Kotik’s café appeared, by its name or otherwise, in literary texts as well. One notable example is a text by Sholem Aleichem, who visited Warsaw many times in the first decade of the twentieth century and became friends with Kotik.32 Sholem Aleichem transferred his antihero Menakhem-Mendl from Odessa and Kiev to Warsaw in the last series of letters to his wife, Sheyne-Sheyndl, which was serialized in the Yiddish newspaper Haynt in 1913.33 Now Menakhem-Mendl was not an aspiring stock-exchange merchant but was employed as a journalist, writing on current events and Jewish and international politics. As soon as Menakhem-Mendl finds work as a journalist, he looks for a café in which he can “enjoy a coffee with a friend, along with everything else which a human being requires.” Not surprisingly, Menakhem-Mendl’s first stop is Kotik’s: “I take my walking stick and go to my café to drink coffee and to chat with people. My café is on Nalewki, Kotik’s place. Why Khatskl Kotik’s place, you ask? To spite the Polacks [the Polish Jews]!” According to Menakhem-Mendl’s letter, some Poles decided to boycott Jewish businesses such as Kotik’s café, and while some “assimilated” Polish Jews avoided these places, he and other Litvaks went to Kotik’s place as an act of resistance. “We sit and sit, Khatskl Kotik and me, over a cup of coffee and discuss our Jewish brethren.”34 The conversations between Menakhem-Mendl and Kotik, which always take place in the café, range from politics and wars to imaginary “projects” and “schemes” suggested by Menakhem-Mendl. Despite the fact that Sholem Aleichem was not a Warsaw resident, the letters of his Menakhem-Mendl about Kotik’s café give us a good glimpse into the conversations and movements that took place in this urban space during the first decade of the twentieth century and its importance to the creation of transnational modern Jewish culture.
Gender, Class, Sociability, and Loneliness in the Café
Looking at Kotik’s political undertakings around his café and some of the writings about it, it is tempting to describe the café as a remarkable example of “a Jewish public sphere.” While this is true to some extent, Kotik’s café should also be understood as a thirdspace. It did function as a space in which individuals from a variety of political and intellectual camps could gather to debate and create the affairs of the day, but this does not mean that Kotik’s café and others like it were truly open to all or free of economic, social, and cultural tensions.35 Sholem Aleichem’s Menakhem-Mendl alluded to some of these tensions when he wrote about boycotts of some Jewish cafés, but we can see other conflicts when we read both the fictional stories and some of the memoirs written by other Hebrew and Yiddish writers. One of the tensions had to do with gender and with the presence of women, which is especially vivid in one of Sholem Asch’s early short stories.
When Asch arrived in Warsaw in 1900, he wrote and published in both Hebrew and Yiddish. The Hebrew story “Mi-ḥaye ha-yehudim be polin-rusya” (From the life of Jews in Russia-Poland, 1901) takes place mostly in Warsaw, recounting the travails of Neta Woolf, who turns to God in search of relief from financial hardships and familial problems.36 Reb Neta’s young and beloved daughter, Rokhele, is a modern Jewish woman, educated and independent in spirit. With knowledge of Yiddish, Russian, and Polish, she relocates to Warsaw and finds work in a local café on Twarda Street, and tensions quickly arise. Women were often employed as café waitresses in Warsaw, and as a server in such a café, Rokhele is exposed to the lusting eyes of the young, single, Jewish men, the habitués of the café who gather around its tables and chat in a mixture of Yiddish, Polish, and German. Rokhele’s father, who comes every evening to visit the café alone, is pained to see his daughter as the target of so much sexual attention. The short story reaches its open-ended conclusion with this double perspective—that of the older father and the young daughter—who view the same events in different ways. However, both the father and the daughter cannot participate in the conversation and the exchange that takes place in the café: Reb Neta because of his age and traditional background and the fact that the café is the realm of young Jewish men; Rokhele because of her gender and the fact that the café is very much a masculine homosocial space, in which women such as Rokhele can only be an object of men’s gazes and desires.
The gender aspect of the Warsaw Jewish cafés can also be seen in an impressionistic Yiddish story by Lamed Shapiro, who lived and worked in Warsaw in the first decade of the twentieth century, before he migrated to New York City. Shapiro’s story “Berte” (“Bertha,” 1906) takes place in a “Litvak café” in Warsaw. Bertha is a young waitress who catches the attention of Mr. Riegel, a habitué of the café. Bertha is described by Shapiro’s narrator as someone with an “almost childish figure that was slender yet very well proportioned, small dainty hands, and a slim, finely chiseled face.”37 Riegel is attracted to Bertha “on his very first visit to the café” and was “haunted ever since by her soft voice, her way of talking, … and especially her smile.”38 Riegel, who comes daily to the café, becomes more and more smitten with Bertha, and eventually, she seems to him a mystery to be deciphered: “Her smile vexed him.… It appeared to him unnatural, even distasteful.” He does not know whether she is “a beautiful, modest Jewish maiden, or a courtesan with a certain chic.” This ambiguity about Bertha drives him crazy: “I must find the truth once and for all. I will put her to the test.” At the end of the story, Riegel does indeed “put her to the test”—by seizing her hand and arms—but it comes too late, after he finds out that she is engaged to a young Jewish man who works in a Łódź clothing store.39 Shapiro’s story highlights the place of young women in Warsaw’s Jewish cafés. These cafés were spaces of homosociality and at the same time fueled sexual desire and tensions. As a server who did not participate in social and cultural masculine exchange, a woman was often an object of male desire and could easily be seen as a sexually available courtesan.
Sometimes, however, the young women who served as waitresses in Warsaw cafés provided the male protagonists with a sense of comfort, which many of the male figures in the café required badly as strangers in the big city. In Eliezer Steinman’s Hebrew novel Seḥor seḥor (Around and around, 1917–1918) the protagonist, the writer Shalit, puts on his clothes and makes his way to a café on Nalewki Street, where a blond waitress serves him a cup of tea with a graceful smile:
At once, like a bolt of lightning, joy overcame Shalit, and he felt his entire body intoxicated. The cup of bitterness of yesterday, which was awaiting him when he woke up, was now gone. The dark mask that covered his face since he settled down in Warsaw suddenly dissolved like breaking cobwebs, and he could not understand in any way the nature of the élan, the spleen that took hold of him like a pincer. The sense of melancholy moved away from him, and he called the waitress softly as a sister, and all the other café habitués were like his brothers.… Shalit left the café into the street, and everybody walked toward him in pairs or groups, and he saw himself as a member of a densely populated family.40
Other literary texts that take place in Warsaw cafés of this period emphasize the economic difficulties of living in the metropolis. Although these cafés were very different from the spectacle of commodities and respectability that were typical of Odessa’s more upscale cafés, they still highlighted the gaps between those who could afford to pay for them and those who could not. This disparity can be seen in a feuilleton by the Hebrew and Yiddish writer Zalman Shneour, who arrived in Warsaw in 1902: “Beit ha-kahava shel ha-sofrim, Grontzel” (The writers’ café, Grontzel, 1903). The story tells us about a certain café, in which “many writers visit each evening, conversing and arguing among themselves.”41 According to the narrator, this café is especially smoky and steamy, similar in appearance and ambiance to a shvitz—a traditional Jewish steam bath, very common in eastern European towns—in which men used to gather before Shabbat to sweat and to chat. The comparison of the café to the site of male social life, familiar from much of Jewish literature in eastern Europe, is evocative but hardly surprising. However, the