7:15 A.M.<\/strong> Istanbul. A bleary departure from the Pera Palace Hotel<\/a> after three nights of its punctiliously restored Orient Express\u2013era fineries. We own a sixth-floor walk-up nearby in Cihangir (an arty neighborhood dear to Orhan Pamuk), but my girlfriend Anya decided to rent it out. So we\u2019ve stayed in a \u201cGreta Garbo\u201d suite here, with photos of GG on the wall and a view not of the Golden Horn but of a minor soccer stadium named for Tayyip Erdogan, the moderate Islamist prime minister, a former semipro football player from the poor neighborhood close by. \u201cFootballer\u201d on a politician\u2019s CV is not to be slighted in soccer-mad Turkey. Hakan S\u00fck\u00fcr, the country\u2019s iconic player, now retired, will run on Ergodan\u2019s party ticket in the June elections.<\/p>\n Last night, d\u00f6ner and leg of lamb for au revoir dinner at Beyti<\/a>, a sprawling palace of meat. Anya recounted dining beside Ralph Fiennes the night before. The ex\u2013investment banker now at our table (“We like you anyway,” I told him, grinning hostilely) told a cute story about Ralph\u2019s cousin Ranulph Fiennes, the preposterously adventurous explorer. Some financial analysts were inspecting a Tesco supermarket in London, and in the main subzero storage freezer they came across a tent. Ranulph Feinnes was staying in it, prepping for the Antarctic. \u201cAny pictures of Garbo?\u201d I asked, to mostly puzzlement.<\/p>\n Pamuk\u2019s name came up, with the inevitable Istanbul confidence-sharing about how admirable a writer he is, but such a tedious read.<\/p>\n 7:40 A.M.<\/strong> Our cab to the airport has functioning seat belts, a rarity in Istanbul\u2019s rocketing traffic. We\u2019re en route between pearls: from the Pearl of Istanbul\u2014the Pera Palace\u2014to the Pearl of the Black Sea\u2014Odessa. In the new book Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams<\/em><\/a> by Charles King, which I\u2019ve been studying for the trip, the following observation: \u201cAs the saying went, cheats learned their profession in Pera … but practiced it in Odessa.\u201d<\/p>\n 4:00 P.M.<\/strong> Odessa, Ukraine. We\u2019ve settled into our grandly high-ceilinged\u2014if sparsely furnished\u2014rental in a pleasantly grubby courtyard on the main drag, Deribasovskaya. The Pearl of the Black Sea is famous for its courtyards. The surgarplum neobaroque Viennese State Opera house rises bang around the corner. Odessa, sprucing up after a rough post-Soviet transition, was considered the Paris of Russia in the late nineteenth century, a gush of Europe on the steppes, with its wide avenues and candy-colored neoclassical edifices. It was a tremendous wellhead of Russian culture and humor, renowned for its Jewish character. (It was the largest city in the old Pale of Settlement.) Anya, a Moscow-born food critic, is doing a long overdue piece on the restaurants. My interests: Isaac Babel, an early writer-hero of mine; the Potemkin Steps and their movie; and Vladimir Jabotinsky, the fervent father of ultranationalist Revisionist Zionism, who was a son of Odessa, too, so I\u2019ve learned.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve developed a sudden, strange fascination with Jabotinsky. His politics and ongoing political legacy are anathema to me. I\u2019m Jewish save for a Catholic paternal grandfather, but I was raised and remain antireligious (across the board). I\u2019m beyond the Woody Allen position, as I don\u2019t really self-identify as a Jew. My Berlin-born, assimilated father lived in Palestine in exile from the early thirties until it became Israel. But he was a vocal anti-Zionist, publishing a magazine of commentary that was put of out business by a right-wing bomb. My mother worked as a secretary at the King David Hotel; she was sneaking a day at the beach when it was blown up.<\/p>\n But Jabotinsky possesses a lurid, arty aura, I find, like Mussolini (whom he admired early on) or perhaps d’Annunzio. He was a novelist, journalist, poet. That he and the Cossack-accompanying Red, Babel, were both Jews from Odessa I find a fabulous historical irony.<\/p>\n 11:00 A.M.<\/strong> At the Bristol Hotel, its grand rose-colored edifice spankingly refurbished, a theme is born: no photographs allowed. Another theme: the crudely tie-and-jacketed muscle-bound goon stationed \u201curbanely\u201d by the front desk.<\/p>\n 1:00 P.M.<\/strong> Anya takes my picture by the plaque on the former Babel family residence on Rishelyevskaya Street, where Babel lived as a teen. I clutch in hand the paperback of his collected stories in Walter Morison\u2019s\u00a0translation<\/a> that I stole from the Swarthmore College bookstore as a teenager decades ago … and that I finally read, thunderstruck, after graduating.<\/p>\n 9:00 P.M.<\/strong> Dinner with Savva, the owner of Dacha<\/a> restaurant, a nobleman\u2019s neoclassic dacha breezily restored in buttery yellow and white on the old outskirts of town. It\u2019s part of Savva\u2019s savvy-charming group of eateries. Ukrainian dumplings and honey-and-red-pepper vodka; nostalgic Soviet tunes on the sound system. Beloved Stalinist jazzman and crooner Leonid Utyosov hailed from Odessa. Russia\u2019s most haunting song from WWII, \u201cDark Night,\u201d was sung by the archetypal Odessan movie character, played by Mark Bernes<\/a> (who somehow wasn\u2019t from Odessa himself). Savva laughs at how the ex-Odessites in Brighton Beach\u2014Brooklyn\u2019s \u201cLittle Odessa\u201d\u2014are lost in a time warp. They imagine the Odessa just as they left it. \u201cThey scratch out a life on welfare and feel superior,\u201d he says. \u201cWhile I just got back from two weeks vacation in the Piedmont.\u201d<\/p>\n 11:30 A.M.<\/strong> Anya\u2019s elderly mom, Larisa, has arrived. Born in Odessa, she lives near us in Jackson Heights, Queens. As we plod the seaside promenade toward the mid-nineteenth-century pile of Londonskaya Hotel, I ask if she\u2019s stirred, being back. \u201cNot at all,\u201d she snorts. She hated every minute in the USSR. Anya spent Brezhnevian childhood summers here and loved it.<\/p>\n It\u2019s Palm Sunday. Instead of palm fronds, people carry little sprays of pussy willows.<\/p>\n 12:15 P.M.<\/strong> At the Londonskaya. Eisenstein, all of twenty-seven years old then, stayed with his crew in these vast-ceiling rooms while filming Battleship Potemkin<\/em>:<\/p>\n \u201cCan I take photographs?\u201d On the second floor I sneak snaps of the displays of memorabilia of Eisenstein, Mayakovsky (he\u2019d read his poems aloud here), Mastroianni, Bernhardt\u2014etc, etc. (What, Hemingway didn\u2019t stay here?) I mull explaining the concept of \u201ctourism\u201d to the post-Soviet hotel staff.<\/p>\n 6:00 P.M.<\/strong> Yevgeny Golubovsky, dean of local cultural journalists and vice president of the culture-boosting World Odessit Club<\/a>, eeriely resembles Miles Malleson, the jowly old English comic actor in The Thief of Bagdad<\/em> and A Christmas Carol<\/em>. In his apartment thick with brave but humdrum \u201cmodernism\u201d from the Soviet sixties and seventies, he describes the statue of Babel finally to go up, in July, in a playground across Rishelyevskaya from the Babel residence. Babel will be gazing at his old home. His surviving daughter Lydia will attend the dedication. Golubovsky has supplied the intro to a special edition of Red Cavalry and Red Cavalry Diaries which the World Odessit Club will shortly publish, with illustrations by the venerable Yefim Ladyzhensky<\/a>.<\/p>\n I show Evgeny Mikhailovich my shoplifted paperback from college. He grins, grins wider when I tell him how my younger brother Palle loves Babel, too, so much that when teaching philosphy in Madison, he himself gave a class on Babel because the university didn\u2019t provide any. I make a joke about searching in vain for the house where Mark Bernes, that arch movie-Odessite, was born. Golubovsky shows us a still from a film where Joseph Brodsky, just back from exile, played a WW2 soldier defending Odessa. Then authorities discovered his presence and most of his scenes had to be reshot.<\/p>\n 11:30 P.M.<\/strong> Palle e-mails back his delight and surprise that they\u2019d actually known of his old Babel class in Odessa!! I have to explain that he misunderstood my e-mail. He has just published a new critical biography of Simone Weil<\/a> (speaking of non-Jabotinskian) and is on a hairtrigger for reviews coming out. Anya demands I knock off the lame Mark Bernes jokes (she has to translate them). And quit my endless crooning of the first two words of the \u201cDark Night\u201d song on the street. Anya\u2019s mom pleads with me to stop going on about Jabotinsky.<\/p>\n Barry Yourgrau<\/a> is author of <\/em>Nastybook and<\/em> The Sadness of Sex, in the movie version of which he starred. Check back tomorrow for the second installment of his culture diary. On May 19, in London, Yourgrau will be reading<\/a> with Dan Rhodes at Idler Academy.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" DAY ONE 7:15 A.M. Istanbul. A bleary departure from the Pera Palace Hotel after three nights of its punctiliously restored Orient Express\u2013era fineries. We own a sixth-floor walk-up nearby in Cihangir (an arty neighborhood dear to Orhan Pamuk), but my girlfriend Anya decided to rent it out. So we\u2019ve stayed in a \u201cGreta Garbo\u201d suite […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":169,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[2077,2267,1617,2265,2264,2263,123,2266],"class_list":["post-15249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-culture-diaries","tag-barry-yourgrau","tag-black-sea","tag-culture-diary","tag-isaac-babel","tag-istabul","tag-odessa","tag-travel","tag-vladimir-jabotinsky"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDAY TWO<\/h3>\n
DAY THREE<\/h3>\n
\n\u201cNyet<\/em>.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n