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.’
