ALTHOUGH THE LONDONSKAYA in Odessa was the most palatial hotel my wife and I had ever stayed in, our room was a simple one on the top floor, where the servants’ quarters once were. The grand suites started on the floor below, past which the elevator didn’t go. To reach it we had to circumnavigate a long, dark hallway and climb down a narrow flight of stairs. Only then did we emerge in the broad corridors with their high, carved wooden doors, chandeliered ceilings, elaborate parquet floors, stained-glass windows, and great carpeted stairway sweeping down to the lobby as though for a Tsarina to descend on to a ball.
It wasn’t all genuinely Tsarist. Built in 1827, the London-skaya was extensively renovated at the start of this century after falling into disrepair during the long years of Communist rule. So was the entire old center of Odessa, which was founded in 1794 by Catherine the Great, on territory wrested from the Turks, to be Russia’s Black Sea gateway to the world. Set on a flat promontory overlooking a gulf into which empty three of Europe’s greatest rivers, the Danube, the Dniester, and the Dnieper, its once-again stately streets with their languorous names—Pushkinskaya, Longeronovskaya, Richelievskaya, Yekaterinskaya, Deribasovskaya—abut a strip of leafy greenery sloping down to a busy port. A few hundred yards to the Londonskaya’s left, at the foot of a commanding statue of Odessa’s second governor, Duke Armand de Richelieu, dressed in the toga of a Roman senator, the slope is cut by Odessa’s famed “boulevard of stairs.” Their nearly two hundred broad steps were made an icon of the city by Sergei Eisenstein’s Soviet-era film The Battleship Potemkin with its melodramatic scene of troops firing, during the 1905 anti-Tsarist uprising, on a crowd of demonstrators that flees, falls, and tumbles down them, followed by a sleeping baby in a runaway carriage.
Farther away from the water, past Cathedral Square and its neoclassical Church of the Incarnation, renovated Odessa comes to an end and leaves the rest of the city still moldering. “It’s all a big show,” we were warned in advance by an ex-Odessan in Israel. Still, it’s a fine show, especially if you’ve come to it on the trail of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the great Zionist politician and writer who was born in Odessa in 1880. Although Jabotinsky left Odessa when he was seventeen, lived in it only intermittently thereafter, and said a last goodbye to it before World War I, a part of him always remained there—and what remained in him of it, the city he grew up in, studied in as a boy, worked in as a young journalist, and wrote his wonderful novel The Five about, was either in or just beyond the elegant downtown above the sea now restored to its former architectural glory.
A gift of the sea is what the most gorgeous of its creations, Odessa’s opera house and municipal theater, looks like. One of the first buildings you come to if you turn away from Richelieu upon leaving the Londonskaya and head in the opposite direction, its curving, sand-colored walls and conch-white pillars and porticos suggest a great, intricately whorled seashell. The story is told, tempting to believe, that its Italian construction workers sang arias as they laid and plastered its bricks. Unable to get a glimpse of its interior, I had to content myself with a description by The Five’s narrator, a young journalist attending a performance of the opera Mona Vanna, of its “blazing crystal, gilt, caryatids, and red velvet chairs” that reflected “all the splendor of our carefree, contented Odessa.”
Carefree, contented Odessa! Never mind that by The Five’s end the city has become a bubbling stew of popular discontent, rising ethnic tensions, and that fumy mixture of decadence and revolutionary ferment that heralds the explosive ends of epochs. While this was the Odessa that Jabotinsky said farewell to and that helped make him an active Zionist, the Odessa he looked back on nostalgically was a lighter-hearted place. A gneyvishe shtot, “a thievish city,” he once called it, using a Yiddish expression that meant not only that it was a freewheeling town in which one had to survive by one’s wits, but that its roguishness stole one’s affections. “Nowhere,” he wrote in his memoirs, “but in Odessa—that is, in the Odessa of those years—was the air ever so full of soft gaiety and light intoxication, without the slightest hint of psychological complications.”1 One of the striking things about these memoirs when compared with the reminiscences of other Jewish authors of the age who were raised in the shtetlakh, the villages and provincial towns of the Tsarist empire, is their untroubled sense of at-homeness in the world. “I have friends and acquaintances from many places [in Russia],” Jabotinsky remarked,
and I have often heard them speak of their formative years and felt (I’m referring to the Jews among them) that they grew up in an atmosphere thick with the grimness and bitter salt of Jewish tragedy. . . . Perhaps Jewish society in such places was more deeply and consciously “Jewish” and far better educated in Jewish terms. Yet I’ve always thought that in their psyches, from childhood on, these Jews lived in a harsh climate, under gray skies—always in a state of war in which they had to fight their way forward while defending themselves against countless enemies. This may have been, I admit, a better training ground for a Jewish existence; it created more profound, perhaps more finely attuned types. Odessa was never profound about anything—but for that reason it never pecked at the soul. Having no traditions, it didn’t fear new ways of life or doing things. This made us Jews more temperamental and less hungry for success; more cynical, but not so bitter.
Odessa was indeed a unique place for nineteenth-century Russian Jews, the only large Russian city they weren’t barred from. For Jewish inhabitants of the Pale of Settlement, the extensive area of rural western Russia to which they were legally confined after its acquisition by the Tsarist empire in the 1772, 1793, and 1795 partitions of Poland, cities like Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev were out-of-bounds; special permits, obtainable only by a limited number of wealthy or professionally trained Jews, were needed to live in them. Newly established Odessa, to which the Russian government sought to attract settlers, was the exception. Drawn by its boom-town economy, Jews flocked to it. By 1850 there were more than fifteen thousand of them, comprising twenty percent of the city’s residents and over fifty percent of its merchant class; thirty years later, they were a quarter of a population that had swelled to three hundred thousand. A main street was named Yevreskaya or “Jews’ Street,” and “living like God in Odessa” was a proverbial Jewish way of saying “living high.” The impressions of a provincial Jew arriving in the city for the first time are conveyed in a letter sent home to his wife by Sholem Aleichem’s comic fictional character Menachem-Mendl, who has gone to Odessa to seek his fortune. “Words fail me,” he writes,
in describing the grandeur and beauty of the city of Odessa, the fine character of its inhabitants, and the wonderful opportunities that exist here. Just imagine: I take my walking stick and venture out on Greek Street, as the place where Jews do business is called, and there are twenty thousand different things to deal in. If I want wheat, there’s wheat. If I feel like wool, there’s wool. If I’m in the mood for bran, there’s bran. Flour, salt, feathers, raisins, jute, herring—you name it and you have it in Odessa.
Menachem-Mendl, who ultimately loses his shirt in Odessa’s stock market, was writing about 1900, when no other major European city apart from Warsaw had such a high proportion of Jews. Yet Odessa’s Jews differed from Warsaw’s. Although they, too, were mainly Yiddish-speaking emigrants from the shtetl, they were at a greater remove from it geographically and psychologically. The first wave of them had come, often from considerable distances, to a new city with no Jewish institutions, and while these were built in the course of time, Odessan Jewry remained less traditional and less subject to rabbinical influence than other Eastern European Jewish communities. Warsaw’s wealth of neighborhood synagogues, yeshivas, and Hasidic courts was not duplicated by Odessa; though the latter had its share of observant Jews, it had more than its share of laxer ones, and observance, too, took on more liberal forms in it. The Yiddish maxim that zibn mayl arum Odes brent der gehenm, “the fires of hell burn seven miles around Odessa,” alluded as much to the alleged impiety of the city’s Jews as to its brothels, gambling houses, speculators, racketeers, and port full of sailors and adventurers.
Ethnically, too, Odessa was unlike Warsaw. Warsaw had Jews and Poles, a large minority and a larger majority, each speaking its own language, living in its own social and economic world, and regarding the other with distrust. Odessa had only minorities. An international city from the start, its first planners and rulers were French and Italian aristocrats brought from abroad by Catherine and her successors; for a while, in fact, before yielding to Russian, Italian was Odessa’s lingua franca. Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Moldavians, Greeks, Turks, Tatars, Azerbaijanis, Georgians, and Armenians mingled in its streets as equals. Of these groups, Jews were the largest, and while exposed to prejudice and even occasional anti-Semitic violence, they were not generally scapegoated or discriminated against. In a place where each “us” had many “thems,” no single “them” was deemed the exclusive menace that Jews were elsewhere.
As a result, Odessa’s Jews, who viewed the Russian language and its culture less as assimilatory lures or dangers than as a practical means of intercourse with their often equally non-Russian neighbors, underwent Russification more quickly than did the Jews of the Pale of Settlement, where the Tsarist regime sought to impose it from above. The son of small-town, Yiddish-speaking parents, Jabotinsky is a case in point. His father Yona–“Yoyne” to his Jewish friends and Yevgeni Grigorievitch to his Russian acquaintances—came from Nikopol, a river port on the Dnieper; his mother, Chava or Eva Zak, from Berdichev, a Ukrainian shtetl so heavily Jewish that even its Christians were said to know Yiddish. Yet though Chava spoke Russian so poorly that, as Jabotinsky put it, she “wreaked havoc” on it with every sentence, it was in Russian and not in Yiddish—as it would have been in Warsaw—that he was raised. Scolded by his Russian nanny if he uttered a Yiddish word, he nevertheless heard enough of what he called his mother’s “juicy Berdichev Yiddish” to acquire a passive knowledge of it that, with the help of the remarkable linguistic facility he was gifted with, he fully activated as an adult.
The Jabotinskys lived on Bazarnaya Street, a fifteen-minute walk from the municipal theater. The two-story, grey stone building whose top floor they rented is still standing. Although like most of the houses of old Odessa it now faces a mournfully rundown courtyard entered by a gateway whose keeper and gate have long vanished, it was a dignified middle-class residence in the late nineteenth century. Yona Jabotinsky was a grain agent, a profitable occupation at a time when Russia exported, via the Black Sea, vast amounts of Ukrainian wheat to Western Europe. An employee of the Russian Navigation and Commerce Company, the largest of the wheat-exporting firms, he plied the towns along the Dnieper, arranging for the purchase, transport, and storage of the annual crop and its loading onto the boats that brought it to Odessa. Long after his death at an early age in 1886, he was affectionately remembered by his associates as a hearty, good-natured man with a gift for getting along. He died of cancer after an extended stay for medical treatment in Germany that ate up the family’s savings, leaving Chava Jabotinsky a hard-pressed widow with her six-year-old son Vladimir or Volodya (his Hebrew name of Ze’ev was rarely used), and her ten-year-old daughter Tamara or Tania. Jabotinsky’s lifelong dislike of Germany and the German language—in which, too, he developed an adult fluency based on a childhood foundation—went back to his association of them with his father’s illness and death.
Chava opened a small stationery store on the corner of Richelievskaya and Yevreskaya Streets, opposite the Great or Choral Synagogue, Odessa’s largest place of Jewish worship, renowned for its children’s choirs and operatic cantors. (Its congregants were described by Menachem-Mendl, accustomed to the more intimate and less decorous services of the shtetl, as sitting as silently as theater goers while “chewing their cud in their little prayer shawls and ritzy top hats. . . . Try praying loud enough for God to hear you and a beadle comes over and tells you to hush!”) The family moved to cramped quarters in the courtyard behind the store, and soon afterwards, to an even smaller attic apartment nearby, where it barely managed to make ends meet with the assistance of Chava’s elder brother, a well-off businessman.
A second brother, a lawyer, tried convincing Chava to send her son to a vocational school to learn a trade, but the advice was indignantly rejected as unbefitting a boy from a good Jewish family and Volodya was enrolled in a private Russian elementary school. Jabotinsky’s short story “Squirrel,” whose nine-year-old protagonist lives in an unnamed Black Sea city with his widowed mother, depicts this as a progressive institution. Run by two women whose young charges called them by their first names alone, it had the reputation of being “a crazy establishment” because of its unheard-of practice of coeducation. To encourage a spirit of sharing, the boys and girls were divided into couples that pooled their lunchboxes. If he happened to have a sardine, the narrator writes, his partner got the tail, “or even the body if she was nice that day,” in return for which he was given half of her corn cob, although he sometimes had to pull her hair to remind her that she had already eaten its first half.
Though fatherless, Jabotinsky had by his own testimony a happy childhood. A high-spirited, independent, self-confident boy, he was remembered by a friend as once answering, when asked whose son he was so that he might be punished for a misdeed, “I’m just me.” Another time, slapped by a Russian army officer for playing too loudly in a courtyard, he hurled himself at his far larger assailant and tried striking back. Perhaps his buoyancy came from the personality of the father he had not known for long; perhaps from the love and devotion of a mother who scrimped for his education by such things as eating the stale remains of the bread she bought every day for her children; perhaps from the streets of Odessa, in which he roamed freely without supervision, often playing hooky from school. Classrooms bored him. Writing decades later as a parent himself, he would say:
I’ve seen children who loved their schools. I envy them—but to tell the truth, I understand them no more than a blind man understands what sunlight looks like. To this day my instinct, which no other father would probably admit to, is to hate good students, those that always do their homework. The only kind I’ve ever loved were the mischief makers.
Like all Russian high schools at the time, Odessa’s had a Jewish quota, and Jabotinsky’s first applications to them were turned down. Only after attending a special preparatory school, from which he was nearly expelled for helping a classmate cheat on a Latin exam, was he admitted to the Richelieu Lycée; there he put his talents to better use, earning pocket money by writing compositions for his classmates. (At the start of one school year, he recalled in a later newspaper column, he produced an essay on “My Summer Vacation” for a large number of clients, taking care to invent a different summer for each.) Often, he cut classes to wander in the port and fish from its stone piers, and he preferred spending the hours after school with friends to preparing lessons. These were not always passed frivolously. He and his friends read serious books, and a group of them even produced a newspaper called Pravda, “Truth,” using a hectograph or primitive printing device on which copies were made by being pressed on an inked screen. The paper’s irreverent contributors had to be censored by its editor to keep it from being banned by the school authorities, and Jabotinsky’s column, he later boasted, was blue-penciled the most. It was the start of his journalistic career.
Most of his friends were Jewish. As he was to recall:
There were about ten of us [Jewish students] in our class. We sat together, and if we met in someone’s home to play, read, or just “shoot the breeze,” it was always by ourselves. Not that some of us didn’t have Russian friends—I myself, for example, was on very good terms with Vsevolod Lebedentsev, a capital fellow . . . but though I often visited him in his home and was visited by him in mine, it never occurred to me to introduce him to my “gang,” just as he never introduced me to his—nor did I even know if he had one. And even stranger was the fact that my Jewish gang had nothing Jewish about it. The literature we read wasn’t Jewish, and we argued about Nietzsche, morality, and sex, not about the fate of Russian Jewry, though this was ultimately our fate, too.
Vsevolod Lebedentsev went on to study astronomy and join the Russian Social Revolutionary Party or SR, the main rival on the Left of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party or SD, which spawned both Lenin’s Bolsheviks and the anti-Bolshevik Mensheviks. Arrested in 1908 for his role in an unsuccessful plot to assassinate Grand Duke Nicholas, he was hanged with the other plotters. He and Jabotinsky remained friends long after their school years and Jabotinsky once visited him in his observatory, where he described him gazing at the stars “like one of the stokers of the furnaces of eternity,” recording their motions with the same methodical precision with which he planned his abortive bomb attack.
Of formal Jewish education, Jabotinsky had little. When he was six, his mother taught him the Hebrew alphabet, and a while later, a young neighbor, struck by his intelligence, offered to give him free Hebrew lessons; the volunteer was Yehoshua Ravnitzky, who was later to collaborate with the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik on their “Book of Legends,” a monumental anthology of rabbinic midrash. When it was time for his barmitzvah, Volodya was passed on to more professional hands, which he left upon turning thirteen. Yet Ravnitzky had done his job well: Jabotinsky’s earliest surviving letter in Hebrew, penned at the age of twenty-three, was written to him, and long before that, as a teenager, he made a Russian translation of a nineteenth-century Hebrew poem that he and Ravnitzky had studied together, Yehuda Leib Gordon’s “In the Depths of the Sea.” A long, rhymed narrative about the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, it had orotund lines like,
The Daughter of Israel was driven from Spain.
Upon Gaullish gates she knocked also in vain.
Europe let her sons choose between dungeons and graves,
Or else face the exile’s fate on the waves.
On the whole, there is little basis for the common assertion that Jabotinsky’s Zionism was a purely adult development and that he came from an assimilated or partially assimilated Jewish home. In his memoirs, it is true, he wrote that, apart from his lessons with Ravnitzky, he had “no inner contact with Judaism” and its customs when young, and that the synagogue and its rituals did not appeal to him. Yet in the same reminiscence, he stated that his observant mother kept a strictly kosher kitchen, lit candles every Sabbath eve, and scrupulously recited the daily prayers, and that
had a Christian boy asked me what I thought of the Jews, I would have answered that I “liked” them well enough, but a Jew would have gotten a different—and more naive—reply. [This would have been that] I knew that some day we would have our own kingdom and that I would go there to live. After all, my mother, my aunts, and even Ravnitzky thought so. I just didn’t have a clear notion of it. It was something taken for granted, like washing my hands in the morning or having soup for lunch.
The word for “kingdom” in this passage, which was written in Russian like nearly all of Jabotinsky’s belletristic work, is the Yiddish mlukhe. Although Theodor Herzl only burst upon the Jewish scene in 1896–97, Zionism had made its earliest appearance in Eastern Europe when Jabotinsky was a child, with Odessa as one of its main centers. The Hibat Tsiyon or “Lovers of Zion” movement, the first organized attempt to sponsor modern Jewish settlement in Palestine, evolved in the early 1880s, in part under the influence of the Odessan physician Leo Pinsker’s “Auto-Emancipation,” a treatise written in the wake of an unprecedented wave of pogroms that swept southern Russia in 1881. (More than anything, it was these pogroms, which also triggered the start of a massive emigration to America, that aroused the interest of Russian Jews in a possible return to Palestine.) It was in Odessa, too, with Pinsker as its head, that a Society for Aid to Jewish Farmers and Artisans in Palestine, better known as “the Odessa Committee,” was established. The committee, which had offices on a lane off Yevreskaya Street, helped to fund early Zionist projects and assist Palestine-bound emigrants, many of whom sailed from Odessa’s port. The future Jewish “kingdom” had an embassy, so to speak, around the corner from where the Jabotinskys lived.
Apart from native Odessans like Pinsker and Ravnitsky, many prominent Zionist activists and intellectuals came to live in the city in these years. Among them were the Hebrew novelist and publicist Moshe Leib Lilienblum; Lilienblum’s ideological rival, the Hebrew essayist Asher Ginsberg or Ahad Ha’am, one of the most influential Zionist thinkers of his age and the editor of the prestigious Hebrew journal Hashiloach; such friends and colleagues of Ahad Ha’am as Mordecai Ben-Ami and Elhanan Levinsky; the Hebrew literary critic and historian Yosef Klausner; Bialik; the Hebrew poet Sha’ul Tchernichovsky; the future mayor of Tel Aviv Meir Dizengoff, and others.
A number of these men were associated with Hashiloach and with Bialik and Ravnitzky’s Moriah, an important Hebrew publishing house of the day; some were active in the city’s Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society, in its Hebrew and Jewish studies classes given at the Jewish library on Troitskaya Street, a block from the Jabotinskys’ home, and in its Beseda (Russian for “Conversation”) Club, a regularly convened Jewish discussion circle. All mingled with each other and with such non-Zionist Odessans as the great Yiddish and Hebrew fiction writer Shalom Abramovitch, known by his pen-name of Mendele Mocher Seforim, and the eminent Jewish historian Simon Dubnov. For a while, in the early 1890s, Odessa was also the home of Sholem Aleichem. In Jabotinsky’s teenage years, it had the most vibrant Jewish cultural life of any city in Europe, and while he seems to have taken no particular interest in this, it was too much part of his surroundings for him to have been unaware of it.
All this does not add up to an “assimilated” Jewish background. Why, then, did the myth of one develop? In part because, to other Eastern European Zionist leaders of his generation like Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, Jabotinsky really did seem a kind of half-breed. The Weizmanns and Ben-Gurions were products of the shtetl. They were raised in Yiddish; were given their first education in the heder, the religiously Orthodox Jewish schoolhouse in which secular subjects were rarely taught; socialized as boys exclusively with other Jewish youngsters; and learned the languages of the generally anti-Semitic Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Belarussians among whom they lived only later. Their world was divided into Jews and non-Jews, the latter viewed as alien and hostile. Ben-Gurion, who in the 1930s headed the more diplomatically and territorially compromising Zionist Left against the more militant Right led by Jabotinsky, once remarked that the latter was the only Zionist politician he knew who had not the slightest instinctive fear of Gentiles and could never be intimidated by them. Although this was meant as a compliment, the inference was, as Weizmann was to put it more baldly in his autobiography Trial and Error, that Jabotinsky had something “not at all Jewish” about him.
This might have been a reasonable way of describing Jabotinsky had he grown up elsewhere than Odessa. Only in Odessa could an Eastern European Jew feel both deeply Jewish and totally at ease among non-Jews, because only there did Jews and non-Jews mix in truly neutral spaces. Early on in The Five, the narrator, recalling his years as a young Odessan journalist who frequented the town’s Writers’ Club, remarks:
Looking back on all this some thirty years later, I think that the most curious thing about it was the good-natured fraternization of nationalities. All eight or ten tribes of old Odessa met in that club, and in fact it never occurred to anyone, even in silence, to note who was who. . . . In our homes, it seems, we lived apart . . . but we had yet to wonder why this was so, unconsciously considering it simply an indication of temporary oversight, and the Babylonian diversity of our common forum a symbol of a splendid tomorrow.
It was Yehuda Leib Gordon who had famously counseled Russian Jews, “Be a Jew at home and a human being when you leave it.” Yet while societies in which one could live Jewishly in one’s private life and as a citizen of the world outside it existed in many places in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century—in Berlin, Paris, and Vienna, for example, all capitals of countries where Jews were fully emancipated, or in Herzl’s Budapest—this was possible in Tsarist Russia in Odessa alone. It was not as an assimilated Jew that Jabotinsky grew up there, but as the anomaly of a Western or Central European–type Jew in Eastern Europe. The feeling of many Eastern European Zionists that he was not one of them—“the inner life of Jewry had left no trace on him,” wrote Weizmann—was of a piece with their attitude toward Western and Central European Zionism as a whole.
Such feelings were also had about Herzl. He, too, was raised more Jewishly than was commonly acknowledged by his Eastern European critics, who misattributed much of what they disliked about him to a total absence of Jewish roots. Nor was it only they who thought his Zionism derived from a born-again sense of Jewish identity that he did not grow up with. Many of his followers also regarded him as a Moses-figure, a Jew raised in Pharaoh’s court, as it were, with no sense of connection to his fellow Israelites. Part of the fascination of Moses’ story lies in his having adopted the persecuted people of his ancestors when he could have led the privileged life of an Egyptian prince, and a similar legend accrued to Herzl. Unlike the Zionism of the Weizmanns and Ben-Gurions, which aspired to solve not only the Jewish predicament but their own predicament as Jews, Herzl’s Zionism seemed disinterested and therefore grander, a selfless act of devotion to his rediscovered brethren with whom he, the acclaimed European journalist and playwright, was under no compulsion to be associated. For his self-sacrifice, Jews felt awe and gratitude; by it their self-esteem was heightened, since his giving up so much to be their savior could only mean they were worth giving it up for.
Jabotinsky, a rising star like Herzl in the worlds of journalism and theater when he abandoned both for full-time Zionist activity, was to inspire similar emotions. But the parallel is not just between him and Herzl, or even between him and young Western European Jews of his era. It is also between him and many young Jews of our own age, whose upbringing, while not at all like Weizmann’s or Ben-Gurion’s, is a great deal like Jabotinsky’s in Odessa. Whether acquired at home, in school, in the synagogue, or elsewhere, their Jewishness must compete with other possibilities of self-definition. Weizmann, though he could have decided after settling in England to devote himself solely to his work as a chemist without getting involved in Zionist politics, could not have decided not to live as a Jew. He already was one through and through, and it would have been psychologically impossible for him to have lived simply as an Englishman or private individual without Jewish ties and obligations.
This was not true of Jabotinsky. Odessa had instilled in him, alongside his Jewish identity, a potentially non-Jewish one as well. In one of his early Zionist essays, he recalled walking there with two Jewish companions and seeing a Jew with the long ear locks and caftan of the shtetl approach them. Although the man clearly felt nervous to be so conspicuously Jewish in a Russian crowd, he was also, Jabotinsky reflected, more sure of himself than were they, who had “from childhood on grown up with the knowledge that we were Jewish but didn’t have to be.”
He had a choice. Indeed, when he dropped out of high school at the age of seventeen and set out for Western Europe and for Italy, where he led a boisterous life for the next three years in an entirely non-Jewish environment, it seemed he had already chosen.
“Going West” was not an unusual thing for a young Russian Jew to do. At the turn of the century, whole colonies of such youngsters could be found in various European cities, especially in Germany and Switzerland. Most were students at universities that, unlike Russian ones, permitted them to matriculate without a high-school diploma; a smaller number were members of revolutionary movements in flight from the Tsarist police. Jabotinsky must have known more than one Odessan who had taken such a route before him.
What was unusual about his decision were two things. The first was that he was already close to the diploma that was beyond the reach of most young Russian Jews. In another year, he could have taken his final exams. Passing them would have opened the doors to a Russian higher education and professional career, walking away from which for an adventure abroad seemed reckless even to himself. When asked “Why, for God’s sake?” by his family and friends, he couldn’t “for the life of me,” he wrote, have answered them, since the only word to convey the willful nature of his decision was “Because.”
The second thing, which partially mitigated the folly of the first, was that he left Russia with the promise of foreign employment. The year before, he had published an article in a local Odessan newspaper criticizing the Russian high-school grading system; now, he talked the paper’s editor into offering him the job of correspondent in either Bern or Rome, two European capitals it was not represented in. Although his preference was for Rome, his mother insisted on Bern, where there were other young Russian Jews like himself. In the spring of 1898 he departed for Switzerland via Vienna, traveling by train through southern Ukraine and Galicia.
The journey was his first contact with the shtetl. He found it depressing. The sight of so many Jews with their queer dress and manners, living in poverty and seeming abjectness, filled him with an “instinctive revulsion” that afterwards, he wrote, took “an unceasing effort to overcome.” This effort would already be apparent in an essay he was to write five years later, in which he called on Jewish intellectuals to reject the “slavish” adoption of anti-Semitic stereotypes of shtetl Jewry. At the time, however, he recalled: “I looked away in silence and asked: Can this people be mine?”
Journalism, which was his ambition, was not an academic subject in those days, and he enrolled in Bern’s law school as the best alternative. A hotbed of political radicalism, Bern’s Russian student community was in any case less concerned with formal studies than with its fierce quarrels between SD’s and SR’s, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, believers in a spontaneous revolution staged by the masses and proponents of the guiding role of a conspiratorial elite. Russian revolutionary luminaries like Lenin, Plekhanov, and Trotsky, all in political exile in Switzerland, spent much of their time in Bern, whose Jewish students, as described by Chaim Weizmann, then working on his doctorate in nearby Freiburg, were in awe of them and excitedly debated the differences between them.
Jabotinsky, who had no clear political views of his own, was a spectator at these debates. The only time he actively participated occurred at a lecture given by Nachum Syrkin, one of the founders of socialist Zionism—an ideology ridiculed in radical circles, which, in Weizmann’s words, “stamped as unworthy [and] intellectually backward . . . the desire of any Jew to occupy himself with the specific suffering and destiny of Jewry.” As Jabotinsky remembered it:
It was then that I gave the first speech of my life—and a “Zionist” one at that. I spoke in Russian and what I said was: I don’t know if I’m a socialist, because I’m not yet well enough versed in the theory of it, but I’m certainly a Zionist, because the Jewish people is a dreadful one. Its neighbors hate it for good reasons. Its only hope of avoiding a “Bartholomew’s night” is to move to Palestine.
The chairman of the meeting . . . translated the gist of my remarks into German as follows: “The speaker is not a socialist because he doesn’t know what socialism is, but he is a confirmed anti-Semite and wants all of us [Jews] to run away to Palestine before we’re slaughtered.”
The massacre of “Bartholomew’s Night” (the actual events took place over a period of several weeks) involved the murder of tens of thousands of French Huguenots by Catholic mobs in 1572, and Jabotinsky’s dry, self-deprecating humor in relating the evening in Bern is typical of his autobiographical writing. Conveyed by it, though, are some of the main features of what was to become his mature Zionism: its ambivalence toward the common Jew he both identified with and shrank from, its conviction that anti-Semitism had objective causes that were not merely the delusion of anti-Semites, and its premonition of the doom lying in wait for the Jews of Europe unless they left it in time.
In all of this, Jabotinsky was the Zionist politician most like Herzl. It is curious, therefore, that his memories of Bern make no mention of the first Zionist Congress that met in nearby Basel a year previously; there Herzl had steered Zionism in a new direction by converting it from an uncoordinated series of Jewish colonization projects in a Palestine ruled by an unsympathetic Turkish government to an international political movement, institutionalized as a world Zionist Organization, whose goal was obtaining an official charter from the Turks for massive Jewish settlement. Yet if Herzl and Zionism were not on the minds of the young Russians Jabotinsky befriended in Bern, Zion remained, for whatever reason, on his mind. In addition to writing several newspaper pieces during his stay there (the first, presumably for lack of a better subject, dealing with a local inhabitant accused of stabbing a fellow towns-man for drowning a mouse), he composed a sentimental ballad about Jerusalem. In it, the city appears as a snow-white woman to the poet camped beneath its walls with an Arab guide, who tells him: “God has sworn that in this country / Hebrews once again shall dwell.” The female apparition shares this hope. Concluding on a Zionistic but anti-religious note, the poem describes how
She summons to the homeland’s ranges
From the Exile’s darkest ends
A people weary and exhausted
By its God’s endless demands.
After several months in Switzerland, Jabotinsky departed for Rome. He had probably intended to do so all along, and having wanted to get away from Russia, he was now eager to get away from Russians and their ideological quarrels, too. In a humorous poem, he described a nighttime walk in the Alps with a young lady who, when he sought to engage her in a romantic conversation, responded by asking if he was a Marxist. Before he could coax a kiss from her, he had to explain that “Only cowards and tame spirits / Need a god to whom to bow. / The highest type is he who has / No labels pasted to his brow.”
Rome was relatively Russian-free. Jabotinsky’s three years there were for him, as his friend, political colleague, and eventual biographer Joseph Schechtman was to put it, a “tremendous experience.” Arriving in the autumn of 1898, he registered for classes in the law faculty of the Sapienza, the city’s ancient university, and set about learning Italian, eventually mastering it so well that he could pass for a native, even if Romans thought he came from Milan and Milanese that he was Sicilian. (Years later, Schechtman wrote, he witnessed Jabotinsky chat with five Italian waiters in a London restaurant, speaking flawlessly in the local dialect of each.) He quickly made friends and embarked on a bohemian student life that was less political, more fun-loving, and more to his liking than Bern’s.
Despite having developed rapidly since becoming the capital of a reunited Italy in 1871, Rome was still a compact city, not much larger than Odessa; its greater part consisted of an old historic center divided into fourteen rioni or neighborhoods, most on the left or east bank of the Tiber and two, Borgo and Trastavere, on the right bank. During his stay, Jabotinsky lived in Trevi, Borgo, and Campo Marzio, where he rented a room on the Via della Croce, a small street leading from the fashionable shopping avenue of the Via del Corso to the Piazza di Spagna. He changed addresses often—sometimes to move in with new roommates, sometimes because he could not pay the rent, and sometimes because his landlords threw him out. “The constant visitors, the singing, the clinking of glasses, and the loud arguments always ended,” he wrote, “with my being asked to pitch my tent elsewhere.”
One place he pitched it in was later described by him in a short story called “48 Via Montebello.” A second-story apartment near the Piazza delle Finanze, it had five rooms and as many occupants: the narrator, a thinly disguised Jabotinsky; his friend Goffredo, a fellow law student, aspiring playwright, and ghostwriter of parliamentary speeches; Goffredo’s teenage girlfriend; his younger brother, a high school student; and a young decadent poet. One room, set aside for a study, had a work table with four places: the high school student’s, piled high with textbooks; Goffredo’s, set with a stack of writing paper and Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra in Italian; the poet’s, with the same writing paper and the same book in French; and the narrator’s, with “nothing at all.” Mornings started with the girlfriend serving the four young men tea in bed; evenings ended with a communal meal, several liters of cheap wine, and Italian and Russian songs accompanied by the poet on his mandolin. “Those were good times,” the narrator recalls. “We didn’t go to a single lecture at the university, we let nothing worry us, and we did no one the least bit of harm.”
Jabotinsky probably did attend some lectures, although perhaps never on a regular basis. An official academic record issued to “Vladimiro Giabotinsky” shows him registering for six courses in his first year in Rome, four in his second year, and none in his third. At the bottom of the document is typed No ha superato esami, “Received no passing grades.”
It wasn’t for lack of illustrious teachers. Besides auditing classes of the philosopher Benedetto Croce, he took Roman Law with Vittorio Scialoja, a future minister of justice in the Italian government; Institutions of Roman Law and History of Roman Law with Gaetano Semeraro, a respected scholar who had served in Parliament; Political Economy with Angelo Messedaglia, a former Italian senator; and statistics with Eteocle Lorini, a world expert on monetary policy. Even more renowned were Enrico Ferri, with whom he registered for Law and Penal Procedure, and Antonio Labriola, who lectured on Moral Philosophy and the History of Philosophy—the former a founder of modern criminology, the latter a noted Marxist theoretician. Both were men of the Left, and if Jabotinsky had not already found out by now, he would have learned from them what socialism was. He was, he now decided, definitely for it. In Rome, too, left-wing ideologies were bon ton in student circles. Fascism was still far away, and the bourgeois democracy that Italy practiced was considered a philosophy for the middle class and middle-aged.
A good deal of his time was spent in the Piazza di Monte Citorio near the Tiber, where the Italian parliament had its seat. He had by now switched newspapers and was writing several times a week for the Odessa daily Odesskaya Novosti. As a correspondent expected to cover Italian politics, he put in long hours in the legislature, livening his accounts of what he called its “usual pandemonium” with as much human interest as he could muster. There were non-parliamentary topics to write about, too, such as Italian literature, theater, and opera, the street life of Rome, the Mafia, the Papacy, an Italian expedition to the North Pole, Jabotinsky’s own travels in Italy, and most dramatically, the assassination of King Umberto I by an anarchist in the summer of 1900. Local crime was also a useful topic. The murder in Borgo of a local champion at the board game of mulino, and the arrest and trial of two men from the rival rion of Trastavere, accused of killing him to avenge his beating their own best player, was good for a number of stories.
When such material ran thin, Jabotinsky, who had taken to signing his pieces with the pen name “Altalena,” an Italian word meaning “seesaw,” fell back on his own life and its escapades, such as the time he and his companions ransomed a young lady of ill repute from a brothel, leading her out in a torch-light parade; the time he challenged a friend to a duel that was averted at the last moment; and the time he went on Goffredo’s behalf, dressed in a black suit jacket, yellow gloves, checked yellow pants, black cape, and battered straw hat, to ask “Signorina Emilia,” a seamstress married to a coachman, for the hand of her daughter Diana.
Goffredo’s girlfriend Diana is also a character in a short story bearing her name in which she, Goffredo, and the narrator become entangled in an emotional triangle. Their relationship takes an unexpected turn one day when, sitting with the narrator in the Caffé Aragno, a favorite haunt of politicians, artists, and intellectuals, Goffredo challenges him to a competition for Diana’s affections. Her being his girlfriend, he declares, gives him no rights over her, inasmuch as, the narrator is told by him,
we people of the upper flight could afford to do away with such obsolete phraseology: there was no such thing as “right,” there was only force and struggle for power—for power over a thing, or power over a woman.
Loath to make Diana, whom he is fond of, a test case of Goffredo’s newly acquired Nietzscheanism, the narrator replies, “My dear chap, I don’t want a row with you; please go on enjoying your luck and leave me alone,” and is answered:
“But there need be no row! Just the contrary, we must remain friends as we are; our friendship will only be purified by the fact of our honestly and openly isolating the struggle. It’s quite simple.”
“You’re a child,” I said. “We’d hate each other on the second day.”
The argument continues at a music hall and tavern until the worn-down narrator agrees. After all, he confides to the reader, “I really did want to make love to Diana just like he did, and even better than he could. [And so] I turned to him and said savagely: ‘All right. I accept the challenge.’”
Yet things get ironically complicated. The narrator, uncertain whether he is motivated more by sexual desire or the determination to best Goffredo, flirts with Diana but makes no real advances; Diana, though having no scruples about going to bed with him, is too afraid of Goffredo to take the initiative; Goffredo, consumed by jealousy, is sure the two are having an affair when they aren’t. Coming home one night to find a cruel letter from Diana, the narrator writes a sonnet in Italian. (Its first stanza apparently alludes to an incident that befell Jabotinsky as a teenager in Odessa.)
There is a sea that men call Black, though it
Shone sapphire long ago when, on the land,
A gypsy with a vampire’s eyes said, “Sit,
And let me read your fortune in your hand.
I see,” she said to me, “your name is Pierre.
Your mother’s dead. The years ahead will start
And end serenely. But I see here
A wanton woman who will break your heart.”
The years went by. My mother’s still with us.
In her flows the proud blood of her race.
My name, if truth be told, is Vladimir
And my whole life has been tempestuous.
And yet it was no lie: fool that I was,
I let that woman drive me to despair.
The donna indegna, the “wanton woman,” was all of eighteen and Jabotinsky’s own “tempestuous” life had not yet completed its twentieth year, but the poem has a precociousness that belies this. The story ends with the narrator’s return to Odessa. The train for Vienna is already pulling out when Goffredo appears on the platform. Running to keep up with the narrator’s moving car, he exclaims:
“One word! If there has been anything, just say yes; if nothing, say no. I’ll stop here if it embarrasses you, you’ll shout from a distance, only please loudly. Only please do shout. I implore you. You have poisoned me, crushed me to earth, do release me.”
. . .
Quite unwillingly, I laughed and drew away from the window, and the train rushed on.
Never mind: in Odessa I soon received a letter from him containing his usual foul language; there was also a sealed envelope from Diana, which I sent back unopened.
Whatever the element of invention in stories like these, which were written many years afterwards, they tell us much about Jabotinsky’s life in Rome. Goffredo, whose actual name was Roberto Lombardo, and Diana, which was how his girlfriend Antoinetta preferred to call herself, were real people. We know this from a letter Jabotinsky wrote in December 1902 from Odessa, to which he had returned a year and a half previously, to his Roman friend Arrigo Razzini, a fellow law student who went on to become a well-known legal commentator and historian. One of the earliest of the many thousands of Jabotinsky’s correspondences in our possession, it asks: “Has Roberto really married Diana? You know that I don’t understand him. Where did he get such nobility of character?” He was not displeased by the news, Jabotinsky wrote Razzini, because “it was I who first proposed to Antoinetta on Roberto’s behalf.” And he added: “Do you remember it? What happy years those were, what wonderful times!”
That they were. Looking back on them, Jabotinsky was to call Italy his true “spiritual homeland,” and while he spent only a small part of his life there, it was a formative one. He had left Odessa an adolescent and he came back a grown man, having matured intellectually, emotionally, sexually, and artistically. Another poem he wrote while in Rome, this one in Russian, is called “Piazza di Spagna.” It begins with a sketch of the square near which he lived on the Via della Croce:
I’m ravished by you, Rome. Your mountain
Of deep blue sky broods with sad majesty.
The flowers planted by Bernini’s fountain,
Bloom autumnally.
All pleases me: the little streets, the piazza,
The old, twin-towered church, up to which curls
The dragon’s stairway with its touring knots of
Country girls.
The twin-towered church was Trinita de’ Monti at the top of the Spanish Steps, which seem to ripple up to it from the fountain below. (Bernini’s sculpture of a half-sunken boat, its eye-like porthole jetting water and its bowsprit sticking up like a narwhale’s horn, may have suggested a dragon rising from the depths.) The piazza had its flocks of tourists then, too, mostly rural Italians come to see their capital. But the simple charm of country girls is not for the poet. A city child himself, his heart belongs to the elegant daughters of Rome:
I see them on the Corso, the patricians,
The proudest and the boldest of their sex,
Their furry boas hiding from my vision
Stately necks.
Draped in the long, stylish “boa constrictor” muffs of the period, the temptresses of the Corso are alluring, even though the poet knows they are out to subjugate, not to be conquered. He knows, too, that, like the city that raised them, they evoke desire that will be dashed to the ground, and that their life of urban refinement is made possible only by the exploitation of the laboring masses. Still, he is enamored of them, as he is of Rome and the cosmopolitan glamour of the age. “Piazza di Spagna” ends with a fin-de-siècle flourish of jaded bravado:
Their smile is false, their friendship knavery,
Their wealth plundered from a thousand others’ share;
Their jewels glitter with the tears of slavery–
And I don’t care.
My times! I was born a son to you.
I see your splendor and your squalidness.
I love each blemish, large and small, in you,
Each poisoned kiss.
Rome opened Jabotinsky’s eyes not only to a sophistication far greater than Odessa’s, and to the cultural treasures of a country that embodied every stage of Western civilization in art, architecture, music, literature, and science, but to a way of life that was both cultivated and passionate, contentious but tolerant, light-hearted yet earnest, hedonistic while respectful of the pursuits of the mind. Though the most southern and Mediterranean-like of Russian cities, Odessa was ultimately a provincial town, without a history, without traditions, without a folk shaped and molded by long centuries, without the liberal political structure that alone could protect its diversity from eventual effacement. Rome was the real thing. It was the beating heart of a country that had been freed in a long struggle for independence led by the intrepid figure of Garibaldi, whose Italian nationalism was tempered by a democratic humanism, and it left Jabotinsky with a lifelong vision of what a decent, free, and pleasurable society could be like—the society he was to want for another former and future people of the Mediterranean: his own.
This people did not occupy his thoughts while in Rome. If to Odessa he owed the possibility of a non-Jewish self, in Rome he lived this self to the full. So little did Jewish concerns impinge on him there, he later wrote, that he was unaware until afterwards that some of the Italian students and professors he had known were Jews like himself. Nowhere do his memoirs mention the one significant Jewish encounter from this period for which there is evidence, which can be found in a little-known recollection by the Tel Aviv physician, author, and Revisionist politician Ya’akov Veinshal. In this account, Veinshal writes of being told by Jabotinsky about several meetings had by him in Rome and Naples with the Sephardi Zionist adventurer Yosef Marcou-Baruch.
Marcou-Baruch, who killed himself in Florence in 1899 after an unhappy love affair, is an extraordinary if now forgotten figure in Zionist history. Born in Constantinople in 1872, he led the life, inspired by Garibaldi, of an anarchist and would-be liberator of his people. Constantly on the move from one European city to another and frequently arrested and imprisoned for his views, he sought to spread the gospel of a Zionist army that would conquer Palestine from the Turks and even preached it as an Italian delegate to the second Zionist Congress in 1898, at which he was a considerable embarrassment to Herzl. Whether it was he who sought out Jabotinsky or vice versa is unclear; his possible influence on the development of Jabotinsky’s thought must remain a matter of speculation.
To Arrigo Razzini, Jabotinsky wrote from Odessa: “Remember I told you this and mark it well: never turn back from an adventure and never ask yourself where it leads.”
When Jabotinsky traveled to Odessa in June 1901, it was to spend his summer vacation there and return to Rome. His plans changed when Odesskaya Novosti’s Jewish editor Ossip Kheyfets, impressed by his Rome correspondent’s popularity with the paper’s readers, offered him a job at a good salary as a regular columnist stationed in Odessa. For a twenty-one-year-old journalist with three years of experience the proposal was irresistible, and Jabotinsky accepted and moved back to Odessa and his mother’s apartment.
Odesskaya Novosti was a liberal paper, founded in 1895. A sketch drawn by its cartoonist Mikhail Linsky in the early 1900s shows a seated Kheyfetz, one finger lifted in admonishment or emphasis, lecturing a staff that is not paying him the slightest attention. In one corner, Linsky is talking animatedly to the cigar-smoking Russian impressionist painter Piotr Nilus while the well-known Jewish journalist Semyon Gerts-Vinogradsky listens. In mid-room, the Jewish writer Ossip Abramovich, one of the founders of Odessa’s Writers’ Club, stands with several men at a lectern, and the popular columnist “Flitt” converses with an unidentified dwarf. In the opposite corner, behind Kheyfets’s back, the writer Alexander Fyodorov sits on a low cabinet beside a young man, his swinging legs encased in tight pants and leather boots, who has been identified as Jabotinsky. A closer look, however, reveals him to be Jabotinsky’s friend Korney Chukovsky, later to become a well-known Soviet-period author of children’s books. A bulldog sniffs at the boots.
Kheyfetz gave Jabotinsky a free hand, and his columns (or feuilletons, to use the French word for a European form that was longer and more literary than the Anglo-American column) touched on a wide variety of subjects. Russian politics, dealt with by others, was not one of them. Jabotinsky discussed books, theater, intellectual trends and developments, local issues and events, chance episodes and encounters, and whatever else he cared to reflect on. Among the first pieces written by him were a review of a performance of the opera Faust; an account of an exhibition of southern Russian painters; a discussion of corporal punishment in Russian schools; a reflection on household servants; an essay on the Italian poet Gabriele d’Annunzio; and a description of an Odessa fire. In the months that followed, the suicide of a streetwalker led to reflections on the profession of prostitution, the expulsion of a fraternity student for making anti-Semitic remarks to a defense of the right to free speech even for bigots, and the death from encephalitis of a boy in Moscow to a critique of Russian education. This began:
A young boy sits trying to solve a complicated problem in arithmetic, keels over, and dies. It turns out that he’s come down with brain fever.
It happened not long ago in Moscow. The boy, whose name was Volodya Fodin, was twelve years old.
I haven’t the slightest doubt that the problem that killed him was taken from Varashchagin’s arithmetic book.
From here, Jabotinsky went on to attack, first, the textbook in question, and next, the Russian school system for its pedantry and regimentation. Whether or not the twelve-year-old Volodya was actually doing his arithmetic lessons when he fell suddenly ill, the passage is typical of Jabotinsky’s Odesskaya Novosti pieces, which jump swiftly from the incidental to the essential as if to make the point that incidentality itself is an illusion. By starting anywhere, such writing implies, one can soon get to the heart of anything.
Jabotinsky had a light, quick touch and a flair for the provocative and unconventional that were ideal for the feuilleton form. His following grew. Newsboys hawked Odesskaya Novosti in the streets with the cry, “Extra! Read Altalena today!” No older than a university student, he was now a local celebrity. At the theater, he had a reserved reviewer’s seat with his name written on it in bronze letters. People pointed him out in the street, sought introductions to him. He was lively company. Chaim Weizmann, who first met him in 1903, found him an “immensely attractive” if “rather ugly” person, and the few photographs of him from this period show a short, young man with a tower of dense wavy hair, a broad, wide forehead, thick lips, heavy brows, and nearsighted, slightly froggy eyes. He liked to dress well. In one photograph he stands, hands clasped behind his back, in a striped jacket, vest, necktie, and fashionable cardboard collar, the pince-nez on his nose attached to his lapel by a gold or silver chain.
Although he had the reputation of being a lady’s man, his memoirs are reticent on the subject. (In the preface to his “Story of My Life,” Jabotinsky wrote that he had in reality told only half the story and omitted its more intimate side, whose many “friends, relationships, experience, and memories” were “far deeper and more momentous” than the things he wrote about.) The one female figure from his bachelor years to appear in them is Yoanna or Ania Gelperin.2 Jabotinsky and Ania met when he was fifteen and she was ten; he was visiting her brother and she was playing the piano in the living room; although he called her “Mademoiselle,” which flattered her, she had to stifle a laugh at his funny looks. When he returned from Rome, she was sixteen. One day at the home of a mutual friend, he teas-ingly handed her a gold coin from his pocket and declared in rabbinical language, “Behold thou art sanctified to me by this coin according to the religion of Moses and Israel.” All present laughed except the friend’s religiously observant father, who sternly warned Jabotinsky that he was now Ania’s husband and would need a divorce if he wished to marry again.
Odesskaya Novosti’s offices were in the “Passage,” a magnificent Parisian-style shopping arcade at the top of Deribasovskaya Street, near Cathedral Square. Built in the 1890s with a modern glass roof over its central mall, its two facing, block-long buildings, each with a row of classical nude sculptures holding up the third and top floor, housed many of Odessa’s fanciest shops. In The Five, Jabotinsky describes his daily walk to it. This started along Bazarnaya Street, crossed the “majestically sleepy” Pushkinskaya, came to Richelevskaya with its tables of moneychangers on which lay “banknotes from all the planets in the solar system,” and turned into Yekaterinskaya, amid whose “tall houses in yesterday’s styles” stood the Cafés Robin and Fanconi, “noisy as the seas at a massif.” (Menachem-Mendl wrote his wife about doing business at Fanconi’s, the favorite hangout of the stock exchange traders, while eating ice cream ordered from a waiter in a frock coat.) Yekaterinskaya led to Deribasovskaya, “the queen of streets in the whole world.” Though architecturally undistinguished, it was the promenade on which anyone who was anyone in Odessa had to be seen—so much so, the narrator says, that he felt privileged each time his foot touched its “sacred ground” and instinctively checked to see if his necktie was in place.
Fanconi’s is now a sushi bar, but Odessans promenade on Deribasovskaya to this day. At its other, seaward end, back toward the Londonskaya and the municipal theater, stands the grand old municipal library, converted to an archaeological museum, its broad steps ascending to a colonnaded Greek facade. Joined to it is a humbler building, today housing a museum too, that once belonged to the city’s Literary and Artistic Society. Here, in an ornate room, its ceiling and walls gold-tinted, the Writers’ Club frequented by Jabotinsky met once a week. Odessa’s liveliest intellectual salon, it was, the narrator of The Five remarks, “the focus of our spiritual ferment.”
It was at this club that Jabotinsky caused a furor in the winter of 1901–2 by delivering an address upholding the supreme importance of the individual over that of the masses as maintained by Marxism. Midway through his remarks—in which he cited the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin’s prediction that the Marxist “dictatorship of the proletariat” would pose a greater threat to human freedom than any preceding it in human history—he was shouted down by the pro-Marxist audience with cries of “Reactionary!” and “Anarchist!” The ensuing melee was so great that the police had to be called to restore order.
The voluntarism of anarchist theory was indeed more congenial to his spirit than the coercive socialism of Marxism. Already in Bern, his nonconformist nature had taken a dislike to the doctrinaireness of Marxist thought. His years in Italy, so much more undisciplined in its way of life than northern Europe, had influenced him, too; so also, perhaps, had his friend Roberto Lombardo, eventually to become prominent in the Italian anarcho-syndicalist movement. An acquaintance who visited Jabotinsky at the time of his Writers’ Club address was struck by the presence on his bookshelves not only of Bakunin, but of such other Russian anarchists and populists as Kropotkin, Lavrov, and Mikhailovsky.
The Tsarist police were struck by it, too. Besides keeping track of the anti-establishment tone of Jabotinsky’s feuilletons, they were aware of his having written for the Italian radical journal Avanti and of his connections with revolutionaries like Lebedentsev. In April 1902, they raided his mother’s apartment, went through his books and belongings, and arrested him. He was held in detention for nearly two months before being released, pending a decision on his case.
Jabotinsky was to remember these months with an insouciance probably greater than what he felt at the time. Given a cell of his own in the political wing of Odessa’s prison, he took part in a life that was intensely social even though its participants never saw each other. Shouted conversations were held from cell to cell; notes and letters, tied to lengths of twirled rope, passed back and forth between the prisoners. At night, when the din of prison life died down, educational lectures were given. Jabotinsky spoke about the Italian independence struggle; unable to refrain from his theme of “individualism,” he was not asked by his Marxist neighbors to address them again. And yet, he wrote in his memoirs, he had been listened to more tolerantly by them than he had been at the Writers’ Club. Most were awaiting trial and possible deportation to Siberia. He had no intention of joining them there. After his release, he wrote to Arrigo Razzini:
I’m under special surveillance following a period of imprisonment. I spent seven weeks in jail in the best and merriest company, and was given fine treatment and even worse food than [we students used to eat] on Via Cappucini. Now I’m awaiting a verdict from a secret court in St. Petersburg. If I’m not acquitted, you’ll see me soon, because I’ll take to my heels. . . .
In the end, the charges were dropped, though recently discovered documents in Soviet archives have revealed that the police kept an active file on Jabotinsky until 1911. In it appears the information that he served briefly in 1903 as a neighborhood representative of the anti-Bolshevik Odessa section of the Social-Democratic party, and that he was arrested again in 1904 for a supposedly seditious speech delivered at an anti-regime banquet. This time he was freed immediately.
Jabotinsky’s prison experience influenced a poem he wrote later that year about the historical figure of Charlotte Corday, a young woman from the French provinces whose assassination of the Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat, stabbed by her with a kitchen knife as he lay in his bathtub, was a dramatic episode of the French Revolution. Charlotte, who sided with the Girondists, the more moderate revolutionary faction, killed Marat for his part in the revolutionary terror of 1793 and was guillotined herself four days later. In an address left behind to the French people, she voiced the hope that she had demonstrated how much even “the most feeble hand” could accomplish by an act of “total devotion.”
Jabotinsky’s poem took the form of an imaginary letter written by Charlotte on the night before her execution to a fellow Girondist named Charles. It was Charles who, stopping by the garden of her village home for a drink of water one day, had first aroused her enthusiasm for the revolution, which her female sex prevented her, to her frustration, from playing an active role in. Bees were buzzing in the garden; she told Charles not to fear them because, since they lost their sting and died when they used it, they rarely did so; he replied that he would rather die “by plunging home my sting” than from illness or old age. Now, from her prison cell, Charlotte writes:
Ah, Charles! Without a tear
I could have given up all of life’s pleasures.
The roof above my head, my hopes and dreams,
A kindred soul’s bright, shining star of love–
I could have learned to live without them,
Though life were hard as stone.
Only when I lost my pride,
And with it the last spark of self-respect,
Did living come to be impossible,
Since there was nothing standing any more
Between me and the chasm of despair. . . .
. . . .
And then [in prison] I thought of you. A long-forgotten
light
Shone in my heart, and in my thoughts
I traveled back to when, as though it happened now,
I stood and listened to you speak
Beneath the shady tree where I rebelled
Against my fate for the first time.
There was a murmur in my ears:
A merry swarm of bees flew by, and in a flash
I dimly heard the echo of your words,
“I’d rather die by plunging home my sting.”
Silent, I glanced up—and there, quite close to me,
Two bees gleamed golden in the sun,
Catching the rays sent from its goodly hoard
Like two glints of fire.
“Yes, you are nature’s gold,” I said to them,
“And I am but dull lead.
Roaming far and laboring for your hive,
You have better things to do
Than seek a bitter end by stinging.
Not from gold are the best bullets made.
That is the fate of lead—the fate that’s mine.”
Charlotte kills Marat both to save her countrymen from a revolution that is devouring its own and to give meaning to the “dull lead” of a life that, so she fears, will otherwise leave no mark. Jabotinsky, who had shared a cell block with revolutionaries, was clearly occupied with the question of revolutionary idealism, its excesses, and the restraining force of moral conscience—and also, it would seem, with the fear that his own young life was being squandered like Charlotte’s.
He had begun to think of journalism as a futile profession. To Razzini he wrote that it was “ruining my nerves” and that, though it paid well and had made him “cheaply popular,” he would have to abandon it. In April 1902, shortly before his arrest, he had published a feuilleton entitled “Clowns” in which he compared himself and his fellow journalists to circus performers, using every possible trick to entertain a bored public. In another piece, called “Helplessness” and published in September of that year, he related a conversation with an eighteen-year-old girl who had turned to him because she had no money for the operation needed to save her mother’s life. “I’m sorry, miss, there’s nothing I can do,” he apologized to her before telling his readers: “How gladly I would trade all the words I know and all the fire I can breathe into them for one true act! Let it be modest, let it be unnoticed—but let it be true.”
He was looking, like Charlotte, for something worthy of his devotion. Had Razzini, his good friend from Rome, been told this was about to be Zionism, it would have seemed hard to credit. Yet that same September, Jabotinsky published an article in Odesskaya Novosti in which his childhood belief in a Jewish mlukhe and his adolescent romanticism about Zion, all but forgotten during his years in Italy, resurfaced in new form, shaped by inner developments and outer events into a mature conviction.
He had been introduced to Zionist literature after his return from Rome by a young Odessan businessman and Zionist activist named Shlomo Saltzman. The two met during an intermission at the opera, where Saltzman was chatting with Vsevolod Lebedentsev. The subject of Zionist thought came up and Saltzman offered to lend Jabotinsky writings by Lilienblum, Pinsker, and Herzl. It was his first encounter with Zionism, not as a visceral sentiment, but as a serious analysis of the Jewish condition and plan for changing it, and the impression made on him was great.
Since its founding congress in Basel five years earlier, Herzl’s Zionist Organization had grown rapidly. The number of its followers had swelled; in Russia alone they now amounted to seventy thousand dues-paying members in more than five hundred chapters. Noted European writers and intellectuals like Max Nordau, Bernard Lazare, and Israel Zangwill had joined its ranks; four more international congresses had been held; a Jewish Colonial Trust had been established; and a high-level Zionist weekly edited by the young Martin Buber, the German-language Die Welt, had begun to appear in Vienna.
Yet in spite of all this, efforts to obtain a Palestine charter from the Sultan in return for a Zionist-backed loan to pay off Turkey’s massive international debt had gone nowhere. Herzl had been several times to Constantinople; had met with international financiers; had sought the support of Germany, which maintained close economic and diplomatic ties with the Turks; had traveled to Palestine for an audience with the Kaiser—and had nothing to show for it.
In his hectic courting of Jewish bankers, alternately wooed with promises of lucrative profits and lectures on their responsibilities to their people, and of European statesmen and monarchs, before whom he dangled the bait of a mass exodus of unwanted Jews from their countries, Herzl was like a juggler rushing to put a new ball into play each time an old one fell to the ground. A semi-organized opposition to him called “the democratic faction,” composed mainly of young Eastern European Zionists like Weizmann under the intellectual leadership of Ahad Ha’am, had arisen within his own movement. In his fixation on high diplomacy and grand publicity coups, it claimed, he was neglecting the practical work of expanding the already existing Zionist presence in Palestine and fostering Jewish national consciousness in the Diaspora. Exhausted and suffering from a serious heart condition though only in his early forties, Herzl was more than once close to despair.
Moreover, the Jewish situation was worsening. In Russia, a regime threatened by a revolutionary movement in which Jews were disproportionately represented was seeking to divert public anger into anti-Semitic channels with the help of the pulpit and the press. Russian Jewry was targeted as the subversive root of all evil; bey zhidov, spasai Rossiyu, “beat the Jews and save Russia,” became a popular slogan. Pogroms resulting in widespread damage to Jewish property had taken place in the Ukraine in 1897 and 1899, and in Russian-ruled Poland in 1902. In Vilna, in 1900, a Jew was indicted for the ritual blood murder of a Christian girl. Legal restrictions on Jewish residence rights were tightened; Jewish educational and occupational quotas were lowered still further. Even in Odessa, things had taken a turn for the worse. “In general,” says the narrator of The Five,
it became uncomfortable in Odessa. I had trouble recognizing our city, which only a short while ago had been so free and easy and good-natured. Now it was swept by a malice that, they say, had never previously affected our mild southern metropolis, created over the centuries through the loving and harmonious efforts of peaceful races. They’d always quarreled and cursed each other as rogues and idiots, and sometimes even fought; but in all my memory, there’d never been any ferocious, authentic hostility. Now all this had changed. . . .
Things were even grimmer in Rumania, which shared a border with Russia not far from Odessa. Never granted full citizenship rights, a quarter million Rumanian Jews were now declared alien residents, expelled from all public educational institutions, and forbidden to engage in a wide range of professions or to work for the government. Jewish communal leaders were arrested and deported.
Eastern European Jewry was fleeing westward by the hundreds of thousands. Western skies, however, were darkening, too. In Austria and Germany, anti-Semitism had long been a staple of political discourse; in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, it had become so in France as well. The only sure havens were America and England, for which most of the emigrants headed—yet their numbers were stoking prejudice against them there, too. In both countries there was talk of legislation to curb or bar Jewish immigration. The prospect of millions of desperate Jews with nowhere to turn loomed large.
Never had the hope of a reestablished Jewish homeland been more relevant—yet its realization seemed no closer than before Herzl’s appearance on the scene. Zionism’s critics had multiplied alongside its supporters. For the European Left, it was a bourgeois movement distracting the Jewish masses from the revolutionary struggle; for the Right, a subversive force fostering disloyalty to the countries Jews lived in. Left and Right alike considered it a pipe dream, and Herzl a spent illusionist with little left up his sleeve.
Zionism’s fiercest critics, because they were the most threatened by an ideology that branded them unwanted by European society, were Jews. One such opponent in Russia was the St. Petersburg journalist and intellectual Ossip Bikerman, a leading member of the Society for the Promotion of Culture Among Russian Jews, an organization dedicated to Russian Jewry’s full integration into Russian life. In the summer of 1902, Bikerman published an attack on Zionism in the magazine Russkoye Bogatsvo that consisted of three main arguments: that Zionism was historically retrograde; that it was politically reactionary; and that it was, practically speaking, unworkable. Jabotinsky read Bikerman’s article and responded to it in Odes-skaya Novosti. He did so dismissively, reserving his greatest scorn for its second point. “One can argue,” he wrote,
whether Zionism is a desirable or practical solution, but to call it reactionary is grossly to defame a dream sprung from the Jewish people’s sea of tears and suffering. . . . Defame it if you must! The dream is greater than its slanderers. It need not fear their calumny.
Jabotinsky’s first published remarks on Zionism, these show him not yet fully identified with it, more a sympathizer than an adherent. Perhaps he, too, still needed to be convinced that it was a practical solution to a Jewish problem that had begun to concern him. Of the validity of the Zionist dream, however, he needed no convincing. He had been exposed to it as a boy. It angered him to see it maligned.
Perhaps he was also struggling to combine a commitment to a national struggle with his philosophy of “individualism,” two things that did not easily go together. The conflict between them is hinted at in a play he wrote in the same crucial year of 1902. Called Ladno, Russian for “all right,” it is one of his most intriguing works.
It was not his first theater piece. That was an effort called “Minister Gamm,” the text of which, long believed to be lost, was rediscovered in a St. Petersburg library after the fall of the Soviet Union. Composed while Jabotinsky was still in Rome, it was a reworking of a drama called Il Sangue, “Blood,” written by his roommate Roberto Lombardo under the impact of the Boer War. Jabotinsky took “Blood,” which tells the story of the foreign minister of an imaginary European country who starts a pointless imperialist war and then kills himself in remorse when a young man dear to a lady friend of his dies in the fighting, and put it into verse in the tradition of such nineteenth-century Russian plays as Pushkin’s Boris Godunov and Lermontov’s Masquerade. Conventional in its anti-war sentiments, it was staged by the Odessa theater in 1901, starring the well-known actress Anna Paskhalovna. Jabotinsky’s memoirs relate:
The theater was empty. Perhaps 300 seats were taken, perhaps less, half of them by friends and acquaintances. Naturally, they applauded, and I was even asked to take a curtain call, though when I came out to bow in the new frock coat I had bought for the occasion, I tripped on the curtain cord and would have fallen flat on my face if Paskhalovna hadn’t grabbed me. . . . At the crack of dawn I ran out to buy the newspapers—all of them, even the Police Gazette. The critics were merciful, the Police Gazette’s too, and didn’t spoil the occasion, but the play closed after two performances. A year later, my second play [“All Right”] was performed. Also in rhyme, it had only one act. Paskhalovna appeared in it again, but this time the critics had no pity. As though by prior agreement, all joked about the play’s name, calling it “All Wrong,” “Nothing Right,” etc.
The main protagonist of “All Right,” Korolkov, is a young Russian student who, in a more extreme version of Jabotinsky’s Writers’ Club address, espouses a philosophy of self-fulfillment that repudiates all notions of social duty. Halfway through the play, he formulates it clearly:
A single right is all I know:
The right to my own self. That’s all—and yet
It’s great and has no bounds. No one can owe
A thing to anyone. . . .
. . . .
Be content, a passionate believer
In yourself. Suspect all sacrifice,
From which no good can ever come. Never
Did the slightest seed of happiness
Sprout from it. Burn your sacred incense
To your will alone! By it be led
To love or knowledge, art or idleness,
To silence like a stone’s on the sea’s bed,
Or else to follow the ancient path
Of service to one’s nation. Yet then, too,
Imbue it with your spirit. Proclaim anew:
“There is no struggle that obliges me.
I celebrate my own will’s sovereignty!”
Korolkov’s credo clashes with his love for Marusya, a young woman who loves him back but rebuffs him in favor of a dull but reliable suitor whom she can count on to support her poor family. Refusing to accept her decision, Korolkov composes a romantic ballad about a brave young nobleman who rebels against his country’s king in order to rescue his beloved princess from her imprisonment in a fortress—a symbol of Marusya’s impending marriage. The play climaxes with a confrontation between the two. Going down on his knees, Korolkov exclaims bitterly, “Why must I give you up when I’m the one who waited for you and believed for so long? I don’t agree!”
Marusya, her defenses overwhelmed, gives in. “All right,” she replies. “Then I agree. Do you hear me? I’m ready for anything. All right? I’m yours. Take me, seize me, overpower me, ravish me! Just decide! Just decide! Just decide!” And the play concludes:
Korolkov: All right. (He exits without looking back. Marusya goes on sitting there, her eyes shut. He can be heard in the vestibule, putting on his coat and boots before walking away.)
It’s a puzzling ending. “All right” to what? Eloping with Marusya? But why, then, hasn’t Korolkov swept his beloved up in his arms as does the young nobleman in his poem? Why his cruelly nonchalant departure, leaving Marusya alone and uncertain of his intentions just when she has offered to stake her life on him? What was Jabotinsky trying to convey?
Perhaps that Korolkov, like Goffredo in “Diana,” is not the Nietzschean man of will he has pretended to be. At the crucial moment, indeed, he seems to have no will at all. Whether “All right” means “Yes,” “I’ll think about it,” “It’s too late,” or “Whatever” hardly matters. Korolkov turns out to be a sham. Marusya, who has mustered the resolve that her lover only pretends to have, learns the difference between words and deeds the hard way.
But it is Korolkov’s betrayal of his belief, not the belief itself, that is condemned in “All Right.” Although Jabotinsky never saved the text of the play, which was found together with “Blood,” he quite remarkably still remembered parts of it by heart three decades later. Sitting in 1935 in a hotel room in St. Louis in the middle of an exhausting speaking tour of America, he wrote in a letter to his sister Tania:
I’m a believer in “individualism” to this day. If I were a philosopher, I’d try to harmonize this with my sense of service [to the Jewish people] as follows: I serve not because I’m “required” to—no one is required to do anything for anyone—but because I will to. This is the education given by Betar [the Zionist youth movement founded by Jabotinsky in 1923]. If something isn’t to your liking, don’t commit yourself to it, but if you do, make your commitment one hundred percent as a matter of self-respect. If you’d like, I can quote you [lines] from “All Right” that expressed this idea 33 years ago.
The lines that Jabotinsky proceeded to quote to his sister with only a few inaccuracies were from Korolkov’s “A single right is all I know” speech. The letter from St. Louis was thus not only a statement of Jabotinsky’s own credo; it was also a gloss on the play’s ending. What Korolkov lacks, this tells us, is not the right values. It is the self-respect of commitment.
Whether there was someone like Marusya in Jabotinsky’s life in these years is unknown. (Can it be only a coincidence that the tragic heroine of The Five, also loved but never possessed by the narrator, is named Marusya too?) But although “All Right” was a minor event in a season that saw productions of operas like Tosca, Tannhaüser, and Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppe, and plays like Cyrano de Bergerac, Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, and Sergei Alekseyev’s Vanyushin’s Children, it was a major turning point for Jabotinsky, who was already then debating whether to follow “the ancient path of service to one’s nation.”
This is a line that doesn’t ring quite true. Why should Korolkov mention a possible course of action that nothing in his life or outlook predisposes him to? The words seem put in his mouth by a playwright who has stepped momentarily outside the mind of his own character—which is exactly what Jabotinsky was doing. Ever since his return to Odessa, he had been laboring to reconcile a belief in the radical freedom of the self with the increasingly powerful pull of Jewish nationalism. The solution hit upon by him was given, though in a context of dramatic irony, to Korolkov to enunciate. If one wills to serve a cause or set of principles, service, too, is freedom.
In the history of Western thought this is a commonplace, whether expressed religiously by a statement like Thomas à Kempis’s that men “shall never get liberty of mind till they with all their heart subdue themselves for God,” or philosophically by Kant’s “freedom and self-legislation of the will are both autonomy and consequently interchangeable concepts.” Yet for Jabotinsky, it had the excitement of an intellectual discovery that addressed the central paradox of his life—that of a partisan of the right, even the obligation, to be one’s own self who nevertheless chose to dedicate this self to a people and ultimately to create a political movement that demanded from its followers an iron discipline in the name of a common goal. Whether his life was ultimately coherent—whether it had a deep inner consistency or was at bottom a tragic contradiction—depends on whether this paradox makes sense to us or whether, like the Columbia University historian Michael Stanislawski in Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky, we regard it as a rationalization, “at best a non sequitur, at worst nonsensical.” The deeper debate about Jabotinsky starts here.
On April 6, 1903, a day on which Easter Sunday coincided with the seventh day of Passover, a pogrom broke out in Kishinev, a heavily Jewish town in the largely Rumanian-speaking province of Moldavia, a hundred miles northwest of Odessa. When the Russian army and police finally stepped in to quell the mayhem two days later, forty-five Jews had been killed, more than six hundred had been wounded or raped, and about fifteen hundred Jewish homes and stores had been sacked and looted. Some of the victims sought to fight back; on the whole, though, resistance was sporadic. Although there had been intermittent pogroms in Russia since 1881, the slaughter in Kishinev had a savagery not experienced by Jews anywhere since the seventeenth century. It came as a shock, not only to Russian and world Jewry, but to all who had thought that the worst barbarism of European anti-Semitism was a thing of the past.
It did not, however, come out of the blue. Throughout the early months of 1903, hostility toward Jews had grown in the Russian south after a Christian boy was found dead in the Moldovan town of Dubossary and Jews were accused of his ritual murder. (The boy, it later turned out, had been killed by his own uncle.) Local riots erupted, and the widely circulated Kishinev newspaper Bessarabets conducted an incendiary anti-Jewish campaign. As was often the case with such agitation, it peaked toward Easter time. One circular making the rounds in the days before the holiday read:
Our great festival of the Resurrection of Christ draws near. . . . The vile Jews are not content with having shed the blood of our Savior, whom they crucified. Every year they shed the innocent blood of Christians and use it in their religious rites. . . . They aspire to seize our beloved Russia. They issue proclamations inciting the people against the authorities, even against our Little Father, the Tsar. . . . Brothers, we need your help: let us massacre the vile Jews!
Odessa was not far away; tensions mounted there, too. Yet the organized Jewish community remained passive, and Jabotinsky, who had his ear to the ground as a journalist, wrote letters to its leaders urging the establishment of a Jewish self-defense force. None of them replied—not surprisingly, perhaps, considering that he was calling for clandestine action. Yet some knew that such a force, the first in Russian Jewish history, was already being organized in Odessa by a Zionist student group called Jerusalem. Jabotinsky’s letter was passed on to it and he was contacted and invited to join.
He responded at once. As recalled by a member of the group, Yisra’el Trivosch, there was a knock one night on the door of its underground office, where a flyer was being run off on a hectograph. Certain it was a police raid, the apprehensive young Zionists opened the door. Standing there was Jabotinsky with two companions. He took in the scene at a glance, said, “You look dead tired; let us spell you for a while,” and stayed up until six in the morning, working the hectograph while the students slept. The flyer ended with the call: “Let there be an end to the shameful heritage of centuries in which we went like sheep to the slaughter. . . . All for one and one for all! To arms in our own defense!”
Jabotinsky threw himself into the self-defense force’s activities. He helped to compose and print proclamations, raise money from wealthy Jews, negotiate with arms dealers for the purchase of revolvers, distribute them to volunteers taught to shoot, plan their deployment, and patrol the city to check for signs of impending trouble. He was remembered by his comrades as being everywhere, always cheerfully ready to lend a hand.
What impelled him to do it? In part, no doubt, the same instinct that had caused him as a boy to lunge at a Russian officer twice his size. It was his nature to fight back when attacked, and if attacked as a Jew, to fight back as one.
But it was more than that. As part of the self-defense force’s fund-raising drive, Jabotinsky spoke one night to a group of Odessan Jewish intellectuals convened at the home of Meir Dizengoff. As quoted by Trivosch, he declared:
We are a people [and] you may as well be angry with your parents for having brought you into the world as wish to be excused from belonging to your people. . . . Life is always a war. The weak are treated with contempt. The bug squashed beneath someone’s foot does not feel insulted; [but] men are sovereign, even if exaggerated egotism can drive them to suicidal extremes.
In theory, every man was—echoing Korolkov’s language—“sovereign”; in practice, living one’s sovereignty in isolation from others only led to being trampled on. With this formulation, the intellectual foundations of Jabotinsky’s conversion to Zionism were completed. These were based on a belief in Jewish activism in Russia no less than in Palestine, since Zionism, as Leo Pinsker had written in his “Auto-Emancipation,” called on Jews to take their destiny into their own hands in the Diaspora as well. Indeed, when Jabotinsky first heard of the Kishinev pogrom, he had just finished delivering a lecture on Pinsker at the Beseda Club. Though it was already the evening of the pogrom’s second day, news of it had yet to reach Odessa, the city’s newspapers and their telegraph services having been shut down for the Easter holiday. Present at the lecture was the historian Simon Dubnov, a non-Zionist Jewish nationalist who advocated Jewish autonomy in Eastern Europe. As he later wrote:
That night the Jewish audience assembled to listen to the talk of a young Zionist, the Odessa Wunderkind V. Jabotinsky. . . . The young propagandist [sic] had great success with his audience [though] as for my own impression, his one-sided treatment of our historical problem depressed me. . . . During the [refreshment] break, while pacing up and down in the neighboring room, I noticed a sudden unrest in the audience: the news had spread that fugitives had arrived in Odessa from nearby Kishinev and reported on a bloody pogrom in progress there.
The next morning, according to Korney Chukovsky, Jabotinsky stormed into an editorial meeting of Odesskaya Novosti, turned to the non-Jews on the staff, berated them and the entire Christian world for what had happened, and stormed back out, slamming the door behind him. It was an uncharacteristic tirade for a generally even-tempered person and probably a factor in the newspaper’s sponsorship of a relief fund that collected money and supplies for the pogrom’s victims. Sent to Kishinev to oversee their distribution, Jabotinsky toured the sites of devastation, spoke to survivors, and visited the injured in the hospital.
Although it would have been an obvious subject to write about, he published nothing about Kishinev in Odesskaya Novosti. Almost demonstratively, his columns in the days after the pogrom dealt with other topics, such as an Italian actor performing in Odessa and the sexual exploitation of female workers by their employers. Yet far from indicating—as he was to claim in his memoirs—that the pogrom made little impression on him and taught him nothing he didn’t know about Jewish helplessness (the more damning word used by him was “cowardice”) in the face of aggression, his silence at the time suggests the opposite. The fury and frustration described by Chukovsky were real. If Jabotinsky didn’t write about Kishinev, this was because, as a journalist with a reputation for wit and urbanity, he didn’t trust himself to control his emotions.
A description of Jabotinsky’s true reaction to the pogrom can be found in his third and last play, “A Strange Land,” written in 1907 but never produced. Composed largely in verse like “Blood” and “All Right,” it is set in Odessa during the 1905 uprising. Each of its main characters is a representative type of Russian Jewish youth; one, Gonta, has just returned from two years in America, where he went, he says, “to forget.” “To forget what?” he is asked and replies “Who I was” and continues:
I was in Kishinev.
The Relief Committee sent me with some money
And a bundle of old clothes.
I spent three days there,
And on the evening of the third, I fled.
I couldn’t breathe. I kept thinking
People in the street were pointing at me:
“There goes a kike! Look at that cringing yid!”
I ran and took a train and faced the window,
Not even getting up to stretch my legs at stations.
I forced myself to talk to no one,
Look at nothing,
Think of nothing–
Nothing but the need to get away.
Gonta has returned from America not as “who he was,” a revolutionary confident that the socialism that would solve all of Russia’s problems would solve its Jewish problem too, but as a Zionist convinced that the Jews have no future in an irredeemably anti-Semitic society. “I say to you,” he proclaims in the play’s final act:
stop living lies!
You’re in a lion’s den. Have no illusions.
Your dreams are nothing but a fool’s effusions.
At the volcano’s edge, you’re fireflies.
The glowworm’s tiny spark
Can’t cause a mountain to erupt,
But get this through your heads: when it blows up
You’ll vanish with the first discharge,
You and all your work, the laboring of ants.
That’s something you had better understand.
“What for?” someone wants to know, and Gonta replies:
So that, once and for all, we’ll burn
Our bridges to this murderous land
That never can be ours; learn to demand
Nothing from it, give nothing in return;
Spurn its alien pomp and circumstance;
Turn upon its riches scornful backs
And like a badge of honor wear our rags;
Walk away from its grand opulence
And festal boards with their munificence;
Forgo it all; display the proud disdain
Of a vagabond who once was king!
Gonta is not given the last word in “A Strange Land.” When he is done speaking, his appeal to Jewish pride is mocked by another character:
Ah, Monsieur Gonta, a highly interesting specimen! We [Russian Jews] disgusted him: his closeness to us was like a chain around his legs—no, like a hump on his back that he couldn’t get rid of. And so now he’s made a virtue of necessity and shouts from every rooftop, “How proud I am of my hump!”
This was not an unjustified observation regarding either Gonta-Jabotinsky or Zionism. In both cases, the pride and shame of being Jewish were closely linked. Without pride, shame could not be aroused; without shame, pride could not be spurred into action. Kishinev called, not for breast-beating, but for an end to the powerlessness of exile. As if to remind himself of this, Jabotinsky carried around with him for years a scrap of parchment from which the title of his play was taken. Torn from a desecrated Torah and retrieved from the rubble near one of Kishinev’s synagogues, it bore part of the verse in Exodus, “I have been a stranger in a strange land.” Some lines of poetry he wrote about it went:
In that town, I spied in the debris
The torn fragment of a parchment scroll
And gently brushed away the dirt to see
What tale it told.
Written on it was “In a strange land”–
Just a few words from the Bible, but the sum
Of all one needs to understand
Of a pogrom.
These lines appeared in Jabotinsky’s introduction to a Russian translation he made of Bialik’s long Hebrew poem “In the City of Slaughter.” Bialik had been in Kishinev with a Jewish commission of inquiry and was, like Jabotinsky, shocked by the failure of most of the town’s Jews, who made up half its population, to defend themselves. Raging more at them and their unsuccessful efforts to hide under beds and in basements than at their assailants, his poem assumed the mock-prophetic form of a bitter tirade by God, who guides the poet through the streets of Kishinev with commentary like:
And now go down to their dark cellar holes!
There, on each daughter of your people, amid junk and
old tools,
Seven uncircumcised savages piled,
Despoiling child in front of mother, mother in front of
child,
Before, and as, and after their throats were slit.
Touch the red-stained pillow and the gory sheet,
The satyr’s cesspit and the wild pig’s sty;
See the bloodied ax, and then espy,
Crouched behind barrels and moldy hides,
The husbands, the brothers, the betrothed of young
brides,
Peering through peepholes at bodies that writhe.
“In the City of Slaughter” had an electrifying effect on Russian Jewry. Even before its publication, which was delayed by problems with the censor, it circulated widely in handwritten copies read aloud to audiences that gathered to hear it. Suf-fused with biblical language and allusions, it was nevertheless something new in Hebrew literature—not another lamentation for Jewish victimhood permitted by an all-powerful God, but self-castigation for what a powerless God could not have prevented, though a determined and organized Jewish populace might have. Jabotinsky’s translation reached a larger audience than did the Hebrew original and helped make him known far beyond the confines of Odessa.
Jabotinsky’s emergence as a Zionist voice led to his being asked to serve as a delegate from Odessa to the sixth Zionist Congress that convened in Basel in August 1903. The congress came after a period in which Herzl, having gotten nowhere with the Turks, had turned to England, whose colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain had expressed sympathy for Zionism and a willingness to grant it a territory from Great Britain’s imperial holdings. The most promising possibility raised by Chamberlain was of the arid, sparsely inhabited Mediterranean coast of the Sinai Peninsula near El-Arish, on British-controlled Egypt’s side of its frontier with Turkish Palestine—a location, Herzl hoped, that Zionists could regard as a stepping stone to Palestine. Throughout the winter and spring of 1902–3 he worked on the project, conferring with Chamberlain in London, sending a fact-finding mission to Sinai, and traveling to Cairo for talks. Yet the mission’s findings were unfavorable; British officials in Egypt opposed Herzl’s idea of irrigating El-Arish’s sands with Nile water; and by the summer of 1903, the scheme had collapsed.
This failure, however, remained a secret. As the congress’s 592 delegates gathered from all over Europe for the informal caucuses preceding the opening session on August 23, the El-Arish plan was expected to be on the agenda. It threatened to divide the delegates into two warring factions—one, largely Western European, that did not object to launching the Zionist project next door to Zion, and the other, grouped around the “democratic faction,” insisting on Zion itself. A fight also loomed over a second issue, a recent visit of Herzl’s to St. Petersburg, where he had met with the openly anti-Semitic Russian interior minister Vyacheslav von Plehve and extracted from him an endorsement of Zionism in return for a promise to restrict its activities to Jewish emigration and not to interfere in internal Russian affairs. Although Herzl sought to present this agreement as a significant achievement, it was seized on by his opponents as a capitulation to dark forces by which he was being manipulated. Zionism, they maintained, could only succeed by remaining an idealistic movement for which worthy ends did not justify squalid means.
Despite Jabotinsky’s assertion in his memoirs that he arrived in Basel a total unknown in the Zionist world, this was not exactly the case. At the very least, his reputation merited being asked by Martin Buber to write the lead article for Die Welt’s pre-congress issue of August 6. Published in German under the byline “W. Schabotinsky” and the title “Kadima,” Hebrew for both “eastward” and “onward,” the article took issue with Jews who called Zionism an escapist fantasy. The real Jewish escapism, Jabotinsky argued, was assimilation, to which Zionism was the only effective alternative. “We Zionists,” he concluded, “are summoning our people to an act of historic creation. We do not point to the east, saying: ‘Run, find a cave you can hide in from your persecutors.’ We point to it and say: ‘Kadima!’” In writing these words, he was surely thinking of the evening in Bern five years previously when he was mocked for urging Jews to “run away” to Palestine. Now, he was no longer a young student blurting out his raw impressions but a spokesman for a movement to which he fully belonged.
Jabotinsky also covered the congress for Odesskaya Novosti, in which he published four long dispatches. The first two dealt with caucuses he attended. One was held by the Mizrachi, the religiously Orthodox Zionist party; struck by its moderateness, he deemed it capable of collaborating with secular Zionists. The other was convened by a Hebraist faction that demanded Hebrew’s adoption as the official language of the Zionist movement and of a future Jewish state. (The congress itself was conducted in German, with delegates free to use Yiddish, Russian, or Hebrew if they wished.) While confessing that he did not understand spoken Hebrew well enough to follow the proceedings, Jabotinsky was impressed by the speakers’ fluency and predicted that their goal would be accomplished in Palestine because Hebrew alone could serve as a lingua franca there; he was also struck by the Sephardic diction used by some of them, which he judged more exact and pleasing than the Ashkenazi pronunciation he was familiar with. The experience spurred him to take up the study of Hebrew again.
Jabotinsky’s third dispatch—written, he told his readers, in the middle of the night, on time stolen from his sleep—was an account of the congress’s gala opening session held earlier that evening. After a brief description of the delegates, he moved on to Herzl, who gave the keynote address and was “the most interesting-looking man I have ever seen,” with a manner “sublimely courageous.”
Unbending and magnificent, he has a profile like an Assyrian king’s in an old bas-relief. He is self-confident [though] it’s hard to say precisely wherein his power lies. He can’t be called a great writer, despite having a fine style. . . . His oratory is not particularly emphatic—yet he outperforms all others. Many claim to be hypnotized by him. All this adds up to a man of mediocre abilities who is nonetheless a great figure—a genius of no special talents.
It was an oddly ambivalent form of adulation at first sight. Having never put anyone on a pedestal before, Jabotinsky appeared to be mystified by finding himself doing that now. Thirty years later, a hero-worshiped politician himself, he was still trying to understand the magical effect Herzl had had on him. Nowadays, he wrote in a 1934 essay called “The Leader,” European politics abounded in charismatic Duces and Führers who, if their true biographies were ever written, would prove to have been little more than “stuffed rag dolls.” Yet in Herzl’s day, the very concept of the charismatic politician did not exist; leaders were obeyed either by virtue of the authority invested in them by their office or because they were chosen by their electors. Herzl had no such objective power. He was able to lead because he spoke from and to a place of truth. Jews followed him not because of his personality, commanding though that was, but because they were carried away “as though by a gifted singer whose song is that of one’s own deepest yearnings.”
Yet at the sixth Zionist Congress, the melody was changed without warning. Herzl’s keynote address, Jabotinsky informed his readers, dropped a bombshell. The El-Arish plan had fallen through. The British government, however, was now offering another territory, in the well-watered, temperate highlands of East Africa, where Jews would be allowed to enjoy home rule as a British protectorate. Given the urgent need to provide Eastern European Jewry with a reliable asylum, he, Herzl, favored accepting the proposal as long as Palestine, “the land of our forefathers,” remained the ultimate goal. As a first step, he was asking the delegates to appoint a committee to investigate the prospects and report back.
The British offer—although apparently referring to an area in northwest Kenya near Lake Victoria, it immediately became known as the “Uganda plan”–was a sensational breakthrough for political Zionism: a mere six years after the movement’s founding, it was being granted an opportunity to establish a semi-independent Jewish polity under the aegis of a major European power. Yet it was a breakthrough with agonizing implications, for Herzl’s “Palestine proviso” could hardly be taken seriously. Unlike El-Arish, from which an expansion of Jewish settlement into nearby Palestine was imaginable, East Africa was thousands of miles away; the enormous investment of time, money, and human resources needed for developing an autonomous Jewish region there clearly precluded a similar effort elsewhere. Was it better, Jabotinsky asked in his dispatch, “to sacrifice an age-old tradition [of Jewish attachment to Palestine] for an immediately attainable success, or to reject a noble offer so as to carry on with the struggle for the Holy Land?”
It was an issue of profound historical and existential dimensions. Just who were the Jewish people that Zionism claimed to represent? What was their relation to their national and religious past? How much did or should this past define them? What role, if any, should a nation’s founding myths play in its politics? A few days’ debate culminating in a show of hands, if only to appoint a committee, was hardly an appropriate way to deal with such issues. Yet a show of hands, which he expected to win easily, was what Herzl wanted—and a bitter debate was what he got.
A majority of the Western Europeans again supported him. Most of them conceived of a Jewish state more as a place of refuge for their persecuted brethren than as an expression of Jewish national and cultural aspirations, and a well-disposed British protectorate in Africa seemed no worse an option than a hostile Turkish Palestine. The Eastern European vote was more divided—and more paradoxical. The Mizrachi voted with Herzl; under attack by the anti-Zionist Orthodox establishment for supporting a Jewish return to the Land of Israel without divine sanction, it sought to demonstrate that it was motivated solely by a desire to relieve Jewish suffering that was untainted by messianic fantasies. Nearly all of the secular Zionists of the “democratic faction,” on the other hand, were fiercely opposed; products of the shtetl and its values even after having revolted against them, they could not imagine a Jewish home-land that was not the land Jews always had longed for. What could be the point of Jewish-owned plantations and haciendas in a country without roots in Jewish collective memory? What devotion could they inspire? By turning his back on Zion, it was argued, Herzl had betrayed the movement that bore its name.
The vote took place on the fourth day of the congress, in an atmosphere fraught with emotion. Two hundred ninety-five delegates voted in favor, 176 were against, and 143 abstained. For Herzl, it was a Pyrrhic victory. Sometimes grumbled about but always deferred to at Zionist Congresses until now, he was shocked by the size and intensity of the revolt against him. Worse yet, not only had he failed to command an absolute majority of the delegates, the “nay-sayers” spontaneously walked out of the hall as soon as the last vote was counted and adjourned to a nearby room, where they acted as though a disaster had befallen them. Some wept openly. Others sat on the floor and removed their shoes as Jews did on Tisha b’Av, the day of mourning for the destruction of the Temple.
Despite his admiration for Herzl, who seemed to him “without exaggeration, a giant,” Jabotinsky voted with the opposition and joined the walkout—why, he later said, he wasn’t sure. He had, he declared in his memoirs, “no romantic love for Palestine.” The only explanation he could give was the same willful “because” that had made him leave school and Odessa for Rome.
Had he re-read his last dispatch to Odesskaya Novosti, he might have remembered things differently. There was, he wrote there, something genuinely tragic about what he had witnessed. “Think of what it is like,” he told his readers, “to belong to a tribe that must weep over its first political victory in 1,800 years!” But although he could identify with both sides, it was the losing Easterners, he believed, “the mourners for Zion,” who would prevail in the long run, since they were in touch with something in the Jewish psyche that the Westerners had lost contact with. The Russian delegates reflected the “natural and powerful will of the people.” Even were Herzl were to get nowhere with the Sultan for the next twenty years, they still would say: “No matter. Maybe next time around we’ll be luckier—and now let’s get on with the work!” Although more of a “Westerner” in outlook himself, he felt in his heart that the “Easterners” were right.
In their breakaway quarters, the rebels debated whether to carry on with the fight or quit the congress and the Zionist Organization entirely. They were still arguing among themselves when Herzl, coming from the hotel room where he had adjourned, appeared at the door and asked to speak to them. Feelings were running so high that he was not immediately admitted—and when he was, Jabotinsky wrote, the nay-sayers signaled one another not to applaud his entrance as they always had done in the past. Yet Herzl spoke simply but eloquently,
without oratorical flourishes and in full control of himself. Every word was self-assured, [even] patronizing. He spoke like a man who still expects to be listened to, as an adult speaks to a child. There were moments when I thought, “Here come the shouts of protest,” but there were none. From his very first words, every face was rapt with attention.
Herzl defended himself. He had not given up on Palestine. But
does that justify officially turning the British down without even looking at what they have suggested? . . . Forcing me to do so would put me in an untenable position. No one would ever want to negotiate with me again. I would be the man who lacked the power to get this congress even to consider a proposal I had received.
He ended on a recriminatory note:
You can ask me to step down whenever you want. I won’t argue. I’ll go back to the private life that, believe me, I’ve been longing for. I only hope that afterwards no one will rightly be able to say that it was all because you didn’t understand me—that your ingratitude made you misconstrue my true intentions.
His words had their effect. The rebels decided to return to the congress for its closing session. A split had been avoided.
Jabotinsky’s last dispatch ended with reflections on Zion-ism’s future. The crucial question, he wrote, was whether the “Uganda plan” was simply a ploy on Herzl’s part to extract concession from the Turks by convincing them he had other alternatives. Even the nay-sayers wondered whether he mightn’t be “playing the game” now, too, with East Africa as one more ball to juggle with. If Herzl had the will to go on working for Palestine, Jabotinsky thought, he could still obtain it. Yet at the same time,
I myself don’t believe that Herzl is as indispensable to the movement called Zionism as he is commonly thought to be. . . . Although he may be a figure of unparalleled importance, I am sure that, were he to fall by the wayside, Zionism is too deeply grounded in the Jewish soul for the “game” not to go on. And Zionism leads only to Palestine. I have no doubt that that’s where Herzl wishes to lead it to, too. The day he ceases to do so will be the day it marches on, unstoppably, without him.
Jabotinsky himself spoke only once at the congress—and not about East Africa. Allotted a quarter hour like every delegate, he used it to defend Herzl’s dealings with Von Plehve. His memoirs relate:
I had barely begun to argue that morality and political tactics were two totally different things when the benches of the opposition sensed what I—an unknown fellow with a great shock of dark hair and high-flown Russian like a high school student’s declaiming for an exam—was driving at and began to shout: “Enough! We don’t need to hear that!” There was a commotion in the presidium. Herzl heard the racket, came running from a nearby room, and asked one of the delegates, “What’s going on? What is he saying?” The delegate, who happened to be Dr. Weizmann, answered “Nonsense,” and Herzl stepped up behind me and said, “Ihr Zeit ist um [Your time is up].” It was the first and last time he ever addressed me.
As Michael Stanislawski has pointed out, this does not appear to be what actually happened, since the congress’s records state that it was the session’s chairman, the German delegate Max Bodenheimer, who told Jabotinsky his time had run out. Stanislawski cites this inaccuracy in support of his view that “Jabotinsky’s various autobiographical writings . . . are a self-conscious and highly inventive literary creation that deliberately, if quite naturally, presents a selective and factually distorted portrait of their author, often omitting the most salient and revealing truths.” Jabotinsky—who wrote in a preface to “Remembrances of a Contemporary” that he had no patience for fact-checking, that readers should not expect “the whole truth from him,” and that memoirs are a form of belles-lettres in which (quoting Goethe) “reality and vision” are combined—would not have taken umbrage at this. Yet Stanislawski’s calling a comic description of a minor incident “perhaps the most evocative case of Jabotinsky’s retroactive creation of his own myth” testifies, if anything, to Jabotinsky’s overall restraint in retouching historical fact, with which he took liberties, when he did, more to deflate himself humorously than to puff himself up.3 And who is to say, for that matter, that Herzl was not unrecordedly present at that moment and did not indeed tell Bodenheimer to cut Jabotinsky short?
Herzl died of a heart attack less than a year later. By then, Jabotinsky had left Odessa a second time and was living in St. Petersburg, where he was engaged in full-time Zionist work. It was an adventure he never turned back from.