at the same time that two groups experienced an ever-growing chasm.
Jewishness and Polishness in Interwar Warsaw Cafés and Cabarets
Wiadomości literackie was created and edited by Mieczysław Grydzewski, who came from an acculturated Jewish family and even converted to Protestantism but never denied or tried to hide his Jewishness. According to Grydzewski, the very idea of the journal was “born between two tables at Café Ziemiańska on Mazowiecka Street.”68 Grydzewski often criticized the separatism and “backwardness” of Jews who did not acculturate into Polish culture. Grydzewski and Wiadomości literackie were closely related to Skamander, the most important and active modernist Polish literary group in the interwar period.69 The prominent members of Skamander were Tuwim, Słonimski, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Kazimierz Wierzyński, and Jan Lechoń. Of the group, which was described by the Jewish-Polish poet and writer Aleksander Wat as a constellation of talent “one encounters once in a hundred years,”70 the most gifted and versatile were Tuwim and Słonimski. Słonimski was the son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. His grandfather Ḥayim Zelig Słonimski was, we might recall, a maskil, the founder and editor of the journal Ha-tsfirah. His good friend Julian Tuwim was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Łódź and had a remarkable gift for verse, writing not only modernist poetry but also for cabarets and for children with much success.71
The friendship between Tuwim and Słonimski, and their poetic activities, took place mostly in the aforementioned Café Ziemiańska. However, the group was created on November 29, 1918, in another café, a small establishment called Pod Picadorem on 57 Nowy Świat. The poster advertising the founding of the café exuded a mix of artistic and political exuberance: “Countrymen! Workers, soldiers, children, seniors, people, women, and dramatic writers! … A great tournament of poets, musicians, and painters, daily from 9 to 11 p.m. Young Varsovian artists, unite!!!”72 The opening night of the café was a great success. Słonimski recalled that Pod Picadorem was arranged to resemble the newly created modernist clubs and cafés in Russia. The great Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who was involved in such a café, was admired by the Skamander group.
Słonimski wrote that everyone “could enter Pod Picadorem Café for as little as five marks. They were selling neither vodka nor meat there.” According to his account, it was a small café where “sober poets used to read their poems aloud in front of random audiences.” Words such as “liberty, independence, Poland, communism, and revolution did not have the sound … of disappointment; we were full of strength and hope. In the evening, on the day of the opening of the café, all the elite of contemporary Warsaw came.”73 In December 1918, the newspaper Świat reported that “Café Pod Picadorem has nothing to do with Parisian Chat Noir or Lapin Agile. Quite different in its character, it is something between an ordinary Parisian café, and even a Berlin café, and a Warsaw cabaret. It was established for the public, … which should support not only the café itself, with its electricity, heating, and the servers dressed as Dutchmen, but also the poets associated with [it].”74 The poet Kazimierz Wierzyński described the interior of Pod Picadorem as making an “odd impression.” This is because futurist artists painted the room “in a manner full of fantasy and humor. It took a while to get used to the overwhelming chaos of their work. Waitresses dressed in some kind of costumes with Bretonne bonnets moved in these ‘futurist frames.’ … A flier on the table announced the dictatorship of the proletariat.”75 Thus, Café Pod Picadorem functioned as both a café and a poetry cabaret, where poets “performed” their poetry, something that was quite new in Poland but became more widespread in the 1920s and 1930s.
In the electric atmosphere of the café, the poets established the group Skamander and its journal. In the first issue of the journal, they articulated their poetics: “We want to be poets of the present, and this is our faith and our whole ‘program.’ … We know that the greatness of art does not appear in subjects but in the forms through which it is expressed, … of words transforming a rough experience into a work of art. We want to be honest workers in that game, through our efforts hidden under frivolous shapes.”76 However, in early 1919, just a few months after the “grand opening,” Pod Picadorem had to move to the basement of the Europejski Hotel, and it closed down soon after, in April 1919, due to lack of funding. The success of the café, which enabled the creation of the most important Polish poetic movement in the first half of the twentieth century, could not sustain it economically. After less than a year, the Skamander poets settled, together with others, into a more permanent and more financially stable home at Café Ziemiańska. Mała Ziemiańska—“little Ziemiańska,” because there were other branches of Ziemiańska in Warsaw—at Mazowiecka Street 12, was established on April 14, 1918, and became the most important literary and cultural café in interwar Warsaw.
In the mid 1920s, the Skamander poets and their publisher, Grydzewski, eventually had a special table reserved for themselves and their guests on the mezzanine of Café Ziemiańska.77 This spatial arrangement had no doubt evolved with their rising reputation and success, as the owner of the café wanted to build on the appeal of these literati who were adored by Polish readers. The admiration of Skamander by the public was the result not only of their poetry and journalism but also of their participation in the world of the Polish cabaret. The 1920s and 1930s constituted the golden age not only of Polish modernism and café culture but also of cabaret, when little theaters (teatrzyk in Polish, kleynkunst revi-teatr in Yiddish) proliferated in Warsaw. Café culture, cabaret, poetry, and satire were closely related in Warsaw, and there was a strong Jewish presence in all of them.78 The most famous cabaret venue and company was Qui Pro Quo (1919–1932), which assembled the creative talents of the Polish-Jewish writers Julian Tuwim and Marian Hemar. Hemar, whose real name was Jan Maria Hescheles, was born in Lemberg/Lwów when it was still part of the Habsburg Empire to well-to-do Jewish parents and began to write and publish poems and songs for cabaret when he was a student at the local university. He moved to Warsaw in 1924 and was recruited to Qui Pro Quo by the manager, Jerzy Boczkowski.
The stellar writing from Hemar, Tuwim, and Słonimski played a significant role in the artistic success of Qui Pro Quo over twelve years and even after its demise, when successive writers and performers managed to revive its model of literary cabaret in different incarnations—until 1939. The ever-changing constellation of artists at Qui Pro Quo, which featured Jews and gentiles alike, worked closely together in ensemble and socialized in Café Ziemiańska and IPS (established in 1930).79 Sometimes the shows themselves were given in cafés, including Małe Qui Pro Quo, which operated on the top floor of Café Ziemiańska as a dedicated space for performance.80 The cabaret Cyrulik Warszawski (The barber of Warsaw) gave its name also to a Polish satirical weekly published in Warsaw from 1926 to 1934. Hemar, Tuwim, and Słonimski were among its main contributors, and cafés appeared often in their work, sometimes with whimsical references to Jews and Jewishness.81
Thus, it is evident why the Skamander table on the mezzanine of Café Ziemiańska acquired the meaning of an “elevated space” for revered poets and cultural figures. Writers from various parts of Poland’s literary scene paid visits to this table, including Adam Ważyk, the futurist Jewish poet Aleksander Wat, and the older poet Stefan Żeromski, as well as the young modernist prose writer Witold Gombrowicz.82 Gombrowicz wrote in his memoirs about visiting Ziemiańska every single evening around nine. He sat at a table, ordered a “small black coffee,” and waited until his café companions gathered. “A café,” wrote Gombrowicz, “can become an addiction.… For a real habitué, not to go to the café at the designated time is simply to fall ill. In a short time, I became such a fanatic that I set aside all my other evening activities.” Gombrowicz claimed that one entered Café Ziemiańska “from the street into darkness, a fearful haze of smoke and stale air, from which abyss there loomed astonishing faces striving to communicate by shouts and gestures in the ever-present din.” Like many other observers, Gombrowicz noted that Café Ziemiańska had its own hierarchy: “in the intellectual sense it was a multistoried edifice, and it wasn’t so easy to transplant oneself from a lower floor to a higher one.”83
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