Chamber of Commerce, Odessa
Odessa has the reputation of being a very fast city, one of the most immoral communities in Europe, and the young Russians are given to gambling and dissipation of all kinds. At night the streets are brilliantly lighted, and are crowded with promenaders of both sexes. There are many cafés on the sidewalks, in the interior courts of the business section, and in the parks and squares. All night the air is filled with music and laughter, and pleasure-seekers turn night into day. One is inclined to wonder when the crowd of men he sees in the cafés and theatres attend to their business, but when the shops, offices, and banks open in the morning at ten o’clock there seems to be no lack of customers and clerks, and everybody is on the rush.
The Exchange, a handsome building of Oriental architecture, is the centre of activity. The trading takes place in a splendid hall on lines similar to those of the board of trade at Chicago. The remainder of the building is devoted to sample rooms, committee rooms, reading rooms, and other purposes.
As grain is the principal staple of southern Russia, and Odessa is the chief market, all business movements centre around the board of trade. Business is very dull just now; there have been several bad crops; fourteen of the largest flour mills in the city have been closed down for want of wheat to grind, and that has thrown a large number of people out of employment, as well as reduced the volume of business. But this year’s crop is a record breaker and prosperity is expected soon again.
There are more than 200,000 Jews in Odessa—exceeding one third of the entire population—and, as everywhere else, they control the banking, the manufacturing, the export trade, the milling, the wholesale and retail mercantile establishments, and practically everything of an industrial and commercial enterprise. And, naturally, they are hated by the Russians and envied for their success and prosperity. The prejudice against the Jewish population elsewhere as well as here is due to economic rather than religious reasons—simply because they are getting richer and more prosperous, while the Russians are losing ground in all the professions and occupations. They have wasted their capital in bad investments and dissipations and extravagance, and are forced to mortgage their property to the Jews to keep up appearances.
In the meantime the Jews have been securing control of all the profitable enterprises and lines of business in Odessa. Their sons show the same earnestness and zeal in the university that they show in the counting-room. Therefore they make the best doctors and lawyers and engineers, and their services are in demand, while the Russian members of the professions are idly waiting for business. A Russian will employ a Jewish lawyer or doctor or engineer in preference to one of his own race, not because he loves the Jew or desires to encourage him, but simply because he needs him, and recognizes his superiority, his shrewdness, and his success.
The same is true among the working classes. The Russians labourer spends his wages for vodka. The Jew puts his in the savings bank. The Russian labourer never saves anything. The Jew is economical and abstemious, his family live on bread and vegetables, and by keeping good habits they grow strong, while the Russian grows weak. While the proud young Russian is carousing in the cafés chantant, and losing his money in gambling halls, the Jewish young man is busy with his books.
This difference in habits produces the results which exasperate the Russian and drive him to the persecution of his rivals. He considers it an insult to himself and his race whenever he hears of a brilliant achievement or instance of prosperity among the Jews, and the spirit of envy and jealousy so aroused is the cause of persecution.
Odessa is a fine city, one of the finest in Europe, and its proud people are in the habit of comparing it with Paris, Vienna, and Berlin. The streets are wide and well paved and most of them are shaded with double columns of trees. There is no residence section, however, as in many other cities, for everybody lives in an apartment-house, with the lower floor occupied by shops and the upper floors for lodgings and offices. Most people live with their business. You will find a hardware shop, a dairy, a grocery on the ground floor of your dwelling, insurance offices and lawyers scattered through the upper floors, with the households of the tenants in the adjoining rooms. There is no home life, almost everybody lunches and dines at a restaurant, and in the summer months they are mostly on the street. In the winter the weather is very cold. In October house-keepers close the double windows and stop the leaks with cotton batting and padding made for that purpose. This keeps out every particle of fresh air until spring. I have never found a people so afraid of fresh air as the Russians, and that antipathy is very annoying to American and English people who are compelled to occupy the same compartments in railway trains and the same dining and drawing rooms in the hotels.