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
