THE JEWS OF ODESSA
When I reached Odessa, after travelling over the peculiarly desolate
steppe from Kieff, only about eleven weeks had passed since she
celebrated an amazing festival of liberty. Her straight streets had
laughed for joy, and the old Black Sea had reflected the smile. Youths
paraded with flags and trumpets, aged professors embraced in tears,
and women, as on a Russian Easter Day, felt hurt if they were not
kissed--all because the Tsar had issued a manifesto and freedom had
risen into life. The long struggle was surely near its end, and those
who had fallen for the cause had not died in vain.
Two days later they buried freedom, and whilst I was there the
Government was still busy stamping down the bloody earth to lay her
ghost. There was no longer any talk of manifesto or concession. Every
promise had been falsified, and every hope deceived. No meetings were
allowed, except to legal Hooligans. No papers could appear, except the
Government organ of violence. Even the paper of the Constitutional
Democrats had been suddenly suppressed. The friends of liberty choked
the prisons, and as I went down the streets I saw their white faces
peering between the bars. All was still, except when the stagnation of
tyranny was broken by the murder of some police-officer conspicuous for
brutality, or by a bomb such as had just fallen into the Café Liebmann
on the central square by the cathedral. No schools had been open since
October, and there seemed no prospect of the University ever opening
again.
Trepoff began it when he sent an order from St. Petersburg urging the
Governor-General Neidhart to allow a demonstration of the loyalist
Black Hundred on November 1st. Infuriated by religious conviction and
the lust for stolen goods, the Black Hundred exhibited an enthusiastic
loyalty, unchecked by the police, who directed their movements, or by
the troops, who were confined to barracks. For three days the city
lay at the mercy of law and order, and in the cemetery may be seen
the oblong of loose earth where 350 bodies were heaped into a common
grave. The Government’s victory was complete and so far-reaching that
memorials of it might still be seen on every side. Even in the middle
of the town, shops that had been the richest had the shutters up in
January, their windows were broken to pieces, their stores all gone.
And in the northern and north-west districts, where the Jews and
some work-people live, whole rows of houses stood desolate. The marks
of bullets were thick upon the walls. The empty sockets of the windows
were roughly boarded over. The roofs had been broken in or sometimes
burnt away, and even on the main streets people pointed out the
windows, three storeys high, from which babies, girls, and women had
been pitched sheer upon the stony pavement below.
[Illustration: THE JEWS’ GRAVE AT ODESSA.]
[Illustration: AFTER THE MASSACRE.]
It was in the miserable lanes of this north-west district that the
plunder and slaughtering began--a district so wretched that my
top-boots kept sticking in the deep slough of the streets, and the
worst Jewish slum off Commercial Road would have seemed in comparison a
County Council paradise. But passing beyond this quarter, I crossed a
deep watercourse, and came out upon the kind of land which serves for
country at the backdoor of Odessa. It is part of the wild and almost
uninhabited steppe which stretches for mile on mile round the basin of
the Dniester and far away into Bessarabia--an uninterrupted, water-worn
plain, like the Orange River veldt, but streaked at that time with
melting snow. On the edge of this steppe stands a semi-detached town or
large village, called Slobodka Romanovka, conspicuous for its madhouse
and its hospital. Providence itself must have ordained the site of
these buildings, for nowhere else upon earth’s surface could they have
been more wanted. And, indeed, it was the Chosen People of Providence
who wanted them most, for none of the rabid Christians who there hunted
them down were afterwards confined in the asylum for mania.
The village numbered about 26,000 souls, and there was hardly a house
which did not still show the marks of wrecking and murder. Clubs
were the weapons chiefly used by the champions of Christ and the
Tsar--such clubs as the Turks used in Constantinople when they brained
the Armenians in the name of the Prophet and the Sultan. But long
butcher knives were found even more convenient for killing children,
and when there was the least show of resistance, nothing could be more
serviceable than a revolver at five yards’ range. In that three days’
massacre nearly all who suffered were Jews, and out of a population of
about 600,000 in Odessa, the Jews are estimated at a little under or a
little over 300,000, so that the game for the Christian sportsmen lay
thick upon the ground.
The Jews of Odessa are said by their Christian neighbours--even by such
as restrained themselves from putting them to death--to represent a
particularly unpleasant type. They are accused of peculiar selfishness,
greediness, and indifference to suffering, even to their own. I
cannot say for certain whether that is so. I only know that they have
a particularly unpleasant time, and, whether indifferent to their
own sufferings or not, they are an amazing people. Their Christian
neighbours, as in Kieff and all centres of Jewish persecution, chalk
a conspicuous cross on their shutters in dangerous times, or stick a
sixpenny saint’s portrait over the door. Most people also, as I noticed
in Moscow, wear big crosses hidden round their necks, so that, when
the supporters of the Government are out cutting throats, they may
have some chance of salvation. No Jew would do any such thing--not for
dear life itself would he do it. Christians say he could not conceal
himself, even if he wished--his look, his dwelling, his passport, the
police, all would betray him. And no doubt that is true, though, if I
were a Jew, I would cover my house with crosses from ground to roof
in the hope of saving any one I cared for from being flung out of my
top window. But, even if such hope were vain, that is no reason why a
Jew should cover his outside shutters and the lintel of his door with
Hebrew inscriptions or Hebrew information about his Kosher goods and
the Shomer who is in attendance. Yet on ruin after ruin I saw these
inscriptions written; and, what is more remarkable, I saw the surviving
owners repainting these inscriptions as they patched up the wreckage of
their homes.
They are not, perhaps, exactly the race I should call chosen, but
certainly they are a peculiar people. I saw, for instance, one aged
type of wretched Israel who had been counted a prosperous man, but
in the massacre had lost wife, family, ducats, and all. When his seed
was buried and the days of the mourning passed, he borrowed a few
cigarettes, and sat down on the pavement outside the wilderness of his
habitation. Next day he had more cigarettes to sell. Next week he had
a stall, and when I saw him he was hoping to open a tobacconist shop
where before he sold secondhand clothes and saw his family murdered. It
seems impossible that all the Christians in Russia, backed as they are
by the open support of the army, police, and Church, can ever succeed
in exterminating such a race.
But for the time their misery was extreme. They had crowded for refuge
into courts which ran far back from the ordinary streets--something
like the old “rents” in Holborn. There I found them living in stinking
and steaming rooms or cellars, and often I had to grow accustomed to
the darkness before I could discern exactly how many families were
accommodated in the corners. The assistant of one of the University
professors was my guide, for a certain amount of relief work was being
carried on by such Liberals as happened to be still out of gaol. I was
told the town had already spent £15,000 in relief, and the Zemstvo
had voted as much again to keep the distressed alive till the end of
April. I dimly heard, also, of a fund contributed by Jews in England,
but I did not discover their methods. As to the town fund, I could not
be certain how much of it reached the Jews, but some did, for with an
agent I visited one of the ten “sanitary districts” into which the town
had been divided, and saw how he dealt with the cases.
Money had been given at first, but, as usual, imposture came, and the
professors had found themselves no match for a race whose whole weekday
existence is devoted to gathering where they have not strown. Later on,
the town bound itself only to feed the destitute by a system of free
tickets, or at a very small charge. It was the ordinary soup-kitchen
method--not scientific, not inhumanly discriminating; but Russia has
the happiness of being young in philanthropy, as in politics, and has
not yet developed the caution of our charity societies, which in their
strained quality are so little like mercy. As was to be expected,
crowds of the unemployed came wandering in from other towns, even as
far away as Kharkoff and Kieff; and under the passport system most
of them were routed out and sent back again. What was worse, some
15,000 men and women had lately been turned upon the streets because
the rich people of Odessa, who live in the pleasant quarter by the
cliffs overlooking the sea, began to run for their lives that day in
June when the mutinous warship _Potemkin_ made them all jump by
throwing two shells into the town near the cathedral; and they had
been running ever since. Behind them they left all that host of valets,
cooks, nurses, housemaids, grooms, coachmen, gardeners, boot-boys,
barbers, and washerwomen who depend on the rich for existence, just as
the rich depend on them. The shopkeepers who sell the things that only
rich people can buy suffered equally, and many of their assistants were
dismissed. It is bad for all when, according to the old parable, the
members refuse to feed the belly, and it is worse when the belly runs
away from the members. But if any one supposes on that account that the
expenditure of the rich confers an inestimable benefit upon the working
classes, he is involved in a very comfortable old fallacy.
Beside all this, there was great distress among the dockers, in spite
of the considerable share of Jewish wealth which they had obtained in
their outburst of religious and patriotic zeal. Most of it went in an
immense drinking debauch to celebrate the victory over the enemies of
Christ, and work had ceased because the great fire during the mutiny
in June destroyed a great part of the docks, and entirely burnt away
the wooden viaduct upon which the dock railway runs along the whole
face of the port. One day when I was there, trial trains began to run
for the first time, amid such popular excitement that I hoped another
mutiny had broken out. But no warships were any longer stationed in
the port, except one little destroyer. The dockers were only excited
at the prospect of regular work. They live by themselves at the foot of
the cliffs, below the fashionable boulevard, and they are said to be
in every way a race apart. Certainly they adopt a distinctive costume,
more astonishing in its incongruity than a West Coast chiefs, and
suggesting a burlesque air of intentional raggedness, like an amateur
who wants to look Bohemian. The dockers, however, have no need for
deliberation in picturesque poverty, for the average wages of unskilled
labour through the city is 1_s._ 8_d._ for a day of ten hours, or
2_d._ an hour. And it is not as though 2_d._ in Russia went as far as
the “honest tanner” for which our own dockers struggled so hard in
the early nineties. Ordinary living is very expensive in Odessa, more
expensive even than in most Russian cities, and in an earlier chapter
I noticed how strangely high the cost of living is in St. Petersburg
and Moscow, chiefly owing to the heavy rent charges, in spite of the
vast extent of unfilled and unoccupied land in the Empire. Except for
the hire of street sledges and little open cabs, two shillings in
Russia do not go much further than one in London, nor twopence to an
Odessa docker much further than a penny in Poplar. No one can dress
very sumptuously when he has to feed himself and family on a penny an
hour, and we cannot wonder that the unskilled join the party of law and
order, in the hope that an occasional massacre will bring a change of
clothes.
In politics, Odessa included all the Russian parties, from the rival
pioneers of Social Revolution and Social Democracy (most of whom were
in gaol) down to the “Russian Order,” or party of violence, which is
the Government’s ready instrument for the destruction of Jews, Poles,
Liberals, and other heretics. The Russian Order alone was still allowed
to hold meetings, every other party organization being forbidden by
the police. But, nevertheless, it was in Odessa that I first became
intimate with the Constitutional Democratic party, which has since
grown to such importance as a possible instrument for reform. They were
especially strong in the University, which justly prides itself on its
political fearlessness. Their newspapers and all meetings had been
suppressed; but most of the Professors and other leaders were still at
large, though daily awaiting arrest, with enviable unconcern.
They were energetically preparing the first grade of elections for
the Duma, and they expected to secure a majority upon the body, who
in turn would select the single representative appointed for the
great city in the Duma. Like other Progressive parties, they demanded
a Constituent Assembly under the four-headed suffrage (universal,
direct, secret, and equal). Their programme included Home Rule for
the various nationalities of the Empire, labour legislation, and a
sweeping agrarian reform on the basis of compensation for private land,
but not for the Crown lands held by the Imperial family. In fact,
their immediate objects, as the Professors admitted, were hardly to be
distinguished from the “minimum programme” of the Social Democrats.
But when we began to talk about “immediate objects” and “minimum
programmes,” I remembered that seven weeks had gone by since such
conversations seemed natural--seven weeks of bloodshed and suppression
and bitter change. They themselves took the mournful difference very
calmly. The fight was still in front of them, every hope had been
crushed, every effort for freedom would have to begin again from the
very start. But nothing discouraged them; the mere struggle was worth
the pains; and to this patient people even the bitterest and most cruel
experience never ceases to work hope.
But, after all, the Jewish question is the centre of political interest
in Odessa, and, in spite of all suppression, the Jewish “Bund” is
likely to remain the most powerful progressive organization as long
as the Jews continue subject to their hereditary wrongs. Under laws
which were called temporary, but have continued unrepealed for fifty
years, no Jew may buy land or rent it. He may not live out in the
country, and only in certain quarters of the towns. He may not be a
schoolmaster or professor. He may not teach in private Christian
families. He may not be educated at a high school (gymnasium) or at
a University, except at a very low percentage of the whole number
of students. Usually it is not higher than three to five per cent.,
though in Odessa the Professors, being exceptionally Liberal, had on
their own authority extended the number to ten per cent., and were on
the point of declaring the University open on level terms to Jew and
Christian alike, when the University was suddenly shut on level terms
to all. A Jew may not sit on the Zemstvo or Town Council; he may not
be an officer in the army or navy; he may hold no State appointment;
and he must not move from place to place without special permission
and a special form of passport, like the prostitutes. Jews are not by
nature a revolutionary people. The rigid Conservatism of their customs
and ritual, as well as their intense pre-occupation in material gain,
deters them from violence and change. Their peculiar dangers lie in
exactly the opposite direction--in disregard of the large issues before
mankind, and in a narrow devotion to antiquated ideals. But we cannot
wonder that in Odessa, as in Russia generally, they are revolutionists
almost to a man, and that to the ordinary Russian official or soldier a
Jew of the “Bund” is identical with the “Anarchist”--a creature to be
shot as quickly as convenient. When I was in Odessa I first heard how
the new Aliens Act was being put into operation in England, and as I
read of Jewish refugees cast back from the ancient protection of our
country to the misery and bloodshed from which they believed they had
escaped, I thought of these things.