The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [134]
We are almost out the door and into the dusty yard when I double back. I am wrong. I am back up the staircase and I put my hand on the cast-iron balustrade, each column topped with a blackened ear of wheat of the Efrussi, the wheat from the granary of the black soil of the Ukraine that made them rich. And while my brother calls up, I go and stand next to a window and look out across the Promenade through the double avenue of chestnut trees, the dusty paths and the benches to the Black Sea.
The Efrussi boys are still here.
Some traces are fugitive. The Efrussi live in the stories of Isaac Babel, the Jewish chronicler of downtown life, the gangs of the slums. An Efrussi bribes his way into the gymnasium ahead of an abler, poorer student. They are in the Yiddish tales of Sholem Aleichem. A poor man from the shtetl treks to Odessa to beg for help from Efrussi the banker. And the banker refuses. There is a Yiddish saying, lebn vi Got in Odes – ‘to live like God in Odessa’ – and the Efrussi live like gods on their Zionstrasse.
Some traces are archival. Below the Opera is the Angliisky Klub, the English Club where Charles’s father Leon was elected ‘by acclamation’ to be the first Jewish member, a move so radical and unexpected that it receives a mention in the newspaper. This is the place on the Boulevard where an aggrieved merchant pulled a revolver on Ignace outside his house, and was overpowered by passers-by. A gift of 500 roubles contributes to the statue of the governor whose great palace stands beyond the Potemkin steps. Somewhere down that street between the catalpa trees is where the disinherited Stefan, banished from Vienna, poorer by the month, lodged with his new wife, his father’s mistress.
Some traces are more concrete. After one of the pogroms the brothers founded an Efrussi orphanage. There is the Efrussi School for Jewish children, endowed by Ignace in honour of his father, the patriarch, and supported over thirty years by new endowments from Charles and Jules and Viktor. It is still there on the edge of a dusty park with feral dogs and ripped-up benches, two low buildings slung together alongside the tram line. In 1892 the school reports the receipt of 1,200 roubles donated by the Efrussi brothers. The school authorities have bought from St Petersburg an astrolabe, a menzula, a globe, a steel knife for cutting glass, a skeleton and a demountable model of an eye. In an Odessan bookshop they have spent 533 roubles and sixty-four kopeks and bought 280 volumes by Beecher Stowe, Swift, Tolstoy, Cowper, Thackeray and Scott. With the remainder there is money to purchase coats, blouses and trousers for twenty-five poor Jewish boys, so that they can read Ivanhoe or Vanity Fair without shivering, covered up from the Odessan dust.
The dust in Paris on the rue Monceau, the dust in Vienna as they build the Ringstrasse: nothing compares to this dust. ‘The dust lies like a universal shroud of some two or three inches thick,’ writes Shirley Brooks in The Russians of the South in 1854. ‘The slightest breeze flings it over the town in clouds, the lightest footstep sends it flying high in dense heaps. When I tell you that hundreds of the carriages driven at high speed . . . are perpetually racing about, and that the sea breezes are as perpetually rushing through the streets, the statement that Odessa lives in a cloud is no figure of speech.’ It was a city on the make: ‘a stirring, business-look about the streets and the stores; fast walkers; a familiar new look about the houses and everything, yes, and a driving and smothering dust . . .’ according to Mark Twain. It makes sense to me, suddenly, that the Efrussi children grow up with dust.
Thomas and I arrange to meet Sasha, a small dapper academic in his seventies. On the corner he bumps into an old friend, a professor of comparative literature, so we all stroll up to the school together, Tom and Sasha talking in Russian and the professor and I talking in English about the International Shakespearian Institute. When we get to the school the