Cafés in the Nalewki area, as well as in other parts of Warsaw during the last decades of the nineteenth century, became important for the emergence of Jewish literature and culture in fin-de-siècle Warsaw. Dovid Pinski was a Yiddish writer and playwright who migrated to Warsaw in 1892 and was immediately involved in a flurry of literary and cultural projects, which he undertook together with two other new arrivals in Warsaw: the writers Mordkhe Spector and Y. L. Peretz. Peretz, who quickly emerged as the most important Jewish literary and cultural figure, moved to Warsaw from the Polish town of Zamość in 1888. Pinski tells us in his memoir about the time he met with Peretz and Spector in a small café on Nalewki Street sometime in February 1894 and how the three of them first came up with the idea to publish Yontev bletlekh (Holiday issues), one of the important Yiddish literary and political publications in this period. In the café, the three men decided to edit and publish the periodical in Warsaw, despite limited funding and the Russian Empire’s restriction on such publications. Their plan was to issue the journal irregularly on Jewish holidays, camouflaging its literary and social reformist intentions as “reading material for the holiday.”10 In this case, the café was a place of sociability and exchange, an incubator of transnational Jewish press culture and new literary projects, as well as a site of “clandestine” activity, which was necessary in Congress Poland, given the tight censorship of the Russian tsarist regime.
The plan of Pinski, Peretz, and Spector was one of several that launched publications in Yiddish and Hebrew. In 1891, a few years after the establishment of Ha-tsfirah as a daily paper, Avraham Leib Shalkovich—known better by his pen name, Ben Avigdor—moved to Warsaw and began to produce a series of inexpensive and accessible volumes of Hebrew fiction with the name Sifrei agorah (Penny books). Ben Avigdor’s plan was to sell “thousands and ten thousands books” and to gradually “create a [Jewish] reading public with good literary taste.”11 The number of Hebrew readers in this period never reached such high numbers. Nevertheless, Ben Avigdor and other competitors and collaborators created, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, a Hebrew book market in Warsaw. Ben Avigdor’s relative success enabled him to open Tushiyah, the first privately owned, modern Hebrew press, and to be involved in the yearly almanac Luaḥ aḥiasaf.
Some of these Hebrew literary and publishing projects took place in cafés in or around the Jewish district, further positioning Warsaw and its cafés as an anchor on the map of modern Jewish culture. This placement can be best seen in a story written by David Frishman, a Hebrew and Yiddish writer, critic, and translator who migrated to the city in the 1880s and was instrumental to the growth of Jewish culture in Warsaw. Frishman’s story “Be-veyt ha-redaktsya” (In the editorial house, 1892) gives readers a glimpse into Jewish literary life and the centrality of cafés in them.12 The first-person narrator begins the story with a scene in a café near the gate of the Saxon Garden—directly next to the Jewish district—owned by an Italian named Skartazini, where Jewish writers and journalists gather daily to talk, smoke, and play chess, with some staying in the café “from morning to evening.” The narrator tells us about certain characters in the café known by their nicknames—“the professor,” the “Rabbi,” and the “accountant,” as well as a mysterious man nicknamed “the editor,” whom no one really knows and with whom the narrator converses and plays chess occasionally. The narrator’s interest in this man grows when he walks to his place on Pańska Street and finds much in common with him, as both are involved in Hebrew literature. When “the editor” invites the narrator to enter his apartment, he finds a weekly Hebrew magazine with the title Reshut ha-yaḥid (A private domain), whose sole writer and reader is “the editor” himself. To the narrator’s great surprise, he finds that “the editor” has written many Hebrew plays and stories, which remained unpublished. The narrator thinks the editor to be mad but quickly comes to realize that he simply could not find his place in the new “market” of late-nineteenth-century Jewish literature.
Frishman’s story presents some of the complexity of Jewish cultural life in Warsaw of the last decades of the nineteenth century. The café in his story is presented as a thirdspace—not just as a place of sociability but as a new institution in Warsaw, intimately related to the emerging Jewish press culture of newspapers and publishing houses that connected the city to a network of modern Jewish culture. At the same time, Frishman’s story highlights the fact that the café could also be a space of loneliness, alienation, and eccentricity, in which some of the new active players in the creation of modern Jewish culture in Warsaw could thrive and occasionally also be forsaken.
Litvaks and Polacks, Writers and Revolutionaries
At the turn of the twentieth century, Warsaw’s industrial growth stimulated a rapid increase in the city’s population, which reached 625,000 in 1897, as well as a substantial increase in the Jewish population, which rose to 210,500 in 1897 and 337,000 in 1914. This resulted not only from natural growth and migration from the small towns of Congress Kingdom but also from the movement of Jews from the Russian Pale of Settlement to Warsaw. The migration was mainly due to secularization and the decline of the economic opportunities in the shtetls. In all, by the outbreak of World War I, around 150,000 Litvaks, as Jews from these areas were called, had moved to Warsaw. Jews played a major role in the burgeoning industries of Warsaw and were particularly dominant in the textile, clothing, and tobacco trades. The years down to 1914 also saw a significant increase in the number of Jews who declared their main language as Polish, as well as the number of Jews in business and in the liberal professions. A major catalyst for the cultural and political renaissance of Jewish Warsaw was the attempted Russian revolution of 1905, which resonated especially in the capital of Congress Poland and its Jewish community.13
Cafés with Jewish owners in the Nalewki area became an integral part of Jewish urban culture and served important social, literary, and political roles. Warsaw became a major center of Jewish commerce, which only increased the importance and volume of its newspaper and book publishing. Writers, journalists, and political activists, as well as the growing class of businessmen, gathered around the tables of these cafés. The cold climate of Warsaw, the cramped space in the middle of a commercial center, and the political tensions that characterized Warsaw were all quite different from the situation in Odessa. This difference was reflected in the cafés themselves, which tended to be small, simple, and without much decoration or amenities. The cafés were built inside and were designed to accommodate Warsaw’s harsh winter weather. They were sometimes hidden within courtyards, but they were nevertheless teeming with life.
It is not hard to understand why many Jewish writers who came of age in the first decade of the twentieth century—those young people who were born in the 1880s in the small towns of the Pale of Settlement, Congress Poland, and Galicia, whose mother tongue was Yiddish, and who received traditional education that included immersion in Hebrew texts—were engrossed by Warsaw, an emerging metropolis with the largest Jewish population in Europe. It was in the first years of the 1900s that young writers such as Sholem Asch, Avrom Reyzen, Hersh Dovid Nomberg, Y. Ḥ. Brenner, Gershon Shofman, Uri Nissan Gnessin, Hillel Zeitlin, Pinchas Lachower, Zalman Shneour, Ya’akov Fichman, Y. D. Berkowitz, and Ya’akov Shteinberg moved to Warsaw. In this period, Warsaw became the most significant publishing market for literature and journalism in the two Jewish languages, created by bilingual (or trilingual) writers, with a readership that extended far and beyond into the rest of Europe and the world.14 The young people who came to Warsaw aspired to leave behind the traditional, and often despised, occupation of many maskilim, that of tutoring the sons or daughters