The Two Sides of the Moon: Ethnic Clashes and Tolerance in a Cosmopolitan City

chapter 5 The Two Sides of the Moon: Ethnic Clashes and Tolerance in a Cosmopolitan City

This chapter examines the inter-ethnic relations through the prism of co- existence and ethnic clashes mainly in the second, imperial phase of the city (1857–1905). This particular period of time was marked by the pogroms that upset the delicate balance of the city, but also by nationalistic and socialist movements as well as political violence that was unrelated to ethnic differences. Florence Weinberg was born in Odessa in 1901. She came from a well-to- do Jewish family and was married to a Jewish doctor who held a government position. After migrating to the us in 1923, she engaged in charity work and was a member of the National Council of Jewish Women. In an interview she gave for the archives of Jewish oral history, she described the family residence in Odessa at the beginning of the 20th century as follows:

We lived in the area where the university is, you know, and schools and all that. It was a very nice area. Our owner of the building was a Jew and there were 75 percent Jews. It was a nice building, beautiful apartments but the gentile people that lived in that building were very friendly with the Jewish people and when there was a pogrom, they used to hide and help the Jewish people. The gentiles who lived in the building were not anti-Semitic.1

She went to a private Russian gymnasium for girls and had very close relation- ships with her gentile friends:

I was with them like that, very close and they loved me and they loved us, all the Jewish girls, we were very good friends. [We didn’t feel no anti- Semitism.] All the holidays I would spend with them and Jewish holidays they would spend with us, it was a very nice relationship at that time…. My girlfriends used to sleep in my house and when we were preparing

1 New York Public Library, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection. Transcript of an interview with Florence Weinberg conducted by Clifford Chanin, November 17 and November 21, 1977, 3–4.

for the examination, sometimes I would stay over there because in the evening I would not go home by myself.2

Food and the ceremonies surrounding it left indelible memories of Jewish family life. “In the Pesach [Passover] we would invite Jewish boys who were from small towns that were not able to go home for Seders [the ritual meal of Passover].”3 The parents were not strictly observant. They spoke Russian to their children but the couple would speak Yiddish when they wished not to be understood. The family was not socially isolated. It was exposed to the prac- tices and cultural habits of its Christian neighbours and was familiar with the exchange of gifts on Christian religious holidays. The family was tolerant of Jews who converted to Christianity and of religious dissimulation in order to facilitate one’s social mobility in the tsarist regime. The parents did not object to the fact that their son had a friendship with the son of a family that had converted. For Florence, friendly relations among people of different religions was based on mutual understanding, respect for diversity and the building of a new environment of co-existence based on cultural acceptance.

I’ll tell you something, his mother never went to church, but they ob- served Russian holidays. For instance, like we have Passover, they have Easter you know. So for Easter the Russian people bake some kind of a special cake, we call it here “babka”, but it’s a very high coffee cake, very rich, and his mother always sent us a very big cake for their holiday. When it was Purim,4 my mother would send his mother Hamantashen,5 and fladin6 and all the things that go with it, because she wasn’t Jewish, I mean, but she knew about Jewish holidays and she would enjoy it. It was a friendly relationship.7

1 Co-existence and Tolerance in the Upper Classes

The “new environment” created by a certain laxity of religious restrictions and the “social intermingling” that prevailed in the upper class regardless of

2 Interview with Florence Weinberg, 10. 3 Interview with Florence Weinberg, 7–8. 4 Purim is a festival celebrating the survival of Jewish people, while living in Persia. www. jewishvirtuallibrary.org/purim (accessed 2 February 2015) 5 A hamantash is a small triangular cookie, usually eaten on Purim. 6 A multi-layer pastry, stuffed with jam, nuts, and coconut. 7 Interview with Florence Weinberg, 33–34.