The one style that probably did influence everyday life in the early 1900s was Art Nouveau, which permeated design on every level, from architecture to furniture, wallpaper, illustration, jewellery, advertisements, posters, postcards, shop signs and textiles. There is no one who would not have seen posters on the street, shop signs, book illustration and postcards with the typical swirling patterns of art nouveau, and many household items would have been influenced to some extent.
Popular artistic styles like the swirling figures and lettering of art nouveau would only have touched people’s lives minimally in their own homes, through the covers of books or magazines, a vase, or decorated tin.
At the same time, an explosion into abstraction in art was beginning in the early 1900s, slowly in Germany and France, following the lead in Art Nouveau with artists like Klimt and Kandinsky, who went back and forth from Germany to Russia. At first, abstraction was brought into design, such as in fabrics, furniture and architecture, but painting soon followed with an incredible liveliness.
In early 1900s Russia, there was the realist style of painting of Repin, the satirical art of political posters and newspapers, and an Impressionism which moved close to abstraction at times. Artists of different styles responded to the events of 1905, especially the political graphic artists, but others as well.
Isaac Brodsky was from Odessa. My first impression of this painting of his mother and sister was that the girl seemed frightened and the two were clutching each other. This might be an over interpretation.
The earliest purely abstract art began with Malevich in Russia in 1912, inspired by a movement called suprematism in avant-garde poetry and modernist literature.
This movement rejected that art needed to come from the natural or real world but could be centred solely on itself. Kandinsky was originally part of this movement but was later rejected because of his mysticism, seeing other meanings behind his purely abstract forms. The later Russian movement, constructivism, which grew up after the revolution, was inspired by Italian futurism and other movements that developed as artists watched the destruction and mechanisation of life during World War I. It developed through painting, sculpture, graphic design, textiles, theatre design and architecture.
Peresyp (Пересып) was one of the later areas of the city to be attacked in the pogrom as it is separated from the rest of the city by a ravine, and was not on the route of the marchers. It is a predominantly working class area and only 20% of the population was Jewish, compared with 50% in some other areas. Even though it runs along the coast, it was a mostly industrial area which does not feature much in Odessa history, as it does not compare with either the wealthy centre or colourful Moldavanka. Its own stories must lie hidden in the walls of the old buildings still lining the main streets and small lanes. The Jews in Peresyp were shopkeepers as well as skilled artisans, factory workers and casual labourers on the nearby docks. Several factories related to the grain trade, such as flour mills , as grain was brought from the interior to the port at Odessa to be shipped all over the world. As much of the grain throughout the 19th century was brought to the docks by oxen dragging heavy wooden carts over the unmade roads, there were also tanneries, slaughter houses and factories for meat preservation and tallow making, as it was not worth the cost and effort to take all the oxen and carts back.
Many Jews took on the laborious business of visiting farms throughout the Ukraine and coordinating the delivery of grain to Odessa, a process that lasted from May to September. Eventually the transport was taken over by rail.
Probably quite a few of the pogrom hooligans were the casual dockworkers who lived around Peresyp and did not want to rampage in their own area, leaving it to others to finally march down the streets causing destruction. None of the Russian reports focuses on or even mentions the streets attacked or the numbers of people killed in Peresyp.
However, on the website Museum of Family History (http://www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/ce/odessa/pogrom-unionmembers-A-G.htm) there is a letter written by Jacob Tenenholz to the Committee of the Jewish Colonization Association in Paris from a group of about 100 Jewish Peresyp union-members and heads of households asking for help to leave Russia after the pogrom. The letter is written from the address 17 Bozhakina St. Peresyp is long and narrow, running along the coast, and originally had four main parallel streets, one of them the coast road, and the third one being Bozhakina.
Now the coast road is broken up and two of the parallel roads make up the carriageways of the M14. Many road names have changed. If the second carriageway was the old Bozhakina St, then this would have been the house where Jacob Tenenholz lived and possibly one of the streets affected by the pogrom.
Two other family names were in the pogrom records and in the 1904-5 directory owning property in Peresyp, Goliak and Fefer, (Голяк и Фефер) although they owned property in several areas. Duvid Faivelev-Leibov was a second guild grain merchant who owned property in the centre and in Peresyp, one at 160 Bozhakina St, but the 22-year-old who died in the pogrom, Abram-Lazar Leibov may not have been related. G. Goliak owned property on the outskirts of Peresyp, at Slobodka Baltovka on Baltskaya, but the pogrom victim was 36-year-old Luzer Duvidovich, and there was a D Goliak who owned a house in Moldavanka at 39 Vinogradnaya and was possibly the father of Luzer, as mentioned earlier (The pogrom at Moldavanka).
Google streetview does not cover Slobodka Baltovka or Baltskaya, which lie across the railroad line from the main running along the coast. While trying to position the marker to see if it was possible to get a view across the railway, I accidentally found myself on a little lane going down to the sea, nearby but in the other direction from Baltskaya. It seemed a typical little Peresyp lane.
Zhakar Movsheve MIKHELOVSKII at 29 Malia Arnautskaia Street. The police took ten people into custody.
None of the actual people under police surveillance were in the pogrom death records, either because they were in hiding or had left Odessa by then, but maybe some of the victims were related in some way to those who were wanted by the police. Because they were not given full rights as citizens, there were many anti-czarist Jews active in politics who might have been targeted by the police and by the more traditional conservative workers.
There was one Rabinovich on the surveillance list, Viktor Kaim Yankel, age 23, about whom is written: registered in Ukmerge JC; born in Shklov; finished Odessa Realschule; exiled to Siberia for surveillance for 4 years; armed resistance to the authorities in Iakutsk; was arested and sentenced to hard labor (“katorga”); escaped from Aleksandrovsk prison in 1905.
The first entry on the left reads: Inquiry into the charge against V Kh Ia Rabinovich, S M Levin and others for producing hectograph proclamations for the RSDWP (Russian Socialist Democratic Workers Party) 11 Oct 1904-19 Jan 1905.
Hectographs were occasionally used by artists, especially the Russian futurists and German Expressionists, who experimented with printing methods and making books. The result was a beautiful, faded mimeograph or carbon copy.
If it had been possible for anyone to look at this with a sober eye, at this group of young people scurrying about in the half-darkness around a miserable hectograph, what a sorry, fantastic thing it would have seemed to imagine that they could, in this way, overthrow a mighty state that was centuries old. And yet this sorry fantasy became a reality within a single generation; and only eight years separated those nights from 1905, and not quite 20 from 1917.
After the diversion with the hectograph, I began to delve into the family names that were on the Peresyp letter and the police surveillance list.