The existence of cafés and their importance was not just the subjective experience of Fichman but was attested by many others; nor were they only sites of literary exchange. The newly established Hebrew newspaper Ha-tsofeh noted, in an article written by the editor A. A. Friedman in 1904, that “the number of cafés in our city has grown at an alarming rate of late.” The reason Friedman gave for the rise and popularity of cafés in Jewish Warsaw was “the growing number of people living in our city on their own without their families.”18 These were young single people, who often left their parents and extended family behind in the small town. As new migrants to the big city, they found a home in such places as the “Zionist café” on Dzielna Street, Glotser’s café on Dzika Street, and Sholem’s café on Gęsia Street, all in the crowded Jewish district. As Scott Ury has claimed in his study of the transformation of Warsaw Jewry in the period leading to and around the aborted 1905 revolution, cafés were sites of intense cultural and political exchange.19 These cafés were vital thirdspaces that fostered debate and the exchange of ideas and were crucial in making Warsaw part of a network of transnational Jewish culture during these stormy years.
The activist Abraham Teitelbaum remembered how he became radicalized and intoxicated with revolutionary politics in Sholem’s café:
Our secret group used to gather for enlightenment, education, conversations and lessons in Sholem’s café on 29 Gęsia St.… One ascended a few steps to enter the not too big room with tables, which were always packed with young men and women, who would lose their temper and discuss, laugh and be loudly angry. The place always smelled of coffee with cheesecake. The same was also in the further smaller rooms. But the very last room was given to our group, when we used to … listen to the talks of our leader, comrade Lampert, or to the leaders of other groups that would come to us.20
Sholem’s café—built of multiple, and ever-smaller, rooms and similar to other cafés in the Nalewki area of this period—was later depicted in Sholem Asch’s Yiddish novel Varshe (Warsaw, 1929). In the novel, the café is the center of the Jewish socialist party, where the members of the “Central Committee,” who keep their identity hidden at any price, meet inside the kitchen of the bustling café. In this café, the protagonist of the novel, Zachary Mirkin, the alienated son of a Russian-Jewish industrialist, has been recruited to socialist circles. This was accomplished with the thought that he could help by preying on the stronghold of “capitalist” industry in Łódź, using his family connections.21
Reyzen, who lived in Warsaw between 1900 and 1911, before migrating to New York City, remembered another place in the Jewish district of the city as an important space of politics and culture: “the Zionist café” on Dzielna Street. This café, which was owned by a man known simply as “the quiet Jew,” was, like Sholem’s café, “hidden deep in a courtyard, on the first floor.” According to Reyzen, it was good that this “Zionist café”—which, despite its nickname, nevertheless attracted socialist revolutionaries who were not part of the Zionist movement, like Reyzen himself—was hidden because “voices and screams could always be heard from there.” Reyzen wrote that in a café facing the street, it would certainly be impossible to conduct “the warring arguments so freely and undisturbed,” since “people who pass by would interrupt because of curiosity, or the police would have to get involved.”22 Reyzen also wrote about Glotser’s café on 45 Dzika Street, a place that attracted mostly maskilim and Hebrew tutors and teachers. Among the teachers there were some young Hebrew writers who belonged to the literary movement ushered in by Ben Avigdor, the editor and publisher. According to Reyzen, the owner, Mr. Glotser, was a maskil and “could not bear to see how one of the young Hebrew teachers and writers ‘wickedly’ tore off the crowns of the ‘old’ maskilim writers.” Thus, Reyzen claimed, in Glotser’s café, the poetic war between old and new in Hebrew literature took place, with people such as the bilingual Hebrew-Yiddish writer Hersh Dovid Nomberg leading the call for modernist literature in the two languages.23
The most important and famous Jewish café during the first decade of the twentieth century was Kotik’s café. It was located at the very heart of Jewish Warsaw, in a courtyard on 31 Nalewki Street. Established by the activist Yehezkel (Khatskl) Kotik in the 1890s, the café quickly became a regular meeting point for Jewish writers, intellectuals, and activists from a variety of political and ideological backgrounds.24 The Yiddish journalist and folklorist A. Litvin (Shmuel Leib Hurwitz) wrote that in the early 1900s, “[Kotik’s] café was the most remarkable Jewish café in the entire world.”25
The Jewish publisher Shlomo Shrebrek, who came to Warsaw from Vilna, confirmed in his memoirs that during these years, much of the literary activity of the young writers was done in Kotik’s: “During this time, Reyzen and Nomberg were active, and around them was a happy gang in the café; they started to create a new culture in Yiddish.”26 In Kotik’s café, writes Shrebrek, “people always read new stories and poems before they were published.” Shrebrek’s description highlights the experience of the café: in its cramped and smoky space, “everybody took off their mundane clothes and donned literary and artistic attire.” Yet Kotik’s café was not only a place for writers. Shrebrek writes that many visitors were actually “modest businessmen, mediators and agents, clerks and sometimes the occasional teacher.” Apart from the fact that it was inexpensive, the attraction of Kotik’s café was the existence of free newspapers in various languages. Because papers were readily available, “people would sit there for hours and hours; they would read the paper, get to know one another, and converse.” Even those who met there for the first time, claimed Shrebrek, “would speak to each other like old friends, … about new literary works, recent newspaper articles, and the lives of the writers themselves, … about Zionism, local and general affairs.”27
Litvin remembered how when he first came to Kotik’s café, the owner gave him a Yiddish pamphlet he had written. When Kotik learned that Litvin could read Hebrew, he gave him a pamphlet written in Hebrew as well. According to Litvin, Kotik had an uncanny sense of his customers, and he knew which reading materials he should give to whom.28 Reyzen also remembered that Kotik’s café was frequented by “salespeople and clerks, budding writers and Hebrew teachers, Zionists and Bundists, PPS [Polish Socialist Party] members and the unaffiliated. This mixture of habitués naturally sparked off debates.”29 According to Reyzen, Mrs. Kotik, who ran the operation together with her husband, did not enjoy the arguments and angrily rushed to hush the contestants, fearful that the noise would draw unwanted attention from the police. Kotik sometimes neglected the business of the café, devoting himself instead to the publication of his pamphlets at his own expense.30
Litvin claimed that Kotik’s café was especially important for Litvaks such as Kotik himself, that is, for the Jews who relocated from small towns in Lithuania and the Pale of Settlement to the big city. The majority of the Hebrew and Yiddish writers in Warsaw were Litvaks, who had to adjust to life in the Polish metropolis. Litvin, like many others, took notice of the fact that Kotik was not merely a café owner but a devoted member of the community, forming mutual aid societies for the needy migrants who felt lost in Warsaw.