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
