Figure 2.1. Postcard of Café Ostrowski
The lure of the Polish cafés to Jewish literati in this period might explain one of Menakhem-Mendl’s more enigmatic letters, written in 1913. Menakhem-Mendl writes to his wife, “Our writers, they write and write and in the end they take themselves to a Polish café to drink tea, in spite of the people who look at them as if they were dogs eating shalakh manos [a traditional gift that one sends on Purim].” He claimed to have pleaded with them, “ ‘Brothers, how is it possible to do such a thing? It’s a shame, an embarrassment before the whole world! …’ They said: ‘What can we do that there is no choice? There’s no proper Jewish café in Warsaw.’ ” When Menakhem-Mendl heard this pronouncement, he immediately came up with a new scheme:
“If there isn’t one, we should see to it that there is one.” They said, “You are a man with schemes, Menakhem-Mendl himself, why don’t you come up with a scheme for one?” And I said: “Give me one week.” … So off I went and planned a project … of a Jewish café [financed] by stocks. The café will be for writers and also for nonwriters, and there one could get not only a cup of coffee, tea, chocolate, bread with butter, and so forth but also at cost food and drink, a glass of beer, cigarettes, a hat if you need it.… With the profit left after the stockholders’ dividends, we could support all the Jewish writers in Warsaw.”49
Always attuned to Jewish urban modernity, Sholem Aleichem gives us, through the seemingly outrageous plans of Menakhem-Mendl, a good rundown of the various tensions in Jewish café life. He also points at the exact moment when Yiddish and Hebrew writers would venture into Polish cafés because they wanted to move beyond the confines of the Jewish quarter and shed their association with the impoverished Jewish community and cafés such as Kotik’s. As we shall see, Sholem Aleichem also gave an almost prophetic glimpse of what was to come next in Warsaw Jewish cultural life and its cafés in the interwar period.
“This Is How Jewish Culture Is Created”: The Writers’ Club in Tłomackie 13
The outbreak of World War I brought a deterioration of the economic and political position of Warsaw Jews. Both the tsarist authorities and the Polish nationalists saw Jews as supporting the German war effort. It is not surprising that many welcomed the defeats of the Imperial Russian Army in the spring of 1915 and the brief German rule during the war years. After the war, on November 1918, Warsaw became the capital of an independent Polish state freed from Russian rule. A large civil service now made its home in the city, and Warsaw was the focus of the country’s political and cultural life. After the Bolshevik revolution, as some forms of Jewish culture in Soviet Russia were suppressed, Warsaw’s importance for the cultivation of Jewish cultural life increased even more. At the same time, the migration out of eastern Europe to such cities as New York, Berlin, and Tel Aviv attracted many figures central to Jewish culture. The migration to and from Warsaw during the early 1920s, in addition to sharpening of political, ideological, and literary alliances, created a dynamic but also very tense atmosphere in the city. The young Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, who settled in Warsaw in 1923, wrote that “the Zionist, socialist, and communist movements snatched most of the young people. Organizations, clubs, and libraries sprouted like mushrooms after a rain. Jewish Poland, in these first years after the war, experienced a spiritual revolution.”50
In terms of urban space, the heart of Jewish Warsaw still revolved around Nalewki and the nearby Grzybów district, but Jews could now be found in significant numbers throughout the city. The interwar period ushered in a cultural and political struggle over the nature of the newly independent Polish state, as well as over what it meant to be Polish and Jewish. Increasing numbers of educated and acculturated Jews used Polish as their primary language of communication, and some of them became highly prominent in Polish literary and cultural life. At the same time, Polish nationalism and anti-Semitism became stronger and more vocal. A large part of Warsaw Jewry strongly identified with Jewish nationalism, religious orthodoxy, socialism, communism, and “folkism.” Literary and cultural movements also became highly politicized, and the choice to write in Yiddish, Polish, or Hebrew was more aligned along political lines.
These deep divisions within Jewish culture, as well as some points of contact between different people and groups, were centered in this period around several cafés. The interwar period was, in fact, the golden age of café culture in Warsaw, and Jews were absolutely central to this culture. But the deep divisions made particular cafés strongholds of certain figures, who became their habitués, but were almost a forbidden zone to others. Establishments in the center of Warsaw, such as Pod Picadorem, IPS (Instytut Propagandy Sztuki: “Institute of Art Propaganda”), and especially Café Ziemiańska, were associated with Polish modernist movements of poetry and literature, as well as with Polish cabaret, hugely popular in this period. Some of the most famous habitués, Julian Tuwim, Antoni Słonimski, Marian Hemar, and Aleksander Wat, were writers of Jewish origin. On the other hand, the robust interwar Yiddish cultural life and the more feeble Hebrew life were focused around the Farayn fun yidishe literatn un zhurnalistn (Association of Jewish writers and journalists) in Tłomackie 13, which was close to both the Nalewki and Grzybów districts and next door to one of Warsaw’s largest synagogues.51
For twenty years between 1918 and 1938, Tłomackie 13 was the address of the association. On the map of Jewish literature and culture during the interwar period, Tłomackie 13 was one of the most important locations. The association was established on March 24, 1916, shortly after Y. L. Peretz’s death in 1915, and was meant to preserve his legacy, as well as to unite and support Yiddish and Jewish writers in Poland. This effort seemed to echo Menakhem-Mendl’s 1913 fictional “scheme” to open such a café for all Jewish writers that would also provide them financial support and protection. To some extent, Menakhem-Mendl’s plan was implemented in Tłomackie 13.52 When activities in Tłomackie 13 began to take place, it served as the address not just of a professional association but of literary and cultural movements that attracted many people. There were drinks, coffee, and simple food on the premises. A number of rooms were furnished with tables and chairs, works of art, and many newspapers, as well as chess and other games and a gramophone with music. The premises functioned as a social meeting place not only for members (i.e., journalists and writers) but also for actors, artists, teachers, guests from abroad, and others who were interested in Jewish culture. In addition, the association offered a large variety of literary readings and parties both for its members and for the general public.53
As we have seen, in the years prior to World War I, many young Jewish writers and journalists were attracted to the cafés in the center of Warsaw, away from the Jewish district. After the war, the attraction did not stop. However, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that the most prominent Polish cafés in interwar Warsaw were associated with “assimilated” or even “converted” Jews, Tłomackie 13 came to fulfill the function of a “literary café.” This happened despite the fact that it was not a privately owned business. This was something that became evident to many people who knew the place, spent much time there, and wrote about it. Thus, Eliyahu Shulman wrote that “Tłomackie 13 was a real literary café, a literary gathering place in the European manner, … the nerve center of Jewish literature and life.”54 Photographs of Tłomackie 13 in the Yiddish press also depict it as a renowned literary café, or kibitzernya, a Yiddish term that was brought to Warsaw from New York City’s cafés (figure 2.2).
Figure 2.2. Photograph of Tłomackie 13, published in Illustrirte vokh (Warsaw), August 17, 1928
Isaac Bashevis Singer, who as a young man made his first foray into Yiddish literature in Tłomackie 13, called the place “Der shrayber klub” (the writers’ club), which was the title of his first autobiographical novel, serialized in 1956.55 Bashevis Singer claimed that “the entire modern Polish Jewry gathered in the writers’ club,” which
