Then came news that filled the refugees from the north of Russia with joy. An Allied naval squadron had arrived in Constantinople and was heading for Odessa; the French were going to land an army in the city; White army forces would gather in the resulting enclave to start a crusade against the Bolsheviks, whom the French saw as the Germans’ stepchildren and as traitors to the Allied cause. Excited crowds began to gather daily on the boulevards above Odessa’s harbor to search the horizon for the ships of their saviors. For Frederick and the other refugees, returning home now seemed just a matter of time.
On December 17, the Allied warships finally reached Odessa. After a local White unit expelled some Ukrainian troops that had briefly moved into the city, an advance guard of 1,800 Allied troops came ashore the same day. On December 18, the first waves of what would be a 70,000-man army, magnificently equipped with all the hardware of modern war—tanks, artillery, trucks, armored cars, and even airplanes—began to disembark from the transports. The enormous quantities of matériel seemed to confirm that the French and other Allies were in Odessa to stay.
People rushed out onto the streets leading to the harbor to cheer the arriving troops as saviors and liberators. After months of anxiety, the joyful unreality of the scene was magnified by the exotic appearance of the soldiers, few of whom, it turned out, actually came from mainland France. Most were from French colonies in North Africa, including black Muslims from Morocco and 30,000 Zouaves from Algeria, whose uniforms included fezzes and picturesque, baggy red pants. There was also a large contingent of tough-looking Greeks in khaki kilts and caps with long tassels.
As the Allied troops continued to pour in, they spread out from Odessa in a semicircle twenty miles long, with the Black Sea at their backs. This was the solid barrier that the French commander in chief, General Franchet d’Espèrey, who was based in Constantinople, promised would allow a White Russian army to grow.
At first, the French occupation invigorated civilian life in Odessa. More people crowded into the restaurants and theaters, there was less shooting in the center, and the speculators were busier than ever. But as the spring of 1919 approached, the situation began to deteriorate very rapidly in every conceivable way. The Bolsheviks defeated Allied forces in two major towns some seventy miles to the east, and then started to move toward Odessa itself. The Whites were unable to coordinate their recruitment efforts effectively either among themselves or with the French. By March, the food situation in Odessa had become dire, the city’s infrastructure was collapsing, and an epidemic of typhus had broken out. The high commands in Paris and Constantinople concluded that the entire Odessa adventure had been a strategic error and that they had to evacuate the city. On April 6, 1919, Frederick had to escape the Bolsheviks once again.
7: Reinvention in Constantinople
The American consulate general in Constantinople did not have the money or the inclination to provide much practical help to the refugees from Odessa after they finally disembarked on the Galata quay. Frederick initially took his family to the Pera Palace Hotel, which was one of the two best in the city. Staying there was an indulgence that he could ill afford, but it must have been an enormous relief to immerse oneself in the cleanliness and comforts of a good hotel after the filth and deprivations of Imperator Nikolay and the degrading quarantine at Kavaka.
The Pera Palace had opened in 1895 on the heights of the city’s European district as a modern residence for the passengers of the Orient Express, the fabled train that ran from London, Paris, and Venice (in reality as well as fiction and film), across all of Europe to the Sirkeci Terminal in Stambul. Other than the sultan’s Dolmabahçe Palace, the Pera Palace was the first building in Constantinople with electricity, an electric elevator, and hot running water. In its heyday before and after the Great War its famous guests included Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary; Edward VIII of the United Kingdom; Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), the founder of modern-day Turkey; Ernest Hemingway; Greta Garbo; and Agatha Christie, among many others. Lavishly decorated with stained glass, marble, and gilded plaster (recently refurbished to all its former glory), the hotel had wonderful views of the Bosporus and the Golden Horn and was the epitome of the Pera district—a cosmopolitan, Westernized island in an otherwise Turkish Muslim sea.
The Pera Palace Hotel was then one of the main centers of social and business life in Constantinople, and a crossroads for people who had either money or ideas about how to make it. Shortly after he arrived, Frederick ran into an old Moscow acquaintance, the Romanian musician Nitza Codolban, a large-nosed man with slicked-back hair, sad eyes, and a big smile. He was a virtuoso of the cimbalom, an instrument resembling a hammered dulcimer that was very popular in Gypsy music.
Codolban recalled how struck he was by Frederick’s passion and eagerness to confront the difficulties ahead: “I’m going to try something desperate,” the black man proclaimed, “and I’ve got a few ideas.”
Frederick went on to explain that he was going to start everything from zero. He described how he had overcome far bigger obstacles than the Black Sea to stop now. He also said that he liked this new city, which even reminded him a bit of Moscow.
Frederick then swore to Codolban, as he said he had already sworn to his wife, that he had had enough. No matter what happened in Constantinople, he would never leave. This is where he would die, he declared, after “conquering the Bosphorus nights,” in Codolban’s florid recollection. “And so, will you join me?” he concluded with his memorable smile.
Much impressed by Frederick’s energy, Codolban decided that he would put off leaving Constantinople and, in a reference to their shared past, agreed to work in what he assumed would be a “new Maxim,” a nightclub to be named after its famous Moscow predecessor. But Frederick was not ready to move so quickly: “Not a Maxim yet. You have to move slowly with luck,” he explained. “I’m going to start with a Stella.”
Despite the physical and cultural distance Frederick had traveled, he discovered that Pera suited him surprisingly well. All the Western embassies were located there, as were the most important businesses, banks, fashionable restaurants, bars, and shops. Many of the buildings on the main streets were half a dozen stories high, constructed of light-colored stone, and European in style. The population was mixed; in addition to Turks there were large numbers of Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and people known locally as “Levantines,” or natives of European descent. Even though spoken Turkish was unlike anything Frederick had heard before, and its written form in Arabic was unintelligible to him, the language of commerce and the second language of the city’s elites was French, which he spoke fluently. This would make life and work in Constantinople much easier.
Frederick also soon noticed some similarities between Constantinople and Moscow because of how both straddled East and West, the old and the new. Despite its European traits and cosmopolitan character, prerevolutionary Moscow often struck visitors as having an Oriental cast due to the unfamiliar architecture of its numerous churches and the traditional garb worn by peasants, priests, and other exotic types. Similarly, in Constantinople the shop signs in French on the Grande rue de Pera, the European district’s central thoroughfare, as well as the automobiles, the streetcars, and the men in business suits, all proclaimed “the West.” But like the fez (the signature tasseled red hat of the Ottoman Empire) that many of the men wore, reminders that Constantinople was on the border between continents and cultures were never far from sight.