A Rich Brew. Shachar M. Pinsker

      2

      Warsaw

      Between Kotik’s Café and the Ziemiańska

      Sitting in a café like at a cloudlike height,

      I could sit like this till evening crawls in.

      Beyond the windows the bustling rank-and-file,

      Though I don’t know and I can’t hear,

      As silent in my autumnal smile,

      By distant gazing rockingly I disappear.

      —Julian Tuwim, “Melodia” (1928)

      Before the Nazis invaded Warsaw in 1939, the Jewish community of the city, with a population of 375,000, was the largest and most diverse in all of Europe. During the first decades of the twentieth century, Warsaw, the capital of Poland, was a “Jewish metropolis.” Like in Odessa but on a larger scale, Jews made up a full one-third of the city’s population, and aspects of Jewish culture could be found throughout the city.1 At that point in time, numerous cafés in Warsaw became part of an interconnected network, the silk road of modern Jewish culture. However, the creation of this “Jewish metropolis” did not happen overnight and was a relatively late phenomenon in the long history of Warsaw. Unlike the new city of Odessa, the history of Warsaw goes back to the fifteenth century. The early days of a small town named Warszawa coincided with the first significant wave of Jewish migration to Poland. Warsaw became the capital of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569, when King Sigismund III Vasa moved the court from Kraków. At that time, a small number of Jews lived in the city under severe restrictions. Over the centuries, despite a series of expulsions, the Jewish population grew, but Warsaw’s Jewish community became large and gained importance only in the nineteenth century. This occurred mainly after the partition of Poland, which was confirmed at the Congress of Vienna in 1815; there, Warsaw became the capital of “Congress Poland,” the truncated state of Poland ruled by the Russian tsar.2

      Despite this shaky political situation, in the nineteenth century, the city evolved into a major administrative and cultural center, the focus of Polish political and economic life. Its population grew rapidly, from 81,250 in 1816 to 223,000 in 1864, and the number of Jews living in the city rose from 15,600 to 72,800. Jews in Poland were not granted the status of citizenship, and most were still banned from living on certain streets in the center of Warsaw. Nevertheless, during the second half of the nineteenth century, Jewish migration from small towns in Congress Poland and the Pale of Settlement to Warsaw increased. The migrants were mostly traditional Jews—Hasidim and their opponents, the mitnagdim—but a growing circle of acculturated Jews and maskilim also evolved and made Warsaw an important Jewish center.3

      Geographically, politically, and culturally, Warsaw is located between eastern and central Europe. Its proximity to the capital cities of Vienna and Berlin, as well as to the cities of the Russian Empire, exerted various influences on the city. Like other European cities in the modern period, the taste for drinking coffee and tea, and for the urban institution of the coffeehouse, developed slowly, parallel to the growth of “Jewish Warsaw.” In 1724, the first coffeehouse (kawiarnia in Polish) in the kingdom was established in Warsaw by one of King Augustus II’s courtiers. It was located within the perimeter of the king’s Saxon Palace and the royal garden and was mainly attended by men who were part of the king’s court. The next café opened in 1763 in the Market Square and was more accessible to the town’s residents. During the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a number of institutions selling coffee, tea, and pastries were established in Warsaw. As in Odessa and in other European cities in this period, they were run mostly by foreigners: Italians, Swiss, French, and Germans.4

      Throughout the nineteenth century, as the Jewish community in Warsaw grew and matured, so too did spending time in cafés, eating, drinking, and socializing, become more common. Early-nineteenth-century cafés such as Kawiarnia Honoratka, established in 1826, became places of meeting for romantic writers, artists, and musicians such as Frédéric Chopin. They were also the setting for some significant historical and political events, such as the Polish national uprisings against the Russian Empire in 1830–1831 and 1863–1864.5 Some activities in these revolts were planned in Warsaw cafés, beyond the watchful eye of tsarist policemen and officials, as when young Polish officers from the local “Army of Congress” revolted against the Russian Empire. As we have seen in Smolenskin’s novella about the maskil who ran away to Odessa from Warsaw, these officers were soon joined by large segments of Polish society, including some Jews. They not only supported the revolt but also joined the “National Guard” or founded a “Civil Guard.” While both uprisings were eventually crushed by the Imperial Russian Army, cafés, as thirdspaces that were open, at least in theory, to everyone, were utilized for organizing and radicalizing by anti-Russian activists.6

      The presence of Jewish writers and intellectuals in Warsaw cafés became more common and more pronounced in the last decades of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the city was gradually becoming a destination of Jewish migration and a major center of Jewish journalism, literature, and culture in three languages: Polish, Hebrew, and Yiddish. In 1862, Ḥayim Zelig Słonimski, a maskil who settled in Warsaw, established and edited the first Hebrew newspaper in Poland, Ha-tsfirah, mainly as a way to disseminate articles of popular science to the “Jewish masses.” Słonimski was inspired by previous Hebrew papers and journals of maskilim in central and eastern Europe. Ha-tsfirah matured and developed into a major Hebrew paper in the 1880s, published weekly and then daily. At that point, it competed with Izraelita, the first Polish-Jewish weekly journal, established in 1866 by Jewish reformers. It took more time, and the approval of Russian censors, to establish Yiddish weeklies and dailies, but they were created and served as an outlet for aspiring young Yiddish writers as well. Y. L. Peretz, Naḥum Sokolow, and David Frishman, major Hebrew and Yiddish writers and cultural figures, migrated to Warsaw, and they joined the acculturated Jewish writers who were active in Polish. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, a number of Hebrew and Yiddish publishing houses were established in Warsaw, and the city attracted both more Jewish writers and also literary and cultural entrepreneurs, who hoped to find in Warsaw a market for modern Jewish literature.7

      Around the same time, Warsaw became dotted with many cafés; some attracted writers, journalists, and intellectuals as habitués. One such café was Kawiarnia Udziałowa, established in 1884. It was located in one of the most central points of Warsaw, on the corner of Nowy Świat and Aleje Jerozolimskie. Kawiarnia Udziałowa’s waiters were dressed in long, dark-red frock coats, and the café organized concerts and had pool tables, something that was quite common in other European cities as well. But it was also important to the Młoda Polska (Young Poland) literary movement. Among the people who congregated there was Leo Belmont (Leopold Blumental), a Polish-Jewish poet, writer, translator, journalist, and lawyer who wrote for the Polish press and contributed to the weekly Izraelita. Belmont was a founder of the Polish Esperanto Society, and he translated extensively into that language and strove to popularize it. Another habitué of Udziałowa was Jerzy Wasercug (Wasowski), the last editor in chief of Izraelita before it closed down in 1915.8

      If cafés such as the Udziałowa attracted