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Warsaw
Between Kotik’s Café and the Ziemiańska
Sitting in a café like at a cloudlike height,
I could sit like this till evening crawls in.
Beyond the windows the bustling rank-and-file,
Though I don’t know and I can’t hear,
As silent in my autumnal smile,
By distant gazing rockingly I disappear.
—Julian Tuwim, “Melodia” (1928)
Before the Nazis invaded Warsaw in 1939, the Jewish community of the city, with a population of 375,000, was the largest and most diverse in all of Europe. During the first decades of the twentieth century, Warsaw, the capital of Poland, was a “Jewish metropolis.” Like in Odessa but on a larger scale, Jews made up a full one-third of the city’s population, and aspects of Jewish culture could be found throughout the city.1 At that point in time, numerous cafés in Warsaw became part of an interconnected network, the silk road of modern Jewish culture. However, the creation of this “Jewish metropolis” did not happen overnight and was a relatively late phenomenon in the long history of Warsaw. Unlike the new city of Odessa, the history of Warsaw goes back to the fifteenth century. The early days of a small town named Warszawa coincided with the first significant wave of Jewish migration to Poland. Warsaw became the capital of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569, when King Sigismund III Vasa moved the court from Kraków. At that time, a small number of Jews lived in the city under severe restrictions. Over the centuries, despite a series of expulsions, the Jewish population grew, but Warsaw’s Jewish community became large and gained importance only in the nineteenth century. This occurred mainly after the partition of Poland, which was confirmed at the Congress of Vienna in 1815; there, Warsaw became the capital of “Congress Poland,” the truncated state of Poland ruled by the Russian tsar.2
Despite this shaky political situation, in the nineteenth century, the city evolved into a major administrative and cultural center, the focus of Polish political and economic life. Its population grew rapidly, from 81,250 in 1816 to 223,000 in 1864, and the number of Jews living in the city rose from 15,600 to 72,800. Jews in Poland were not granted the status of citizenship, and most were still banned from living on certain streets in the center of Warsaw. Nevertheless, during the second half of the nineteenth century, Jewish migration from small towns in Congress Poland and the Pale of Settlement to Warsaw increased. The migrants were mostly traditional Jews—Hasidim and their opponents, the mitnagdim—but a growing circle of acculturated Jews and maskilim also evolved and made Warsaw an important Jewish center.3
Geographically, politically, and culturally, Warsaw is located between eastern and central Europe. Its proximity to the capital cities of Vienna and Berlin, as well as to the cities of the Russian Empire, exerted various influences on the city. Like other European cities in the modern period, the taste for drinking coffee and tea, and for the urban institution of the coffeehouse, developed slowly, parallel to the growth of “Jewish Warsaw.” In 1724, the first coffeehouse (kawiarnia in Polish) in the kingdom was established in Warsaw by one of King Augustus II’s courtiers. It was located within the perimeter of the king’s Saxon Palace and the royal garden and was mainly attended by men who were part of the king’s court. The next café opened in 1763 in the Market Square and was more accessible to the town’s residents. During the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a number of institutions selling coffee, tea, and pastries were established in Warsaw. As in Odessa and in other European cities in this period, they were run mostly by foreigners: Italians, Swiss, French, and Germans.4
Throughout the nineteenth century, as the Jewish community in Warsaw grew and matured, so too did spending time in cafés, eating, drinking, and socializing, become more common. Early-nineteenth-century cafés such as Kawiarnia Honoratka, established in 1826, became places of meeting for romantic writers, artists, and musicians such as Frédéric Chopin. They were also the setting for some significant historical and political events, such as the Polish national uprisings against the Russian Empire in 1830–1831 and 1863–1864.5 Some activities in these revolts were planned in Warsaw cafés, beyond the watchful eye of tsarist policemen and officials, as when young Polish officers from the local “Army of Congress” revolted against the Russian Empire. As we have seen in Smolenskin’s novella about the maskil who ran away to Odessa from Warsaw, these officers were soon joined by large segments of Polish society, including some Jews. They not only supported the revolt but also joined the “National Guard” or founded a “Civil Guard.” While both uprisings were eventually crushed by the Imperial Russian Army, cafés, as thirdspaces that were open, at least in theory, to everyone, were utilized for organizing and radicalizing by anti-Russian activists.6
The presence of Jewish writers and intellectuals in Warsaw cafés became more common and more pronounced in the last decades of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the city was gradually becoming a destination of Jewish migration and a major center of Jewish journalism, literature, and culture in three languages: Polish, Hebrew, and Yiddish. In 1862, Ḥayim Zelig Słonimski, a maskil who settled in Warsaw, established and edited the first Hebrew newspaper in Poland, Ha-tsfirah, mainly as a way to disseminate articles of popular science to the “Jewish masses.” Słonimski was inspired by previous Hebrew papers and journals of maskilim in central and eastern Europe. Ha-tsfirah matured and developed into a major Hebrew paper in the 1880s, published weekly and then daily. At that point, it competed with Izraelita, the first Polish-Jewish weekly journal, established in 1866 by Jewish reformers. It took more time, and the approval of Russian censors, to establish Yiddish weeklies and dailies, but they were created and served as an outlet for aspiring young Yiddish writers as well. Y. L. Peretz, Naḥum Sokolow, and David Frishman, major Hebrew and Yiddish writers and cultural figures, migrated to Warsaw, and they joined the acculturated Jewish writers who were active in Polish. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, a number of Hebrew and Yiddish publishing houses were established in Warsaw, and the city attracted both more Jewish writers and also literary and cultural entrepreneurs, who hoped to find in Warsaw a market for modern Jewish literature.7
Around the same time, Warsaw became dotted with many cafés; some attracted writers, journalists, and intellectuals as habitués. One such café was Kawiarnia Udziałowa, established in 1884. It was located in one of the most central points of Warsaw, on the corner of Nowy Świat and Aleje Jerozolimskie. Kawiarnia Udziałowa’s waiters were dressed in long, dark-red frock coats, and the café organized concerts and had pool tables, something that was quite common in other European cities as well. But it was also important to the Młoda Polska (Young Poland) literary movement. Among the people who congregated there was Leo Belmont (Leopold Blumental), a Polish-Jewish poet, writer, translator, journalist, and lawyer who wrote for the Polish press and contributed to the weekly Izraelita. Belmont was a founder of the Polish Esperanto Society, and he translated extensively into that language and strove to popularize it. Another habitué of Udziałowa was Jerzy Wasercug (Wasowski), the last editor in chief of Izraelita before it closed down in 1915.8
If cafés such as the Udziałowa attracted Jewish writers and intellectuals who wrote mostly in Polish and aspired to be part of mainstream Polish culture, those who were active in Jewish languages—Hebrew and Yiddish—went primarily, though not exclusively, to cafés that were located in the Jewish quarter. Although Jews at the turn of the twentieth century were not restricted anymore to one area of the city, the center of Jewish Warsaw was in the Muranów and Grzybów areas. This large Jewish district occupied around one-fifth of the municipal area, and its heart was a complex of densely populated streets around Nalewki Street, the commercial main artery of Jewish Warsaw.9 In this large Jewish district, there was an active street life with markets and peddlers, as well as a number of little cafés; some of them were known as mleczarnie—dairy restaurants that served kosher food. These cafés attracted Jews from all walks of life, as well as many writers, intellectuals, and political activists. As we will see, the appearance and the atmosphere of these cafés were very different from Odessa’s most famous spots, Cafés Fanconi and Robina.
Cafés in the Nalewki area, as well as in other parts of Warsaw during the last decades of the nineteenth century, became important for the emergence of Jewish literature and culture in fin-de-siècle Warsaw. Dovid Pinski was a Yiddish writer and playwright who migrated to Warsaw in 1892 and was immediately involved in a flurry of literary and cultural projects, which he undertook together with two other new arrivals in Warsaw: the writers Mordkhe Spector and Y. L. Peretz. Peretz, who quickly emerged as the most important Jewish literary and cultural figure, moved to Warsaw from the Polish town of Zamość in 1888. Pinski tells us in his memoir about the time he met with Peretz and Spector in a small café on Nalewki Street sometime in February 1894 and how the three of them first came up with the idea to publish Yontev bletlekh (Holiday issues), one of the important Yiddish literary and political publications in this period. In the café, the three men decided to edit and publish the periodical in Warsaw, despite limited funding and the Russian Empire’s restriction on such publications. Their plan was to issue the journal irregularly on Jewish holidays, camouflaging its literary and social reformist intentions as “reading material for the holiday.”10 In this case, the café was a place of sociability and exchange, an incubator of transnational Jewish press culture and new literary projects, as well as a site of “clandestine” activity, which was necessary in Congress Poland, given the tight censorship of the Russian tsarist regime.
The plan of Pinski, Peretz, and Spector was one of several that launched publications in Yiddish and Hebrew. In 1891, a few years after the establishment of Ha-tsfirah as a daily paper, Avraham Leib Shalkovich—known better by his pen name, Ben Avigdor—moved to Warsaw and began to produce a series of inexpensive and accessible volumes of Hebrew fiction with the name Sifrei agorah (Penny books). Ben Avigdor’s plan was to sell “thousands and ten thousands books” and to gradually “create a [Jewish] reading public with good literary taste.”11 The number of Hebrew readers in this period never reached such high numbers. Nevertheless, Ben Avigdor and other competitors and collaborators created, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, a Hebrew book market in Warsaw. Ben Avigdor’s relative success enabled him to open Tushiyah, the first privately owned, modern Hebrew press, and to be involved in the yearly almanac Luaḥ aḥiasaf.
Some of these Hebrew literary and publishing projects took place in cafés in or around the Jewish district, further positioning Warsaw and its cafés as an anchor on the map of modern Jewish culture. This placement can be best seen in a story written by David Frishman, a Hebrew and Yiddish writer, critic, and translator who migrated to the city in the 1880s and was instrumental to the growth of Jewish culture in Warsaw. Frishman’s story “Be-veyt ha-redaktsya” (In the editorial house, 1892) gives readers a glimpse into Jewish literary life and the centrality of cafés in them.12 The first-person narrator begins the story with a scene in a café near the gate of the Saxon Garden—directly next to the Jewish district—owned by an Italian named Skartazini, where Jewish writers and journalists gather daily to talk, smoke, and play chess, with some staying in the café “from morning to evening.” The narrator tells us about certain characters in the café known by their nicknames—“the professor,” the “Rabbi,” and the “accountant,” as well as a mysterious man nicknamed “the editor,” whom no one really knows and with whom the narrator converses and plays chess occasionally. The narrator’s interest in this man grows when he walks to his place on Pańska Street and finds much in common with him, as both are involved in Hebrew literature. When “the editor” invites the narrator to enter his apartment, he finds a weekly Hebrew magazine with the title Reshut ha-yaḥid (A private domain), whose sole writer and reader is “the editor” himself. To the narrator’s great surprise, he finds that “the editor” has written many Hebrew plays and stories, which remained unpublished. The narrator thinks the editor to be mad but quickly comes to realize that he simply could not find his place in the new “market” of late-nineteenth-century Jewish literature.
Frishman’s story presents some of the complexity of Jewish cultural life in Warsaw of the last decades of the nineteenth century. The café in his story is presented as a thirdspace—not just as a place of sociability but as a new institution in Warsaw, intimately related to the emerging Jewish press culture of newspapers and publishing houses that connected the city to a network of modern Jewish culture. At the same time, Frishman’s story highlights the fact that the café could also be a space of loneliness, alienation, and eccentricity, in which some of the new active players in the creation of modern Jewish culture in Warsaw could thrive and occasionally also be forsaken.
Litvaks and Polacks, Writers and Revolutionaries
At the turn of the twentieth century, Warsaw’s industrial growth stimulated a rapid increase in the city’s population, which reached 625,000 in 1897, as well as a substantial increase in the Jewish population, which rose to 210,500 in 1897 and 337,000 in 1914. This resulted not only from natural growth and migration from the small towns of Congress Kingdom but also from the movement of Jews from the Russian Pale of Settlement to Warsaw. The migration was mainly due to secularization and the decline of the economic opportunities in the shtetls. In all, by the outbreak of World War I, around 150,000 Litvaks, as Jews from these areas were called, had moved to Warsaw. Jews played a major role in the burgeoning industries of Warsaw and were particularly dominant in the textile, clothing, and tobacco trades. The years down to 1914 also saw a significant increase in the number of Jews who declared their main language as Polish, as well as the number of Jews in business and in the liberal professions. A major catalyst for the cultural and political renaissance of Jewish Warsaw was the attempted Russian revolution of 1905, which resonated especially in the capital of Congress Poland and its Jewish community.13
Cafés with Jewish owners in the Nalewki area became an integral part of Jewish urban culture and served important social, literary, and political roles. Warsaw became a major center of Jewish commerce, which only increased the importance and volume of its newspaper and book publishing. Writers, journalists, and political activists, as well as the growing class of businessmen, gathered around the tables of these cafés. The cold climate of Warsaw, the cramped space in the middle of a commercial center, and the political tensions that characterized Warsaw were all quite different from the situation in Odessa. This difference was reflected in the cafés themselves, which tended to be small, simple, and without much decoration or amenities. The cafés were built inside and were designed to accommodate Warsaw’s harsh winter weather. They were sometimes hidden within courtyards, but they were nevertheless teeming with life.
It is not hard to understand why many Jewish writers who came of age in the first decade of the twentieth century—those young people who were born in the 1880s in the small towns of the Pale of Settlement, Congress Poland, and Galicia, whose mother tongue was Yiddish, and who received traditional education that included immersion in Hebrew texts—were engrossed by Warsaw, an emerging metropolis with the largest Jewish population in Europe. It was in the first years of the 1900s that young writers such as Sholem Asch, Avrom Reyzen, Hersh Dovid Nomberg, Y. Ḥ. Brenner, Gershon Shofman, Uri Nissan Gnessin, Hillel Zeitlin, Pinchas Lachower, Zalman Shneour, Ya’akov Fichman, Y. D. Berkowitz, and Ya’akov Shteinberg moved to Warsaw. In this period, Warsaw became the most significant publishing market for literature and journalism in the two Jewish languages, created by bilingual (or trilingual) writers, with a readership that extended far and beyond into the rest of Europe and the world.14 The young people who came to Warsaw aspired to leave behind the traditional, and often despised, occupation of many maskilim, that of tutoring the sons or daughters of rich Jewish families. Instead, they hoped to find, not always successfully, steady work in Warsaw’s literary market as editors or writers in a publishing house, a newspaper, or a journal.
To be sure, just as in Odessa with its “sages,” turn-of-the-century Warsaw was also home to esteemed figures with widespread reputations. Some of them established “salons,” private spaces in which Jewish writers and intellectuals gathered on a regular basis. The most famous and well attended was located in Peretz’s house at 1 Ceglana Street in the Grzybów district.15 There were also such gatherings in Sokolow’s house until 1905 and later also in Zeitlin’s house.16 However, much activity—less restricted, more open and uncontrolled—took place in the many cafés that dotted the Jewish district. This becomes clear in the writings of the figures who arrived in Warsaw in the early years of twentieth century. Fichman, who moved from Odessa to Warsaw in 1903, remembered that he did not know where he would go: “Peretz, Frishman and Sokolow were simultaneously dear to our heart and remote.” Fichman was not focused on specific personalities but rather on the city itself, with its intense cultural activity and its “bohemian life”: “On the very first day, I met Ya’akov Shteinberg and Zalman Shneour, who like me came from the south, attracted to the boisterous literary center. In a few days, I became a habitué in the tiny and smoky café of Kotik. There we sat with a cup of coffee with Asch and Reyzen. The bohemian life attracted all of us to the Polish metropolis.”17
The existence of cafés and their importance was not just the subjective experience of Fichman but was attested by many others; nor were they only sites of literary exchange. The newly established Hebrew newspaper Ha-tsofeh noted, in an article written by the editor A. A. Friedman in 1904, that “the number of cafés in our city has grown at an alarming rate of late.” The reason Friedman gave for the rise and popularity of cafés in Jewish Warsaw was “the growing number of people living in our city on their own without their families.”18 These were young single people, who often left their parents and extended family behind in the small town. As new migrants to the big city, they found a home in such places as the “Zionist café” on Dzielna Street, Glotser’s café on Dzika Street, and Sholem’s café on Gęsia Street, all in the crowded Jewish district. As Scott Ury has claimed in his study of the transformation of Warsaw Jewry in the period leading to and around the aborted 1905 revolution, cafés were sites of intense cultural and political exchange.19 These cafés were vital thirdspaces that fostered debate and the exchange of ideas and were crucial in making Warsaw part of a network of transnational Jewish culture during these stormy years.
The activist Abraham Teitelbaum remembered how he became radicalized and intoxicated with revolutionary politics in Sholem’s café:
Our secret group used to gather for enlightenment, education, conversations and lessons in Sholem’s café on 29 Gęsia St.… One ascended a few steps to enter the not too big room with tables, which were always packed with young men and women, who would lose their temper and discuss, laugh and be loudly angry. The place always smelled of coffee with cheesecake. The same was also in the further smaller rooms. But the very last room was given to our group, when we used to … listen to the talks of our leader, comrade Lampert, or to the leaders of other groups that would come to us.20
Sholem’s café—built of multiple, and ever-smaller, rooms and similar to other cafés in the Nalewki area of this period—was later depicted in Sholem Asch’s Yiddish novel Varshe (Warsaw, 1929). In the novel, the café is the center of the Jewish socialist party, where the members of the “Central Committee,” who keep their identity hidden at any price, meet inside the kitchen of the bustling café. In this café, the protagonist of the novel, Zachary Mirkin, the alienated son of a Russian-Jewish industrialist, has been recruited to socialist circles. This was accomplished with the thought that he could help by preying on the stronghold of “capitalist” industry in Łódź, using his family connections.21
Reyzen, who lived in Warsaw between 1900 and 1911, before migrating to New York City, remembered another place in the Jewish district of the city as an important space of politics and culture: “the Zionist café” on Dzielna Street. This café, which was owned by a man known simply as “the quiet Jew,” was, like Sholem’s café, “hidden deep in a courtyard, on the first floor.” According to Reyzen, it was good that this “Zionist café”—which, despite its nickname, nevertheless attracted socialist revolutionaries who were not part of the Zionist movement, like Reyzen himself—was hidden because “voices and screams could always be heard from there.” Reyzen wrote that in a café facing the street, it would certainly be impossible to conduct “the warring arguments so freely and undisturbed,” since “people who pass by would interrupt because of curiosity, or the police would have to get involved.”22 Reyzen also wrote about Glotser’s café on 45 Dzika Street, a place that attracted mostly maskilim and Hebrew tutors and teachers. Among the teachers there were some young Hebrew writers who belonged to the literary movement ushered in by Ben Avigdor, the editor and publisher. According to Reyzen, the owner, Mr. Glotser, was a maskil and “could not bear to see how one of the young Hebrew teachers and writers ‘wickedly’ tore off the crowns of the ‘old’ maskilim writers.” Thus, Reyzen claimed, in Glotser’s café, the poetic war between old and new in Hebrew literature took place, with people such as the bilingual Hebrew-Yiddish writer Hersh Dovid Nomberg leading the call for modernist literature in the two languages.23
The most important and famous Jewish café during the first decade of the twentieth century was Kotik’s café. It was located at the very heart of Jewish Warsaw, in a courtyard on 31 Nalewki Street. Established by the activist Yehezkel (Khatskl) Kotik in the 1890s, the café quickly became a regular meeting point for Jewish writers, intellectuals, and activists from a variety of political and ideological backgrounds.24 The Yiddish journalist and folklorist A. Litvin (Shmuel Leib Hurwitz) wrote that in the early 1900s, “[Kotik’s] café was the most remarkable Jewish café in the entire world.”25
The Jewish publisher Shlomo Shrebrek, who came to Warsaw from Vilna, confirmed in his memoirs that during these years, much of the literary activity of the young writers was done in Kotik’s: “During this time, Reyzen and Nomberg were active, and around them was a happy gang in the café; they started to create a new culture in Yiddish.”26 In Kotik’s café, writes Shrebrek, “people always read new stories and poems before they were published.” Shrebrek’s description highlights the experience of the café: in its cramped and smoky space, “everybody took off their mundane clothes and donned literary and artistic attire.” Yet Kotik’s café was not only a place for writers. Shrebrek writes that many visitors were actually “modest businessmen, mediators and agents, clerks and sometimes the occasional teacher.” Apart from the fact that it was inexpensive, the attraction of Kotik’s café was the existence of free newspapers in various languages. Because papers were readily available, “people would sit there for hours and hours; they would read the paper, get to know one another, and converse.” Even those who met there for the first time, claimed Shrebrek, “would speak to each other like old friends, … about new literary works, recent newspaper articles, and the lives of the writers themselves, … about Zionism, local and general affairs.”27
Litvin remembered how when he first came to Kotik’s café, the owner gave him a Yiddish pamphlet he had written. When Kotik learned that Litvin could read Hebrew, he gave him a pamphlet written in Hebrew as well. According to Litvin, Kotik had an uncanny sense of his customers, and he knew which reading materials he should give to whom.28 Reyzen also remembered that Kotik’s café was frequented by “salespeople and clerks, budding writers and Hebrew teachers, Zionists and Bundists, PPS [Polish Socialist Party] members and the unaffiliated. This mixture of habitués naturally sparked off debates.”29 According to Reyzen, Mrs. Kotik, who ran the operation together with her husband, did not enjoy the arguments and angrily rushed to hush the contestants, fearful that the noise would draw unwanted attention from the police. Kotik sometimes neglected the business of the café, devoting himself instead to the publication of his pamphlets at his own expense.30
Litvin claimed that Kotik’s café was especially important for Litvaks such as Kotik himself, that is, for the Jews who relocated from small towns in Lithuania and the Pale of Settlement to the big city. The majority of the Hebrew and Yiddish writers in Warsaw were Litvaks, who had to adjust to life in the Polish metropolis. Litvin, like many others, took notice of the fact that Kotik was not merely a café owner but a devoted member of the community, forming mutual aid societies for the needy migrants who felt lost in Warsaw. Kotik, writes Litvin, could have used his personal connections and become a successful merchant, but instead he opened a café. Although he did not enjoy great profits, Litvin commented, neither did he run up large expenditures: “and there was food there at least, and he would thus not die of starvation.”31 There was a telephone in the café—a rare commodity in early-twentieth-century Warsaw—utilized by Kotik in the service of the public matters in which he took an interest. Kotik’s organizational activity revolved around his café. He published communal and political brochures, distributed for free to all those who frequented his café. Reyzen claimed that Kotik took pride in these publications and engaged in preaching the same principles of proper moral behavior about which he wrote.
Kotik’s café appeared, by its name or otherwise, in literary texts as well. One notable example is a text by Sholem Aleichem, who visited Warsaw many times in the first decade of the twentieth century and became friends with Kotik.32 Sholem Aleichem transferred his antihero Menakhem-Mendl from Odessa and Kiev to Warsaw in the last series of letters to his wife, Sheyne-Sheyndl, which was serialized in the Yiddish newspaper Haynt in 1913.33 Now Menakhem-Mendl was not an aspiring stock-exchange merchant but was employed as a journalist, writing on current events and Jewish and international politics. As soon as Menakhem-Mendl finds work as a journalist, he looks for a café in which he can “enjoy a coffee with a friend, along with everything else which a human being requires.” Not surprisingly, Menakhem-Mendl’s first stop is Kotik’s: “I take my walking stick and go to my café to drink coffee and to chat with people. My café is on Nalewki, Kotik’s place. Why Khatskl Kotik’s place, you ask? To spite the Polacks [the Polish Jews]!” According to Menakhem-Mendl’s letter, some Poles decided to boycott Jewish businesses such as Kotik’s café, and while some “assimilated” Polish Jews avoided these places, he and other Litvaks went to Kotik’s place as an act of resistance. “We sit and sit, Khatskl Kotik and me, over a cup of coffee and discuss our Jewish brethren.”34 The conversations between Menakhem-Mendl and Kotik, which always take place in the café, range from politics and wars to imaginary “projects” and “schemes” suggested by Menakhem-Mendl. Despite the fact that Sholem Aleichem was not a Warsaw resident, the letters of his Menakhem-Mendl about Kotik’s café give us a good glimpse into the conversations and movements that took place in this urban space during the first decade of the twentieth century and its importance to the creation of transnational modern Jewish culture.
Gender, Class, Sociability, and Loneliness in the Café
Looking at Kotik’s political undertakings around his café and some of the writings about it, it is tempting to describe the café as a remarkable example of “a Jewish public sphere.” While this is true to some extent, Kotik’s café should also be understood as a thirdspace. It did function as a space in which individuals from a variety of political and intellectual camps could gather to debate and create the affairs of the day, but this does not mean that Kotik’s café and others like it were truly open to all or free of economic, social, and cultural tensions.35 Sholem Aleichem’s Menakhem-Mendl alluded to some of these tensions when he wrote about boycotts of some Jewish cafés, but we can see other conflicts when we read both the fictional stories and some of the memoirs written by other Hebrew and Yiddish writers. One of the tensions had to do with gender and with the presence of women, which is especially vivid in one of Sholem Asch’s early short stories.
When Asch arrived in Warsaw in 1900, he wrote and published in both Hebrew and Yiddish. The Hebrew story “Mi-ḥaye ha-yehudim be polin-rusya” (From the life of Jews in Russia-Poland, 1901) takes place mostly in Warsaw, recounting the travails of Neta Woolf, who turns to God in search of relief from financial hardships and familial problems.36 Reb Neta’s young and beloved daughter, Rokhele, is a modern Jewish woman, educated and independent in spirit. With knowledge of Yiddish, Russian, and Polish, she relocates to Warsaw and finds work in a local café on Twarda Street, and tensions quickly arise. Women were often employed as café waitresses in Warsaw, and as a server in such a café, Rokhele is exposed to the lusting eyes of the young, single, Jewish men, the habitués of the café who gather around its tables and chat in a mixture of Yiddish, Polish, and German. Rokhele’s father, who comes every evening to visit the café alone, is pained to see his daughter as the target of so much sexual attention. The short story reaches its open-ended conclusion with this double perspective—that of the older father and the young daughter—who view the same events in different ways. However, both the father and the daughter cannot participate in the conversation and the exchange that takes place in the café: Reb Neta because of his age and traditional background and the fact that the café is the realm of young Jewish men; Rokhele because of her gender and the fact that the café is very much a masculine homosocial space, in which women such as Rokhele can only be an object of men’s gazes and desires.
The gender aspect of the Warsaw Jewish cafés can also be seen in an impressionistic Yiddish story by Lamed Shapiro, who lived and worked in Warsaw in the first decade of the twentieth century, before he migrated to New York City. Shapiro’s story “Berte” (“Bertha,” 1906) takes place in a “Litvak café” in Warsaw. Bertha is a young waitress who catches the attention of Mr. Riegel, a habitué of the café. Bertha is described by Shapiro’s narrator as someone with an “almost childish figure that was slender yet very well proportioned, small dainty hands, and a slim, finely chiseled face.”37 Riegel is attracted to Bertha “on his very first visit to the café” and was “haunted ever since by her soft voice, her way of talking, … and especially her smile.”38 Riegel, who comes daily to the café, becomes more and more smitten with Bertha, and eventually, she seems to him a mystery to be deciphered: “Her smile vexed him.… It appeared to him unnatural, even distasteful.” He does not know whether she is “a beautiful, modest Jewish maiden, or a courtesan with a certain chic.” This ambiguity about Bertha drives him crazy: “I must find the truth once and for all. I will put her to the test.” At the end of the story, Riegel does indeed “put her to the test”—by seizing her hand and arms—but it comes too late, after he finds out that she is engaged to a young Jewish man who works in a Łódź clothing store.39 Shapiro’s story highlights the place of young women in Warsaw’s Jewish cafés. These cafés were spaces of homosociality and at the same time fueled sexual desire and tensions. As a server who did not participate in social and cultural masculine exchange, a woman was often an object of male desire and could easily be seen as a sexually available courtesan.
Sometimes, however, the young women who served as waitresses in Warsaw cafés provided the male protagonists with a sense of comfort, which many of the male figures in the café required badly as strangers in the big city. In Eliezer Steinman’s Hebrew novel Seḥor seḥor (Around and around, 1917–1918) the protagonist, the writer Shalit, puts on his clothes and makes his way to a café on Nalewki Street, where a blond waitress serves him a cup of tea with a graceful smile:
At once, like a bolt of lightning, joy overcame Shalit, and he felt his entire body intoxicated. The cup of bitterness of yesterday, which was awaiting him when he woke up, was now gone. The dark mask that covered his face since he settled down in Warsaw suddenly dissolved like breaking cobwebs, and he could not understand in any way the nature of the élan, the spleen that took hold of him like a pincer. The sense of melancholy moved away from him, and he called the waitress softly as a sister, and all the other café habitués were like his brothers.… Shalit left the café into the street, and everybody walked toward him in pairs or groups, and he saw himself as a member of a densely populated family.40
Other literary texts that take place in Warsaw cafés of this period emphasize the economic difficulties of living in the metropolis. Although these cafés were very different from the spectacle of commodities and respectability that were typical of Odessa’s more upscale cafés, they still highlighted the gaps between those who could afford to pay for them and those who could not. This disparity can be seen in a feuilleton by the Hebrew and Yiddish writer Zalman Shneour, who arrived in Warsaw in 1902: “Beit ha-kahava shel ha-sofrim, Grontzel” (The writers’ café, Grontzel, 1903). The story tells us about a certain café, in which “many writers visit each evening, conversing and arguing among themselves.”41 According to the narrator, this café is especially smoky and steamy, similar in appearance and ambiance to a shvitz—a traditional Jewish steam bath, very common in eastern European towns—in which men used to gather before Shabbat to sweat and to chat. The comparison of the café to the site of male social life, familiar from much of Jewish literature in eastern Europe, is evocative but hardly surprising. However, the narrator focuses on the fact that some of the writers who frequent the café can afford the price of admission to this modern shvitz by buying a cup of coffee or tea and something to eat, but other writers, or aspiring writers, must resort to shnorring—to borrowing a few pennies in order to stay in the café and not to raise the wrath of the owner. Whenever an unfamiliar person appears in the café, the habitués investigate his “talent,” code for his ability to pay. The narrator himself gains such a reputation and thus is asked for loans, especially by a man known as Grontzel, who came to Warsaw from a small town in the Russian province of Podolia. The reality that Shneour’s sketch reveals is one of poor, hungry young Jewish men, hoping to make money by teaching and publishing, finding refuge in the café with the reluctant support of more successful writers.42
Even more poignant is Reyzen’s Yiddish story “Fermashkent zikh aleyn” (To pawn yourself, 1905). This dark story is told through the point of view of Velvl Klinger, a young, single, and penniless Jewish teacher who shares a cold apartment in Warsaw with two other teachers like him. He dreams about being a poet but has been unable to publish any of his poems in the Warsaw press. One sunny morning in the early spring, he walks around the streets of Warsaw hungry and thirsty, and then he passes by “the famous café,” where “teachers, poets, critics, and readers he knew could be found whenever they had a few groshn [pennies] in their pockets.”43 Velvl goes in the café, but he cannot find any friends to borrow money from. He knows he must order something to quiet his gnawing hunger and to avoid the suspicion of the young waitress. The café gradually becomes for Velvl a self-imposed prison, where he feels as if he “pawns his own body and soul.” Even the ending of the story, in which someone finally lends Velvl twenty kopeks, does not bring real relief to the anxious protagonist. The Warsaw café in this story is not a place of gathering and exchange but a claustrophobic space of desperation, alienation, loneliness, and the miserable economic condition of a young, educated Jewish man who cannot find an anchor in the city. The female waitress and the unfamiliar visitors are dreaded because they cannot provide the protagonist any help.
The ethnic, sexual, and socioeconomic tensions and conflicts around Warsaw cafés, which are so pronounced in the stories of the writers who presumably were their most faithful habitués, find echoes in a memoir written by Ephraim Kaganowski, one of the very few Yiddish writers born and raised in Warsaw. He told about an incident involving Sholem Asch, when he had started to rise in fame in Poland and abroad and became a well-paid writer. At that point, Asch, Nomberg, and Reyzen sat in Kotik’s café, and Asch took out a hundred-ruble note, which provoked much excitement. According to Kaganowski, everyone in the café inspected the note. Reyzen said that he saw such a large sum of money for the first time in his life, while Kotik did not even have enough to give change for such a large note.44
Kaganowski also wrote about the significant changes that happened in Jewish Warsaw during the years after 1905. “The Jewish sons and daughters who wanted to merge with the Polish world,” he claimed, “unwillingly joined the streaming march to a new realm, which was only steps away from the Nalewki area.”45 According to Kaganowski, the young Yiddish and Hebrew writers discovered that on the main streets of the city, one could see the Polish writers and artists, whom they secretly admired: “One can see them as living people in a café, at a table in Marszałkowska Street.”46 Kaganowski remembered that another young Yiddish writer and journalist, Moyshe-Yosef Dikshteyn, known to everybody by the pseudonym Kawa (“Coffee” in Polish and many languages), discovered one day that “in the big, bright Café Ostrowski, on the corner of Marszałkowska and Złota, Nomberg and Reyzen, and sometimes Asch, sit at a table every evening, and even the revered Y. L. Peretz likes to go there from time to time.” And at this, remarked Kaganowski, “the big divide between the young and the known and recognized arose again.”47 The fact that Jewish writers and intellectuals during the years leading to World War I went to Café Ostrowski was also noted by A. Litvin. In 1914, he wrote, “Today there are Jewish literati, for whom it is beneath their dignity to drink coffee at Kotik’s. They find their way to the refined cafés ‘Bristol’ and ‘Ostrowski.’ ”48
Figure 2.1. Postcard of Café Ostrowski
The lure of the Polish cafés to Jewish literati in this period might explain one of Menakhem-Mendl’s more enigmatic letters, written in 1913. Menakhem-Mendl writes to his wife, “Our writers, they write and write and in the end they take themselves to a Polish café to drink tea, in spite of the people who look at them as if they were dogs eating shalakh manos [a traditional gift that one sends on Purim].” He claimed to have pleaded with them, “ ‘Brothers, how is it possible to do such a thing? It’s a shame, an embarrassment before the whole world! …’ They said: ‘What can we do that there is no choice? There’s no proper Jewish café in Warsaw.’ ” When Menakhem-Mendl heard this pronouncement, he immediately came up with a new scheme:
“If there isn’t one, we should see to it that there is one.” They said, “You are a man with schemes, Menakhem-Mendl himself, why don’t you come up with a scheme for one?” And I said: “Give me one week.” … So off I went and planned a project … of a Jewish café [financed] by stocks. The café will be for writers and also for nonwriters, and there one could get not only a cup of coffee, tea, chocolate, bread with butter, and so forth but also at cost food and drink, a glass of beer, cigarettes, a hat if you need it.… With the profit left after the stockholders’ dividends, we could support all the Jewish writers in Warsaw.”49
Always attuned to Jewish urban modernity, Sholem Aleichem gives us, through the seemingly outrageous plans of Menakhem-Mendl, a good rundown of the various tensions in Jewish café life. He also points at the exact moment when Yiddish and Hebrew writers would venture into Polish cafés because they wanted to move beyond the confines of the Jewish quarter and shed their association with the impoverished Jewish community and cafés such as Kotik’s. As we shall see, Sholem Aleichem also gave an almost prophetic glimpse of what was to come next in Warsaw Jewish cultural life and its cafés in the interwar period.
“This Is How Jewish Culture Is Created”: The Writers’ Club in Tłomackie 13
The outbreak of World War I brought a deterioration of the economic and political position of Warsaw Jews. Both the tsarist authorities and the Polish nationalists saw Jews as supporting the German war effort. It is not surprising that many welcomed the defeats of the Imperial Russian Army in the spring of 1915 and the brief German rule during the war years. After the war, on November 1918, Warsaw became the capital of an independent Polish state freed from Russian rule. A large civil service now made its home in the city, and Warsaw was the focus of the country’s political and cultural life. After the Bolshevik revolution, as some forms of Jewish culture in Soviet Russia were suppressed, Warsaw’s importance for the cultivation of Jewish cultural life increased even more. At the same time, the migration out of eastern Europe to such cities as New York, Berlin, and Tel Aviv attracted many figures central to Jewish culture. The migration to and from Warsaw during the early 1920s, in addition to sharpening of political, ideological, and literary alliances, created a dynamic but also very tense atmosphere in the city. The young Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, who settled in Warsaw in 1923, wrote that “the Zionist, socialist, and communist movements snatched most of the young people. Organizations, clubs, and libraries sprouted like mushrooms after a rain. Jewish Poland, in these first years after the war, experienced a spiritual revolution.”50
In terms of urban space, the heart of Jewish Warsaw still revolved around Nalewki and the nearby Grzybów district, but Jews could now be found in significant numbers throughout the city. The interwar period ushered in a cultural and political struggle over the nature of the newly independent Polish state, as well as over what it meant to be Polish and Jewish. Increasing numbers of educated and acculturated Jews used Polish as their primary language of communication, and some of them became highly prominent in Polish literary and cultural life. At the same time, Polish nationalism and anti-Semitism became stronger and more vocal. A large part of Warsaw Jewry strongly identified with Jewish nationalism, religious orthodoxy, socialism, communism, and “folkism.” Literary and cultural movements also became highly politicized, and the choice to write in Yiddish, Polish, or Hebrew was more aligned along political lines.
These deep divisions within Jewish culture, as well as some points of contact between different people and groups, were centered in this period around several cafés. The interwar period was, in fact, the golden age of café culture in Warsaw, and Jews were absolutely central to this culture. But the deep divisions made particular cafés strongholds of certain figures, who became their habitués, but were almost a forbidden zone to others. Establishments in the center of Warsaw, such as Pod Picadorem, IPS (Instytut Propagandy Sztuki: “Institute of Art Propaganda”), and especially Café Ziemiańska, were associated with Polish modernist movements of poetry and literature, as well as with Polish cabaret, hugely popular in this period. Some of the most famous habitués, Julian Tuwim, Antoni Słonimski, Marian Hemar, and Aleksander Wat, were writers of Jewish origin. On the other hand, the robust interwar Yiddish cultural life and the more feeble Hebrew life were focused around the Farayn fun yidishe literatn un zhurnalistn (Association of Jewish writers and journalists) in Tłomackie 13, which was close to both the Nalewki and Grzybów districts and next door to one of Warsaw’s largest synagogues.51
For twenty years between 1918 and 1938, Tłomackie 13 was the address of the association. On the map of Jewish literature and culture during the interwar period, Tłomackie 13 was one of the most important locations. The association was established on March 24, 1916, shortly after Y. L. Peretz’s death in 1915, and was meant to preserve his legacy, as well as to unite and support Yiddish and Jewish writers in Poland. This effort seemed to echo Menakhem-Mendl’s 1913 fictional “scheme” to open such a café for all Jewish writers that would also provide them financial support and protection. To some extent, Menakhem-Mendl’s plan was implemented in Tłomackie 13.52 When activities in Tłomackie 13 began to take place, it served as the address not just of a professional association but of literary and cultural movements that attracted many people. There were drinks, coffee, and simple food on the premises. A number of rooms were furnished with tables and chairs, works of art, and many newspapers, as well as chess and other games and a gramophone with music. The premises functioned as a social meeting place not only for members (i.e., journalists and writers) but also for actors, artists, teachers, guests from abroad, and others who were interested in Jewish culture. In addition, the association offered a large variety of literary readings and parties both for its members and for the general public.53
As we have seen, in the years prior to World War I, many young Jewish writers and journalists were attracted to the cafés in the center of Warsaw, away from the Jewish district. After the war, the attraction did not stop. However, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that the most prominent Polish cafés in interwar Warsaw were associated with “assimilated” or even “converted” Jews, Tłomackie 13 came to fulfill the function of a “literary café.” This happened despite the fact that it was not a privately owned business. This was something that became evident to many people who knew the place, spent much time there, and wrote about it. Thus, Eliyahu Shulman wrote that “Tłomackie 13 was a real literary café, a literary gathering place in the European manner, … the nerve center of Jewish literature and life.”54 Photographs of Tłomackie 13 in the Yiddish press also depict it as a renowned literary café, or kibitzernya, a Yiddish term that was brought to Warsaw from New York City’s cafés (figure 2.2).
Figure 2.2. Photograph of Tłomackie 13, published in Illustrirte vokh (Warsaw), August 17, 1928
Isaac Bashevis Singer, who as a young man made his first foray into Yiddish literature in Tłomackie 13, called the place “Der shrayber klub” (the writers’ club), which was the title of his first autobiographical novel, serialized in 1956.55 Bashevis Singer claimed that “the entire modern Polish Jewry gathered in the writers’ club,” which was also a second home for him and for many others like him.56 He described the first time he went into Tłomackie 13 in 1923 as a young aspiring writer, following the footsteps of his older brother, Israel Joshua. He was in awe of the revered figures, about whom he had heard and read so much before:
Before I opened the door … I tried for some time to summon courage. Why am I trembling like this?—I asked myself—after all they are only flesh and blood.… They also don’t live forever.… I opened the door, and I saw a hall. Opposite, on the other side of the hall, there was a buffet, like in a restaurant. The writers sat by the tables. Some of them ate, others played chess, and some chatted. All of them seemed terribly important to me, full of wisdom and higher knowledge of the kind that elevates man above worldly troubles.… I expected someone to ask me who I am, what do I want, but no one approached me. I stood there with wide-open mouth.57
Bashevis Singer’s retrospective look at Tłomackie 13 beautifully captures his perception of the place as a “literary café,” a place of lofty cultural aspirations, which was nevertheless a space of “flesh and blood,” where people not only wrote, conversed, and debated but also ate, drank, chatted, played games, and gossiped. He also compared, with a mixture of wit and reverence, the space of Tłomackie 13 to a Hasidic synagogue. When Hasidim, he wrote, wanted to have a synagogue of their own, they rented a room and installed shelves full of books, an ark filled with scrolls of Torah, a table, and a few benches. When writers, journalists, and activists wanted to create a space of modern secular Jewish culture, they did the same: they rented a hall and put in some tables and a kitchen, and everything needed was there, as long as people showed up.
Food and drink were central to the place. According to Kaganowski, the owner of the kitchen that served the simple meals, coffee, and tea in Tłomackie 13 was a waiter in one of the city’s many cafés prior to World War I. He was known to everyone as Max, and he ran a café that catered to the “aristocracy of the Jewish underworld.” After an accident and a heart attack, Max could no longer serve these “big guests,” but he wanted to re-create that café feeling in Tłomackie 13, together with his wife, who cooked the food. He never understood, according to Kaganowski, what kind of a place it was and what all those people were doing in such a place, a mixture of café, restaurant, lecture hall, and a space for other activities.58
The vexing mixture of cultural activities, both “high” and “low,” is evident also in a caricature published in the Yiddish press, with the title Oyfn Olimp (On the Olympus; figure 2.3). The cartoon describes revered luminaries—Jewish and non-Jewish, from the ancient and from the recent past—looking from heaven above at Tłomackie 13 below, where there is music and dancing. The caption describes Y. L. Peretz asking, “What kind of literature is it?” Sholem Aleichem, who presumably knows better about such matters, answers, “This is how ‘Jewish Culture’ is created.” The cartoon captured Tłomackie 13 as a space of sociability, with food and drink and people listening to music and dancing but also at the heart of poetic revolutions and literature.
Many of the younger writers who migrated to Warsaw in the years after World War I were not happy with the state of Yiddish literature and sought a change. The modernist Yiddish poets, writers, and artists Melech Ravich, Uri Tzvi Greenberg, Peretz Markish, and Israel Joshua Singer (Isaac’s older brother) used Tłomackie 13 as a platform to launch their new, revolutionary style of Yiddish literature. They articulated their poetics, as well as their frustration over the attitude of the older Yiddish literary establishment toward them, and established modernist groups and small magazines such as Khaliyastre (Gang), which brought the expressionist mode into Yiddish literature.
Stormy debates over the current and future character of modern Yiddish literature took place in Tłomackie 13. Isaac Bashevis Singer called Tłomackie 13 “the temple of Yiddish literature” and “the bourse,” the stock exchange of Yiddish literature in Poland.59 This was not a place like Café Fanconi in Odessa, where presumably business activity also took place, but a place of literary and cultural “business.” Thus, writes Bashevis Singer, it was “always filled with young talents who came from every corner of the country … with the will to make a revolution in literature. They strolled in provincial fur coats and boots. In the little magazines they published … they used a difficult archaic Yiddish, thickened with provincialism.”60 The poet Melech Ravitch, who moved to Warsaw in 1921 from Vienna, remembered how lively and full of contradictions this thirdspace was. In the same building of Tłomackie 13, he wrote, the office of the youth movement of Mizrahi (Orthodox Zionist Jewry) was also located.61 The wide stairs of the building were full of Jews in traditional garb and visitors who came to Tłomackie 13. Every evening, music was pouring down from the building, mixing with the hustle and bustle of carts, the shops, the buses, and trams. Inside this noisy atmosphere, the space was used as a social meeting place and as a club for debates that sometimes reached a fever pitch.
Figure 2.3. Yiddish caricature depicting Tłomackie 13 as a literary café, published in Ber Isaac Rozen, Tlomatske 13 (Buenos Aires: Tsentral-Farband fun poylishe yidn in Argenṭine, 1950)
Tłomackie 13 was the gathering place for writers, poets, and journalists from different shades of the Jewish political spectrum, and somehow the space accepted them all. Ravitch wrote that there were four to five hundred members of the professional association, who were paying dues, but the place was always full of people, whether they were members or not, whether they paid or not.62 Zusman Segalovitsh remembered the place as the bude (den). “Without it,” he wrote, “we could not live. Its door was always open. We felt free there.”63 Kadya Molodowsky was one of the very few women who, while teaching children in Jewish schools in Warsaw, made a name for herself as a Yiddish writer and journalist. She used to visit Tłomackie 13 but felt marginal in what was experienced as mostly a homosocial, masculine space. In her memoir of Warsaw in the 1920s, Molodowsky wrote that from her perspective, “it was always dark” in Tłomackie 13. There was, she wrote, “a medley of different ‘institutions’ in one place. By day, there was a café-restaurant.… People would eat, talk, and some played chess.” However, it was difficult for Molodowski to understand “how Yiddish writers could sit over chess boards with furrowed brows … when there was so much poverty [in Jewish Warsaw].”64 Molodowsky made it clear that Tłomackie 13 might have fulfilled the role of café, but it was hard for her to find a place there as a woman writer who was mostly concerned about children and the poverty and desperation of Jewish life in interwar Warsaw.
Ephraim Kaganowski wrote that Tłomackie 13 became a professional institution only for the newspaper guild, and writers of poetry and fiction were merely “tolerated” there. He claimed that the publishers of the daily newspapers opened the door for the “unfortunate writers, who nevertheless gave the place a particular charm.”65 Kaganowski might have been correct about the real source of money and power within Tłomackie 13. However, the place was also significant to the development of all highbrow Yiddish literature. The best example of this development was Literarishe bleter (Literary pages, 1924–1939); the most important literary and cultural Yiddish weekly journal in interwar Poland and around the world was located, physically and symbolically, within the walls of Tłomackie 13. Initially, Ravitch, Markish, I. J. Singer, and Nakhmen Mayzl edited and published the new periodical at their own expense. Later it was part of the Boris Kletskin publishing house, and Mayzl became its editor in chief. Literarishe bleter was highly influenced by a similar Warsaw literary magazine, Wiadomości literackie (Literary news), which was published in exactly the same years, between 1924 and 1939, and was the most important journal of Polish literature and culture in the interwar period. Mayzl wrote in his memoir, “We read Wiadomości literackie with great enthusiasm; we were impressed by its large canvas, and we were jealous.”66
Mayzl and his friends, who closely followed the developments in Polish literature and culture, decided to do something similar in Yiddish, and their efforts saw much success with Literarishe bleter. The similarity between these “twin weeklies,” as Aleksandra Geller has called them, is closely related to Warsaw cafés, because both the Yiddish and the Polish journal were rooted in café life.67 Significantly, this was one of the few points of contact between the Jews who were active in Polish and those who were active in Yiddish, at the same time that two groups experienced an ever-growing chasm.
Jewishness and Polishness in Interwar Warsaw Cafés and Cabarets
Wiadomości literackie was created and edited by Mieczysław Grydzewski, who came from an acculturated Jewish family and even converted to Protestantism but never denied or tried to hide his Jewishness. According to Grydzewski, the very idea of the journal was “born between two tables at Café Ziemiańska on Mazowiecka Street.”68 Grydzewski often criticized the separatism and “backwardness” of Jews who did not acculturate into Polish culture. Grydzewski and Wiadomości literackie were closely related to Skamander, the most important and active modernist Polish literary group in the interwar period.69 The prominent members of Skamander were Tuwim, Słonimski, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Kazimierz Wierzyński, and Jan Lechoń. Of the group, which was described by the Jewish-Polish poet and writer Aleksander Wat as a constellation of talent “one encounters once in a hundred years,”70 the most gifted and versatile were Tuwim and Słonimski. Słonimski was the son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. His grandfather Ḥayim Zelig Słonimski was, we might recall, a maskil, the founder and editor of the journal Ha-tsfirah. His good friend Julian Tuwim was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Łódź and had a remarkable gift for verse, writing not only modernist poetry but also for cabarets and for children with much success.71
The friendship between Tuwim and Słonimski, and their poetic activities, took place mostly in the aforementioned Café Ziemiańska. However, the group was created on November 29, 1918, in another café, a small establishment called Pod Picadorem on 57 Nowy Świat. The poster advertising the founding of the café exuded a mix of artistic and political exuberance: “Countrymen! Workers, soldiers, children, seniors, people, women, and dramatic writers! … A great tournament of poets, musicians, and painters, daily from 9 to 11 p.m. Young Varsovian artists, unite!!!”72 The opening night of the café was a great success. Słonimski recalled that Pod Picadorem was arranged to resemble the newly created modernist clubs and cafés in Russia. The great Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who was involved in such a café, was admired by the Skamander group.
Słonimski wrote that everyone “could enter Pod Picadorem Café for as little as five marks. They were selling neither vodka nor meat there.” According to his account, it was a small café where “sober poets used to read their poems aloud in front of random audiences.” Words such as “liberty, independence, Poland, communism, and revolution did not have the sound … of disappointment; we were full of strength and hope. In the evening, on the day of the opening of the café, all the elite of contemporary Warsaw came.”73 In December 1918, the newspaper Świat reported that “Café Pod Picadorem has nothing to do with Parisian Chat Noir or Lapin Agile. Quite different in its character, it is something between an ordinary Parisian café, and even a Berlin café, and a Warsaw cabaret. It was established for the public, … which should support not only the café itself, with its electricity, heating, and the servers dressed as Dutchmen, but also the poets associated with [it].”74 The poet Kazimierz Wierzyński described the interior of Pod Picadorem as making an “odd impression.” This is because futurist artists painted the room “in a manner full of fantasy and humor. It took a while to get used to the overwhelming chaos of their work. Waitresses dressed in some kind of costumes with Bretonne bonnets moved in these ‘futurist frames.’ … A flier on the table announced the dictatorship of the proletariat.”75 Thus, Café Pod Picadorem functioned as both a café and a poetry cabaret, where poets “performed” their poetry, something that was quite new in Poland but became more widespread in the 1920s and 1930s.
In the electric atmosphere of the café, the poets established the group Skamander and its journal. In the first issue of the journal, they articulated their poetics: “We want to be poets of the present, and this is our faith and our whole ‘program.’ … We know that the greatness of art does not appear in subjects but in the forms through which it is expressed, … of words transforming a rough experience into a work of art. We want to be honest workers in that game, through our efforts hidden under frivolous shapes.”76 However, in early 1919, just a few months after the “grand opening,” Pod Picadorem had to move to the basement of the Europejski Hotel, and it closed down soon after, in April 1919, due to lack of funding. The success of the café, which enabled the creation of the most important Polish poetic movement in the first half of the twentieth century, could not sustain it economically. After less than a year, the Skamander poets settled, together with others, into a more permanent and more financially stable home at Café Ziemiańska. Mała Ziemiańska—“little Ziemiańska,” because there were other branches of Ziemiańska in Warsaw—at Mazowiecka Street 12, was established on April 14, 1918, and became the most important literary and cultural café in interwar Warsaw.
In the mid 1920s, the Skamander poets and their publisher, Grydzewski, eventually had a special table reserved for themselves and their guests on the mezzanine of Café Ziemiańska.77 This spatial arrangement had no doubt evolved with their rising reputation and success, as the owner of the café wanted to build on the appeal of these literati who were adored by Polish readers. The admiration of Skamander by the public was the result not only of their poetry and journalism but also of their participation in the world of the Polish cabaret. The 1920s and 1930s constituted the golden age not only of Polish modernism and café culture but also of cabaret, when little theaters (teatrzyk in Polish, kleynkunst revi-teatr in Yiddish) proliferated in Warsaw. Café culture, cabaret, poetry, and satire were closely related in Warsaw, and there was a strong Jewish presence in all of them.78 The most famous cabaret venue and company was Qui Pro Quo (1919–1932), which assembled the creative talents of the Polish-Jewish writers Julian Tuwim and Marian Hemar. Hemar, whose real name was Jan Maria Hescheles, was born in Lemberg/Lwów when it was still part of the Habsburg Empire to well-to-do Jewish parents and began to write and publish poems and songs for cabaret when he was a student at the local university. He moved to Warsaw in 1924 and was recruited to Qui Pro Quo by the manager, Jerzy Boczkowski.
The stellar writing from Hemar, Tuwim, and Słonimski played a significant role in the artistic success of Qui Pro Quo over twelve years and even after its demise, when successive writers and performers managed to revive its model of literary cabaret in different incarnations—until 1939. The ever-changing constellation of artists at Qui Pro Quo, which featured Jews and gentiles alike, worked closely together in ensemble and socialized in Café Ziemiańska and IPS (established in 1930).79 Sometimes the shows themselves were given in cafés, including Małe Qui Pro Quo, which operated on the top floor of Café Ziemiańska as a dedicated space for performance.80 The cabaret Cyrulik Warszawski (The barber of Warsaw) gave its name also to a Polish satirical weekly published in Warsaw from 1926 to 1934. Hemar, Tuwim, and Słonimski were among its main contributors, and cafés appeared often in their work, sometimes with whimsical references to Jews and Jewishness.81
Thus, it is evident why the Skamander table on the mezzanine of Café Ziemiańska acquired the meaning of an “elevated space” for revered poets and cultural figures. Writers from various parts of Poland’s literary scene paid visits to this table, including Adam Ważyk, the futurist Jewish poet Aleksander Wat, and the older poet Stefan Żeromski, as well as the young modernist prose writer Witold Gombrowicz.82 Gombrowicz wrote in his memoirs about visiting Ziemiańska every single evening around nine. He sat at a table, ordered a “small black coffee,” and waited until his café companions gathered. “A café,” wrote Gombrowicz, “can become an addiction.… For a real habitué, not to go to the café at the designated time is simply to fall ill. In a short time, I became such a fanatic that I set aside all my other evening activities.” Gombrowicz claimed that one entered Café Ziemiańska “from the street into darkness, a fearful haze of smoke and stale air, from which abyss there loomed astonishing faces striving to communicate by shouts and gestures in the ever-present din.” Like many other observers, Gombrowicz noted that Café Ziemiańska had its own hierarchy: “in the intellectual sense it was a multistoried edifice, and it wasn’t so easy to transplant oneself from a lower floor to a higher one.”83
Figure 2.4. Photograph of a literary group in a Warsaw café, 1933 (Courtesy of Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe, Warsaw)
The “elevated space” of the Skamander poets highlighted their Jewishness and their highly contentious status as both “Jews” and “Poles.” Gombrowicz, who was raised Catholic but defined himself as a “secular humanist,” wrote about the poetic alliances he had at Café Ziemiańska, which was, according to him, marked as a Polish-Jewish space: “my friendship with Jews began to blossom, and in the end in the Ziemiańska I became known as ‘the King of the Jews,’ since it was enough for me to sit down at a table to be surrounded by hordes of Semites; at the time they were my most gracious listeners.”84 The elusive sense of “Jewishness” of Ziemiańska’s habitués had conflicting meanings to different people. As the historian Marci Shore has claimed, those among the Polish intelligentsia who were of Jewish origin (Tuwim, Słonimski, Wat, and Grydzewski) were “first- or second-generation assimilated Jews, Polish patriots and cosmopolitans, their families often split apart by differing responses to modernity.”85
Figure 2.5. Władysław Daszewski, caricature showing Jan Lechoń, Julian Tuwim, and Antoni Słonimski sitting at their table at Café Ziemiańska with Colonel Bolesław and Wieniawa-Długoszowski, Wiadomości literackie 36 (1928)
