with the anti-Bolsheviks: “businesswomen with large handbags” and “stockbrokers.” The café is also full of invalid veterans, “wounded war heroes” who are victims of “imperialist war.” Benya Krik, the Jewish gangster, now has some compassion for the soldiers. However, the real hero of Babel’s screenplay (and film) is not Benya but the baker Sobkov, who tries to convince the patrons in Café Fanconi to instigate a proletarian revolution. By the time the film was released in 1927, Fanconi had long been converted into a club for sailors of the Soviet navy, and Odessa’s collective past was under Soviet ideological control.
The Jewish gangster of the café of bygone days was still very much alive and well, revived in the character of Ostap Bender, the hero of the great satirical novel Zolotoy telyonok (The Golden Calf, 1931), written by the duo Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov. In this Soviet masterpiece, they describe Odessa as “Chernomorsk” (literally, “the Black Sea”) and Café Fanconi as “Café Florida,” which becomes, in the Soviet era, “City Diner No. 68.” Ilf and Petrov describe “a crowd of respectable-looking old men, babbling away in front of the covered porch of the City Diner No. 68.” These old men are “odd people, preposterous in this day and age. Nearly all of them wore white pique vests and straw boater hats. Some even sported panamas that had darkened with age. And, of course, they all have yellowed starched collars around their hairy chicken necks.”103 Like many other Odessan writers, poets, journalists, and musicians, Ilf and Petrov describe in their 1931 novel a space of absence, filled with the memory of what existed before: “This spot near Diner No. 68, formerly the fabled Florida Café, was the gathering place for the remnants of long-gone commercial Chernomorsk.” We are told that in the old days, “these people used to gather” in the café to meet each other and “to cut deals.” Now, they come to the same place, compelled by a “long-time habit, combined with a need to exercise their old tongues, that kept bringing them to this sunny street corner.… The legend of porto franco still shone its golden light on the sunny street corner near the Florida Café.”104
On the one hand, it is clear that Ilf and Petrov describe in their satiric novel a handful of antiquated and decrepit old-timers who linger lethargically in a place that does not exist anymore. On the other hand, these fictional characters express a genuine longing for an era of Odessa cafés that was still very much alive and well, albeit in their memories and their cultural imagination.
The longing for the cafés of bygone days was expressed, however, with the wit and humor with which the city was associated and with the literary and cultural imagination of so many former Jewish Odessans, a generation of many who were compelled or forced to leave the city and migrate to other cities. It was a generation of migrants who often tried to re-create the richness and vibrancy of Odessa cafés in the various cities to which they migrated, whether in the Soviet Union or elsewhere in Europe and beyond. Odessa’s cafés were part of an urban modernity that flourished between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was an essential part of the history and the myth of the city and of the network of diasporic modern Jewish culture. The fact that the poet Leon Feinberg and the painter Yefim Ladyzhensky (figure 1.3) remembered these cafés and made them part of their artistic representation of Odessa, even as late as the 1960s and 1970s, when they lived in America or Israel, is a testament to their lasting cultural significance as part of a network of modern Jewish culture.
Figure 1.3. Yefim Ladyzhensky, Ex Café Fanconi, from the series “Odessa of My Youth” (Courtesy of Gregory Vinitsky)
Most of Odessa’s cafés were spaces with a confounding mix of business, pleasure, commodity spectacle, and cultural activities, as well as exchange between different languages, nationalities, and ethnicities. One way or another, Jews were central in Odessa café culture. While many people saw Odessa cafés as both a blessing and a curse, it is hard to imagine modern Jewish culture created in the city in this period without them. Thus, Odessa and its cafés became part of a network of transnational, diasporic Jewish culture. Migrant Jews, both common folks and prominent artists and writers such as Gordin, Smolenskin, Babel, Jabotinsky, Steinman, and Bialik, who moved to other European, American, or Middle Eastern counties, carried the memory of Odessa’s cafés to new cities and new cafés.
2
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
