In Search of Humor: Myth and Memory in Modern Odessa

"People will claim that what I am saying smacks of tall tales. Well, I assure you that these are not tall tales! There is much more than meets the eye. Dark-haired Odessans simply bring with them a little lightness and sunshine…Well, fine. So I am biased, I admit it. Maybe I am extremely biased, but parole d’honneur, there is something to this place!"
--Isaac Babel

Background:

Amidst the oppressive shroud of anti-Semitism, the crowded, gritty bustle of Jewish shtetl neighborhoods, and the comfortless reality of deficits and crime, Odessa emerged as the proverbial "pearl of the Black Sea." This southern hub of commerce, unimpressive in its size and political stature, became the unlikely wellspring of the thinkers and writers who defined a generation of Russian Jews and bequeathed the rich intellectual and cultural legacy of the Diaspora.

The chaotic jumble of diverse voices and foreign tongues that resonated in the streets of this cosmopolitan port city made Odessa an incarnation of the biblical Tower of Babel. In the Odessan tradition of felicitous irony it is perhaps fitting, then, that the singular figure who ascended to embody and immortalize the legendary wit of Odessa was none other than Isaac Babel. Building on the homespun satires of Sholem Aleichem, Babel both distilled and disseminated the consciously wry and self-deprecating wit that typified the celebrated Odessan sensibility.

A noteworthy peculiarity of this sensibility lies in the extent to which it was informed by the worldview of a minority—a Jewish author writing about Jewish culture from the disenfranchised margins of Odessan society. Sardonic, bantam humor was inadvertently fostered by the undertow of political and religious repression during the tumultuous transition of the '920s from tsarist to soviet rule, and proved pivotal in sustaining the psychological and cultural vitality of Jewish Odessans. Quips like "if you want to eat, know how to sell the sleeves of a vest" allowed Jews to momentarily slip out of their blighted existence, to defiantly wink at the "tsuris" (troubles) that should have made them weep. Babel's stories so faithfully apprehended this distinctively Jewish-Odessan humor and bristled with such irresistible verve that even Russian gentiles came to deploy Babelian witticisms and, to this day, can recite whole passages from the "Odessa Stories."

Though the wit of Babel and his contemporaries is now a relic from a bygone era—when anxieties inherent to the "civilizing process" ['] and confrontations with modernity produced a unique comedic ethos—humor continues to permeate and reinforce the identity of modern Odessa. This persistent cultural identification with Odessa's comedic heritage, and the fierce pride that revolves around it, is the focus of our intended research. We are fascinated by Odessan humor and how it exists as a living concept in the imaginations of different social groups today. In our explorations of the Jewish underpinning of Odessan culture, we hypothesize to find that the once authentic and bold humor subsists today largely as a vestige of the past golden age of literature and intellect.

Review of Literature:

In the early '970s, Slavic studies scholar Maurice Friedberg conducted interviews with Odessan émigrés and produced what remains the only sociological study of Odessans [2]. Friedberg's intent was to paint a portrait of life in the city and though he was conscious of the "genuine affection and nostalgia so often found in the accounts" [3] he heard, he did not attempt to probe the role of myth as a confounding variable in assessing the Odessan memory. Though Friedberg titled his book after Babel's renowned short story, "How Things Were Done In Odessa," he acknowledges but does not investigate humor as a foundational component of Odessan identity. In the past thirty years the city's cultural landscape has experienced drastic alterations: the mass exodus of Jews and the abrupt dissolution of communism. The resulting political relaxation has opened up new possibilities for studying within the actual borders of the once-restricted eastern bloc, and for filling the gap in scholarship since the demographic shift of a diminished Jewish presence.

Historians Steven Zipperstein and Patricia Herlihy have written detailed accounts of Odessan Jewry and Odessan general history, respectively. While both scholars mention the sunny image of Odessa that persisted even after the golden age of the early '900's, their major works extend no further than the Russian Revolution of '9'7 [4], and therefore cannot shed light on how Odessa's past continues to be refracted through the present imagination. As historians of Odessa it is inevitable that Herlihy and Zipperstein encounter the vital cultural aspect of Odessan wit, but they use the writings of literary humorists as a historical source, a kind of textual snapshot of a bygone era. Rather than analyzing how writers such as Babel and Aleichem perceived the people of Odessa, we propose to capture the crux of Odessan identity by exploring how the people of Odessa perceived their literary humorists. By inverting traditional historical methodology and by focusing on Odessans' connection to humor, we face the prospect of understanding in a modern context how "the more [Odessa] deteriorated, the more she adorned and embellished herself" [5] with fantasies of her own uniqueness and grandeur. We are interested in studying Odessan humor not as a historically interred artifact but as a breathing entity that intimately informs Jewish and Russian identity today. To do so requires not only an objective, scholarly knowledge of the city's past, but also familiarity with the wistful, folkloric impressions and ornate memories of Odessa that individuals continue to cultivate and harbor.

Theorizing the commodification of culture, performance and Hebrew studies scholar Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett describes issues surrounding the "agency of display" in museums, fairs, and tourist attractions [6]. For Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, "heritage is not lost and found, stolen and reclaimed…Rather, the heritage industry is a new mode of cultural production and it produces something new" [7]. Her conception of heritage as an "industry" will be a useful to our analysis of the tangible exponents of Odessan humor in monuments, souvenirs, museums, plaques, and billboards. However, the scope of our research requires a move beyond the formal production of cultural legacy through artifacts and pandering to tourism, and necessitates an interpretation of heritage as it exists informally in the minds of native Odessans.

In his book "Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor in Literature," Paul Lewis says that the contemporary "study of humor in literature continues to be shaped by two dated and, therefore, limiting methodologies" [8]. The first methodology is widely advocated by literary critics, who use universalist theories of humor—Freud’s psychoanalytic explanation of jokes as escaped expressions of unconscious impulses [9], Bergson's notion of the mechanical as humorous and laughter as the corrective force ['0], Schopenhauer's and Kant's incongruity theories in which the violation of perception or expectation is funny [''], Hobbes's premise of sudden glory where laughter is a function of superiority ['2], and Bakhtin's idea that hegemony is subverted by the comedy of carnival and chaos ['3]—to analyze comedic instances within literature. The second methodology, espoused by social scientists and psychologists, rejects the belief that derivations of humor are universal and focuses on empirical research and case studies to understand humor in a specific, individual context. Because of the scholarly chasm between these two research methods, Lewis claims that humor research today is fundamentally flawed and calls for a comprehensive approach that incorporates both literary criticism and social science. In our research we plan to bridge the gap between these two opposing disciplines, comparing literary criticism of Jewish-Odessan humor with our own data collected from fieldwork and interviews to arrive at a more complete understanding of the social function of Odessan humor.

Criticism of Odessan literary humorists abounds, with the majority capitalizing on the rich theories of Jewish wit ['4]. Odessa has historically been a haven for Russian Jews and thus many scholars perceive Jewish identity as a latent force at the origin of Odessan humor. Many academics find an avowal of the framework of Jewish wit in Odessan fictional heroes, particularly in Sholem Aleichem's milkman Tevye, a wry self-deprecating protagonist who sardonically shrugs his shoulders at his blighted existence and life's cruel twists of fate ['5]. It is paradoxical that out of the dismal circumstances of economic depression, pogroms, and political disenfranchisement emerged a "most richly distinctive humor" in Jewish Eastern Europe ['6]. Two different theoretical principles offer explanations for the creation and proliferation of the comedic Jewish sensibility fathered by Aleichem: Norbert Elias's civilizing process and the general theory of subculture. Elias's description of civilization and the development of the modern bourgeois world ['7] can be used to supply an understanding of Jewish humor—as Jews assimilated into the dominant Western culture, laughter soothed the embarrassment of missteps and the trials of cultural transition. At the same time that the marginalized community was learning to make light of the adversity of attempting to enter a governing culture, they nevertheless reveled in their distance as a subculture by ridiculing the values of the majority ethos. Though these theories are helpful in understanding the wellspring of Jewish wit, we are in search of cultural significance of humor for Jews and non-Jews in contemporary Odessa. In analyzing the humor of today's Odessa it would be facile to apply these theories, which are more appropriate to describe the pre-modern era, to the vastly changed landscape of the city. Despite drastic political and cultural shifts such as the mass departure of Jewish intellectuals, the political upheavals of a sloppy democratic election, and large-scale and zealous privatization, Odessans' pride in and identification with the humorists of the early twentieth century remain steadfastly unchanged. We propose to perform an inquiry into Odessan humor that will delve beyond theories of its creation and explore the reasons behind its perpetuation and its inflated vision as a primary cultural cachet of Odessa.

Of the theories of Russian humor that do not concentrate on the Jewish aspect, Slavic studies scholar Lesley Milne's interpretation is the most substantial and provocative. Contrasting Gogolian tradition of "laughter through tears" with Rabelaisian variety of hearty belly laughter, Milne argues that "Ilf and Petrov created a new category of literary laughter for the Russian tradition," one that cherished humor for humor's sake and valued an "active, uncomplacent, youthful spirit" ['8]. Although her book was published just in 2003, Milne adamantly maintains an almost purely formalist treatment, a kind of pedantic approach that does not allow for common perspectives of how individuals, past or present, find meaning in humorists such as Ilf and Petrov in their daily lives.

In a paper presented at Harvard in March of 2005, Patricia Herlihy and Russian journalist Oleg Gubar discuss the modern state of Odessa as teetering on the brink of transformation. They discuss with considerable urgency that "steps must be taken for a makeover" ['9], and express concern that the Odessan myth stands as an obstacle to the city's regeneration. They write, "Odessits have become accustomed to the fact that nothing depends on them; they take no initiative, but treasure paperweights of mementoes and picturesque ruins" [20]. Professor of Russian and Jewish studies Alice Nakhimovsky proclaims a parallel moment of change in her 2003 essay on Mikhail Zhvanetskii, the prominent contemporary descendant of the long lineage Odessan humorists. Nakhimovsky boldly asserts that the unique cultural expression of Russian Jewry "may have reached a historical end…along with it goes an important source of Jewish ironic humor" [2']. In light of this possibility for change, now is a critical time to understand the nature of the Odessan myth as it is manifested through a comedic sensibility and preserved as an evolving reality in the minds of Odessans today. Through our project we hope to contribute to the incipient field of humor research, to converge interdisciplinary methodology in novel ways, and to identify the issues that are pertinent and significant to the present condition of Odessa.