Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams Read Free Page B

next half century, if Soviet citizens were asked to name someone who represented the city of Odessa, they would probably have named Arkady Dzyubin. Plenty of Russians today, nostalgic for the films their parents and grandparents knew, would do the same. And in thinking of Dzyubin, they automatically thought of the actor who created him.
    Mark Bernes was perfect for the part. He had a wide and open face, with the first hints of the furrows of wisdom and middle age, a Soviet version of William Holden or Humphrey Bogart, yet with the smiling eyes and subdued humor of Spencer Tracy. But Bernes was not, nor ever claimed to be, an Odessan—at least until he played one in a film. He was born in September of 1911 in a small town near Chernigov, in north-central Ukraine, and grew up in the regional center of Kharkov. His family was probably of Jewish heritage—Bernes’s fans certainly assumed it—although Bernes himself preferred to speak of his roots as being in Ukraine rather than in any particular ethnic group. His father was a junk dealer and odd-jobs man. His mother was the real power in the household and managed to keep things together in tough times. Her ambition for her son was that he should become either an accountant or a violinist, but he disappointed on both fronts. He displayed an early attraction to the limelight, and even though he had no formal theatrical training, he seemed to relish the songs and folk poems that swirled around his native region. At age fifteen he saw his first theatrical production and fell in love with the stage. He took a job plastering theater notices around town and managed to secure a place as an extra in several productions. That experience took him to Moscow, and by 1930 he had landed a position in the famed Korsh Theater.
    Bernes was still relatively unknown more than a decade later when he was cast in the film role of Dzyubin. He answered an open call for auditions, and after two weeks he was called back and given news that he had earned the part. Then began what he later called a real soldier’s life. To prepare for the role, he donned a regular uniform and lived on a soldier’s rations. He visited hospitals to listen to the dialect of Odessans and pick up its pronunciations and tones—the “g” that sounds like an “h” or the upward glide at the ends of sentences, usually accompanied by shrugged shoulders and pursed lips. But it was only when he got a bad haircut from an inexperienced barber—“teased-up in a characteristically Odessan way,” as he called it—that he felt he was finally prepared to inhabit the character. 13
    Bernes had the ability to portray youthful Soviets in exactly the way they remembered themselves: struggling to build a young country and fight off an invader, but doing so with the good humor and comradeship they embraced as part of their national character. Bernes’s Odessan became a Soviet Everyman. Russians and Ukrainians found in him a jocular but courageous hero, motivated by love of country but eager for the war to end. For others, Dzyubin’s Jewish identity was unspoken but evident. “We know your kind, the Odessans,” an artilleryman in Two Warriors sneers at Dzyubin. What he really meant would have been clear to both Jewish and non-Jewish viewers. “What kind of Odessans do you mean?” Dzyubin replies, agitated and defensive. “The women and children bombed by the Germans?…Don’t mess with Odessa. There’s sorrow and blood there.” More than ever before, the qualities Odessans claimed as their own—cosmopolitanism, freedom, and resilience—were appropriated by the larger country of which they were a part. The city had once been a place of escape, exile, and adventure. Now, through the alchemy of cinema and wartime displacement, every Soviet citizen could imagine himself to be just a little bit Odessan.
    One of the film’s musical numbers, “Dark Is the Night,” is sappy and sentimental, but it struck a chord with a Soviet