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
