help of American money from the Lubavitch Foundation: mahogany, thick carpets, chandeliers. Brass plaques announce individual donors. It is now ultra-Orthodox. Apart from the
shammes
, and a middle-aged woman who managed the gift shop, however, there was no one from the congregation when we put our noses inside.

Even in the middle of the afternoon, the synagogue on Yevraiskaya Street is livelier. Young boys laugh and smoke cigarettes on the steps. Inside, we found a young teacher with a parchment-yellow face, gingery hair and big, melancholy eyes. He had been born in Belorus, where Jews were commonly attacked physically. It was rather better, he told us, in Odessa. When he said something ironic, a grin transformed his whole face with amusement.

Every morning, old, poor Jews, mainly women, come to the synagogue for free food and to pray. When we returned on our last morning, I met an old man with a black beard and deep-set eyes whose face crinkled up when he smiled. His heavy build, his ready shrug and the way his cardigan
rode up at the back reminded me of Zaida in spite of his different colouring.

He came from Zhitomir, a city in Western Ukraine, some time under Polish, some time in Lithuanian control, with a long history of pogrom and persecution. The brilliant Yiddish writer Mendele Mocher Sforim lived there, and Chaim Bialik grew up nearby. The young men from Zhitomir were less passive than those in other small towns in 1905. When anti-Jewish riots broke out, in the wake of the Beilis Trial, organised groups of Zionist and Socialist young men fought back, though several lost their lives doing so.

Babel described Zhitomir as it was when Poles had taken the town for a time. The Polish soldiers organised a pogrom, cut off beards, cut out tongues. The people were glad to see the Cossacks ride into town. Perhaps the Bolsheviks would prove saviours? He saw women washing clothes in the river, and old Jewish men with long skinny legs soaping themselves. The Civil War was raging. A shopkeeper in a Dickensian shop, recognising him as a Jew, muttered to him: ‘They all say they are fighting for justice, and they all loot.'

Strangely, the man we met from Zhitomir remembered an idyllic childhood as the son of a cobbler, with everything a large family could need. In Soviet times he worked on the shop floor of a factory. In the Second World War he was at the Front. His parents had survived because they were evacuated to Uzbekistan. I guessed he must be at least eighty-five, though he still looked sturdy.

‘Well,' he smiled, ‘my only work nowadays is to come twice a day to the synagogue.'

He had a daughter in New York and I wondered why he was not tempted to join her.

‘And how would the synagogue survive without me?' he demanded.

These ghosts of a lost world make jokes as if they are amused by God. Enduring so many vicissitudes, they feel entitled to question Him. Theirs is a religion of questions, always posed with irony.

This is a bitter amusement, but not a defensive one; no emotions are denied or hidden; it holds the full knowledge of human brutality and helplessness, alongside a profound gratitude for being alive.

It is Babel's irony.

I met Joseph Brodsky for the first time in London, on his way out of the Soviet Union, when he looked through my translations of Tsvetaeva, murmuring the lines of her poems which he had by heart. It was an unnerving experience, and it did not go well. He thought her the greatest of Russian poets, alongside Mandelstam, and he wanted her rhymes and metres preserved in English.

We saw more of one another when he came to take up a Fellowship at Clare Hall. He was lonely in Cambridge, which is not particularly hospitable to poets – even Octavio Paz, that most charming and gregarious of diplomats found as much – and it is to that loneliness I attribute Joseph's occasional visits, and the meals he took at my house. Sometimes he watched football with my youngest son, Joel, who was much the same age as the son he had been forced to leave in Russia.

When I met him again in New York in 1978, he was living in a flat in Greenwich Village. I had come to interview him for the
Sunday Times
as part of a piece that included Andrei Sinyavsky and the Chilean José Donoso, to be called ‘Writers in Exile'.

Later, at the Cambridge Poetry Festival, we clashed on a television panel, in which he argued about the necessity for rhyme in translating Russian verse. I explained that in English verse there is a quite different tradition, in which the shape of every line has to pull against the rhythms of colloquial speech; and more is lost than gained by insisting on strong full rhymes. I said, ‘You can't preserve all that.'
He retorted with a joke about the taxi driver, who, when asked how to get to Carnegie Hall, replies, ‘Practise. Practise. Practise.'

My indignation was profound.

‘Practise? You mean Shakespeare? Milton?
Wordsworth
? Eliot?'

The audience was restive. They wanted to hear Brodsky talk about Mandelstam.

He was rude, brusque, annoyed by my presumption and that evening did not show up at a supper party in his honour, perhaps most irritated by our conversation in the bar after the panel, when several poets, notably Vasco Popa, declared themselves on my side in defence of modernism. At the Festival, he read in a magnetic, mesmerising way, which those who read the translations did not attempt to mimic.

He bore me no ill will. I happened to be in New York on the very day he first heard that he would need a bypass. He drove me to the airport and shared his thoughts about the possibility of death.

‘Afterwards there is only the book,' he said.