A RICH BREW
A Rich Brew
How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture
Shachar M. Pinsker
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
© 2018 by New York University
All rights reserved
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pinsker, Shachar, author.
Title: A Rich brew : how cafés created modern Jewish culture / Shachar M. Pinsker.
Description: New York : New York University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017034136 | ISBN 9781479827893 (cl : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Jews—Social life and customs—19th century. | Jews—Social life and customs—20th century. | Jews—Intellectual life—19th century. | Jews—Intellectual life—20th century. | Coffeehouses—Social aspects.
Classification: LCC DS112 .P64 2018 | DDC 305.892/4—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034136
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This book is dedicated to my wife, Amanda Fisher, and to my dear friend David Ehrlich.
CONTENTS
A Note on Transliteration and Translation
Introduction: The Silk Road of Modern Jewish Creativity
1. Odessa: Jewish Sages, Luftmenshen, Gangsters, and the Odessit in the Café
2. Warsaw: Between Kotik’s Café and the Ziemiańska
3. Vienna: The “Matzo Island” and the Functioning Myths of the Viennese Café
4. Berlin: From the Gelehrtes Kaffeehaus to the Romanisches Café
5. New York City: Kibitzing in the Cafés of the New World
6. Tel Aviv–Jaffa: The “First Hebrew City” or a City of Many Cafés?
A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION
Modern Jewish culture is multilingual, and the sources I draw on, cite, and analyze in this book are in Hebrew, Yiddish, German, English, Russian, and Polish. Three of these languages do not use Roman characters, and this fact creates a major problem, since there are various norms and variations. Creating a perfectly consistent system of transliteration in English across the various languages is doomed to fail, despite the best intentions. The purpose of transliteration is to assist readers of English who are not familiar with the original languages, and this principle takes precedence over the desire for consistency. Nevertheless, I try to be consistent within each language. For Hebrew, I follow the Prooftexts journal system of Romanization, which is a modified, simplified version of the Library of Congress system. For Yiddish, I follow the YIVO system. For Russian, I follow the Library of Congress system. For proper names of people and places, I try to retain the form most familiar to readers of English.
When texts from foreign languages have been translated into English, I use and cite these published translations. Otherwise, translations are mine, with much-needed assistance from experts on languages in which I am not proficient.
Introduction
The Silk Road of Modern Jewish Creativity
In January 1907, a young and handsome Jewish man took the train from his small hometown of Buczacz to the city of Lemberg. The nineteen-year-old was an aspiring Yiddish and Hebrew writer by the name of Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes, better known to us as S. Y. Agnon, the winner of the 1966 Nobel Prize for literature. The trip to Lemberg—the provincial capital of Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire—took him only a few hours, but it changed his life. Shmuel Yosef was traveling in order to become an assistant to Gershom Bader, an older journalist and writer of fiction who wrote in Hebrew, Yiddish, German, and Polish. Bader had established a Hebrew daily newspaper with the name ‘Et (Time) and invited Shmuel Yosef to assist him. This was an opportunity he could not refuse.1 In Lemberg—also known as Lvov in Russian, L’viv in Ukrainian, and Lwów in Polish—the budding writer encountered many institutions that he had never before seen: boulevards, parks, theaters, museums, and an opera house. One urban institution made a particular impression: the café.2
Lemberg in the early twentieth century was renowned for its coffeehouses. Bader and other Jewish writers frequently socialized in cafés; sometimes they would also write or edit there, using the café table as their working desk.3 In spite of the energy and optimism of Bader, the Hebrew daily paper quickly faltered, and he was soon forced to close it down. Shmuel Yosef lost his source of income and returned home. But during the months in which he lived in Lemberg, he visited several cafés and met many Jewish writers, politicians, and intellectuals, as well as people from many other walks of life, Jews and non-Jews, young and old, rich and poor.4 The polyglot enthusiasm of Lemberg’s café, an institution held together seemingly by little more than the desire for coffee and conversation, made a strong impact on him.
A little more than a year later, in April 1908, Shmuel Yosef traveled to Lemberg once again. This time, he had decided to leave his parents’ home and migrate to Palestine in the Ottoman Empire. On his way there, he stopped in a few European cities. First, he arrived at Lemberg’s railway station and went directly to the café to bid farewell to his old friends and to meet new ones. After his visit in Lemberg, Shmuel Yosef traveled to Kraków and then to the capital city Vienna, where he met other Jewish intellectuals in still more Kaffeehäuser. At the end of this trip, he arrived at the Arab port of Jaffa on the Mediterranean coast. He lived in Jaffa