A Rich Brew. Shachar M. Pinsker
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
Figure 2.4. Photograph of a literary group in a Warsaw café, 1933 (Courtesy of Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe, Warsaw)
The “elevated space” of the Skamander poets highlighted their Jewishness and their highly contentious status as both “Jews” and “Poles.” Gombrowicz, who was raised Catholic but defined himself as a “secular humanist,” wrote about the poetic alliances he had at Café Ziemiańska, which was, according to him, marked as a Polish-Jewish space: “my friendship with Jews began to blossom, and in the end in the Ziemiańska I became known as ‘the King of the Jews,’ since it was enough for me to sit down at a table to be surrounded by hordes of Semites; at the time they were my most gracious listeners.”84 The elusive sense of “Jewishness” of Ziemiańska’s habitués had conflicting meanings to different people. As the historian Marci Shore has claimed, those among the Polish intelligentsia who were of Jewish origin (Tuwim, Słonimski, Wat, and Grydzewski) were “first- or second-generation assimilated Jews, Polish patriots and cosmopolitans, their families often split apart by differing responses to modernity.”85
Figure 2.5. Władysław Daszewski, caricature showing Jan Lechoń, Julian Tuwim, and Antoni Słonimski sitting at their table at Café Ziemiańska with Colonel Bolesław and Wieniawa-Długoszowski, Wiadomości literackie 36 (1928)
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