the footsteps of his older brother, Israel Joshua. He was in awe of the revered figures, about whom he had heard and read so much before:
Before I opened the door … I tried for some time to summon courage. Why am I trembling like this?—I asked myself—after all they are only flesh and blood.… They also don’t live forever.… I opened the door, and I saw a hall. Opposite, on the other side of the hall, there was a buffet, like in a restaurant. The writers sat by the tables. Some of them ate, others played chess, and some chatted. All of them seemed terribly important to me, full of wisdom and higher knowledge of the kind that elevates man above worldly troubles.… I expected someone to ask me who I am, what do I want, but no one approached me. I stood there with wide-open mouth.57
Bashevis Singer’s retrospective look at Tłomackie 13 beautifully captures his perception of the place as a “literary café,” a place of lofty cultural aspirations, which was nevertheless a space of “flesh and blood,” where people not only wrote, conversed, and debated but also ate, drank, chatted, played games, and gossiped. He also compared, with a mixture of wit and reverence, the space of Tłomackie 13 to a Hasidic synagogue. When Hasidim, he wrote, wanted to have a synagogue of their own, they rented a room and installed shelves full of books, an ark filled with scrolls of Torah, a table, and a few benches. When writers, journalists, and activists wanted to create a space of modern secular Jewish culture, they did the same: they rented a hall and put in some tables and a kitchen, and everything needed was there, as long as people showed up.
Food and drink were central to the place. According to Kaganowski, the owner of the kitchen that served the simple meals, coffee, and tea in Tłomackie 13 was a waiter in one of the city’s many cafés prior to World War I. He was known to everyone as Max, and he ran a café that catered to the “aristocracy of the Jewish underworld.” After an accident and a heart attack, Max could no longer serve these “big guests,” but he wanted to re-create that café feeling in Tłomackie 13, together with his wife, who cooked the food. He never understood, according to Kaganowski, what kind of a place it was and what all those people were doing in such a place, a mixture of café, restaurant, lecture hall, and a space for other activities.58
The vexing mixture of cultural activities, both “high” and “low,” is evident also in a caricature published in the Yiddish press, with the title Oyfn Olimp (On the Olympus; figure 2.3). The cartoon describes revered luminaries—Jewish and non-Jewish, from the ancient and from the recent past—looking from heaven above at Tłomackie 13 below, where there is music and dancing. The caption describes Y. L. Peretz asking, “What kind of literature is it?” Sholem Aleichem, who presumably knows better about such matters, answers, “This is how ‘Jewish Culture’ is created.” The cartoon captured Tłomackie 13 as a space of sociability, with food and drink and people listening to music and dancing but also at the heart of poetic revolutions and literature.
Many of the younger writers who migrated to Warsaw in the years after World War I were not happy with the state of Yiddish literature and sought a change. The modernist Yiddish poets, writers, and artists Melech Ravich, Uri Tzvi Greenberg, Peretz Markish, and Israel Joshua Singer (Isaac’s older brother) used Tłomackie 13 as a platform to launch their new, revolutionary style of Yiddish literature. They articulated their poetics, as well as their frustration over the attitude of the older Yiddish literary establishment toward them, and established modernist groups and small magazines such as Khaliyastre (Gang), which brought the expressionist mode into Yiddish literature.
Stormy debates over the current and future character of modern Yiddish literature took place in Tłomackie 13. Isaac Bashevis Singer called Tłomackie 13 “the temple of Yiddish literature” and “the bourse,” the stock exchange of Yiddish literature in Poland.59 This was not a place like Café Fanconi in Odessa, where presumably business activity also took place, but a place of literary and cultural “business.” Thus, writes Bashevis Singer, it was “always filled with young talents who came from every corner of the country … with the will to make a revolution in literature. They strolled in provincial fur coats and boots. In the little magazines they published … they used a difficult archaic Yiddish, thickened with provincialism.”60 The poet Melech Ravitch, who moved to Warsaw in 1921 from Vienna, remembered how lively and full of contradictions this thirdspace was. In the same building of Tłomackie 13, he wrote, the office of the youth movement of Mizrahi (Orthodox Zionist Jewry) was also located.61 The wide stairs of the building were full of Jews in traditional garb and visitors who came to Tłomackie 13. Every evening, music was pouring down from the building, mixing with the hustle and bustle of carts, the shops, the buses, and trams. Inside this noisy atmosphere, the space was used as a social meeting place and as a club for debates that sometimes reached a fever pitch.
Figure 2.3. Yiddish caricature depicting Tłomackie 13 as a literary café, published in Ber Isaac Rozen, Tlomatske 13 (Buenos Aires: Tsentral-Farband fun poylishe yidn in Argenṭine, 1950)
Tłomackie 13 was the gathering place for writers, poets, and journalists from different shades of the Jewish political spectrum, and somehow the space accepted them all. Ravitch wrote that there were four to five hundred members of the professional association, who were paying dues, but the place was always full of people, whether they were members or not, whether they paid or not.62 Zusman Segalovitsh remembered the place as the bude (den). “Without it,” he wrote, “we could not live. Its door was always open. We felt free there.”63 Kadya Molodowsky was one of the very few women who, while teaching children in Jewish schools in Warsaw, made a name for herself as a Yiddish writer and journalist. She used to visit Tłomackie 13 but felt marginal in what was experienced as mostly a homosocial, masculine space. In her memoir of Warsaw in the 1920s, Molodowsky wrote that from her perspective, “it was always dark” in Tłomackie 13. There was, she wrote, “a medley of different ‘institutions’ in one place. By day, there was a café-restaurant.… People would eat, talk, and some played chess.” However, it was difficult for Molodowski to understand “how Yiddish writers could sit over chess boards with furrowed brows … when there was so much poverty [in Jewish Warsaw].”64 Molodowsky made it clear that Tłomackie 13 might have fulfilled the role of café, but it was hard for her to find a place there as a woman writer who was mostly concerned about children and the poverty and desperation of Jewish life in interwar Warsaw.
Ephraim Kaganowski wrote that Tłomackie 13 became a professional institution only for the newspaper guild, and writers of poetry and fiction were merely “tolerated” there. He claimed that the publishers of the daily newspapers opened the door for the “unfortunate writers, who nevertheless gave the place a particular charm.”65 Kaganowski might have been correct about the real source of money and power within Tłomackie 13. However, the place was also significant to the development of all highbrow Yiddish literature. The best example of this development was Literarishe bleter (Literary pages, 1924–1939); the most important literary and cultural Yiddish weekly journal in interwar Poland and around the world was located, physically and symbolically, within the walls of Tłomackie 13. Initially, Ravitch, Markish, I. J. Singer, and Nakhmen Mayzl edited and published the new periodical at their own expense. Later it was part of the Boris Kletskin publishing house, and Mayzl became its editor in chief. Literarishe bleter was highly influenced by a similar Warsaw literary magazine, Wiadomości literackie (Literary news), which was published in exactly the same years, between 1924 and 1939, and was the most important journal of Polish literature and culture in the interwar period. Mayzl wrote in his memoir, “We read Wiadomości literackie with great enthusiasm; we were impressed by its large canvas, and we were jealous.”66
Mayzl and his friends, who closely followed the developments in Polish literature and culture, decided to do something similar in Yiddish, and their efforts saw much success with Literarishe bleter. The similarity between these “twin weeklies,” as Aleksandra Geller has called them, is closely related to Warsaw cafés, because both the Yiddish
