394
PARTISAN REVIEW
Motherland from the sharp traders of the Middle East and Europe?
Czar Alexander I scouted abroad and found that Armand-Emmanuel
de Plessis , Duc de Richelieu, a collateral descendant of the Great
Cardinal, was unemployed. In 1803 the Duc accepted a position as
Governor of Odessa. He did not have much business or governing
experience, but he had lived through the Estates General, the storm–
ing of the Bastille, the fever of the Jacobins, the bad manners of the
stunted corporal who so much liked to march that he had turned
the whole continent into a parade ground. Richelieu, in short, knew
the middle classes. As a governor of Odessa interested in commercial
development, he welcomed Jews. Whatever their faults, the People
of the Book were literate and energetic. They understood money.
Certainly they were better than Corsicans and attorneys.
By the mid-nineteenth century Odessa was, as historians say,
flourishing. It was a beautiful city, one that looked more European
than Russian. That was the comment German visitors always made
when they came to sit in the warm mud baths of the seashore, and
Russians were inclined to believe them. Richelieu's body had de–
parted, but since 1826 an enormous statue of the Duc had gazed
from the central square down a broad flight of steps that led to the
bay. So smooth, so finished, so well-proportioned were these twelve
flights that a baby carriage might roll sweetly down all 240 steps
without ever tilting over or tumbling a squalling inhabitant onto the
pavement. More than two hundred thousand residents enjoyed the
broad, tree-lined streets, leafy parks, Italian-style mansions and ele–
gant store fronts of Odessa's central area, though a goodly number of
them had to return at night to wooden hovels packed into ravines
that sliced from the plateau to the sea.
Close to one-third of these residents were Jews, and in this city
born of an Enlightened sovereign, they too could dress in finery and
stroll slowly along Nikolai Prospekt, looking down to the huge grana–
ries and warehouses of the waterfront and to a harbor crowded with
the sails and smokestacks of foreign ships. Odessa was prosperous
and well connected to the world beyond Russia's borders. It was far,
far removed from any
shtetl.
Here was no surrounding population of
muhjiks,
but an international community of Greeks, Serbs, Roma–
nians, Bulgarians, Armenians, Italians, and even French and Ger–
mans. Odessa bore all the hallmarks of civilization - a university, an
active scientific society, a public library . Is it any wonder that Jews
here began to shave their beards, that some became lax about practic-
