Even more poignant is Reyzen’s Yiddish story “Fermashkent zikh aleyn” (To pawn yourself, 1905). This dark story is told through the point of view of Velvl Klinger, a young, single, and penniless Jewish teacher who shares a cold apartment in Warsaw with two other teachers like him. He dreams about being a poet but has been unable to publish any of his poems in the Warsaw press. One sunny morning in the early spring, he walks around the streets of Warsaw hungry and thirsty, and then he passes by “the famous café,” where “teachers, poets, critics, and readers he knew could be found whenever they had a few groshn [pennies] in their pockets.”43 Velvl goes in the café, but he cannot find any friends to borrow money from. He knows he must order something to quiet his gnawing hunger and to avoid the suspicion of the young waitress. The café gradually becomes for Velvl a self-imposed prison, where he feels as if he “pawns his own body and soul.” Even the ending of the story, in which someone finally lends Velvl twenty kopeks, does not bring real relief to the anxious protagonist. The Warsaw café in this story is not a place of gathering and exchange but a claustrophobic space of desperation, alienation, loneliness, and the miserable economic condition of a young, educated Jewish man who cannot find an anchor in the city. The female waitress and the unfamiliar visitors are dreaded because they cannot provide the protagonist any help.
The ethnic, sexual, and socioeconomic tensions and conflicts around Warsaw cafés, which are so pronounced in the stories of the writers who presumably were their most faithful habitués, find echoes in a memoir written by Ephraim Kaganowski, one of the very few Yiddish writers born and raised in Warsaw. He told about an incident involving Sholem Asch, when he had started to rise in fame in Poland and abroad and became a well-paid writer. At that point, Asch, Nomberg, and Reyzen sat in Kotik’s café, and Asch took out a hundred-ruble note, which provoked much excitement. According to Kaganowski, everyone in the café inspected the note. Reyzen said that he saw such a large sum of money for the first time in his life, while Kotik did not even have enough to give change for such a large note.44
Kaganowski also wrote about the significant changes that happened in Jewish Warsaw during the years after 1905. “The Jewish sons and daughters who wanted to merge with the Polish world,” he claimed, “unwillingly joined the streaming march to a new realm, which was only steps away from the Nalewki area.”45 According to Kaganowski, the young Yiddish and Hebrew writers discovered that on the main streets of the city, one could see the Polish writers and artists, whom they secretly admired: “One can see them as living people in a café, at a table in Marszałkowska Street.”46 Kaganowski remembered that another young Yiddish writer and journalist, Moyshe-Yosef Dikshteyn, known to everybody by the pseudonym Kawa (“Coffee” in Polish and many languages), discovered one day that “in the big, bright Café Ostrowski, on the corner of Marszałkowska and Złota, Nomberg and Reyzen, and sometimes Asch, sit at a table every evening, and even the revered Y. L. Peretz likes to go there from time to time.” And at this, remarked Kaganowski, “the big divide between the young and the known and recognized arose again.”47 The fact that Jewish writers and intellectuals during the years leading to World War I went to Café Ostrowski was also noted by A. Litvin. In 1914, he wrote, “Today there are Jewish literati, for whom it is beneath their dignity to drink coffee at Kotik’s. They find their way to the refined cafés ‘Bristol’ and ‘Ostrowski.’ ”48
Figure 2.1. Postcard of Café Ostrowski
The lure of the Polish cafés to Jewish literati in this period might explain one of Menakhem-Mendl’s more enigmatic letters, written in 1913. Menakhem-Mendl writes to his wife, “Our writers, they write and write and in the end they take themselves to a Polish café to drink tea, in spite of the people who look at them as if they were dogs eating shalakh manos [a traditional gift that one sends on Purim].” He claimed to have pleaded with them, “ ‘Brothers, how is it possible to do such a thing? It’s a shame, an embarrassment before the whole world! …’ They said: ‘What can we do that there is no choice? There’s no proper Jewish café in Warsaw.’ ” When Menakhem-Mendl heard this pronouncement, he immediately came up with a new scheme:
“If there isn’t one, we should see to it that there is one.” They said, “You are a man with schemes, Menakhem-Mendl himself, why don’t you come up with a scheme for one?” And I said: “Give me one week.” … So off I went and planned a project … of a Jewish café [financed] by stocks. The café will be for writers and also for nonwriters, and there one could get not only a cup of coffee, tea, chocolate, bread with butter, and so forth but also at cost food and drink, a glass of beer, cigarettes, a hat if you need it.… With the profit left after the stockholders’ dividends, we could support all the Jewish writers in Warsaw.”49
Always attuned to Jewish urban modernity, Sholem Aleichem gives us, through the seemingly outrageous plans of Menakhem-Mendl, a good rundown of the various tensions in Jewish café life. He also points at the exact moment when Yiddish and Hebrew writers would venture into Polish cafés because they wanted to move beyond the confines of the Jewish quarter and shed their association with the impoverished Jewish community and cafés such as Kotik’s. As we shall see, Sholem Aleichem also gave an almost prophetic glimpse of what was to come next in Warsaw Jewish cultural life and its cafés in the interwar period.
“This Is How Jewish Culture Is Created”: The Writers’ Club in Tłomackie 13
The outbreak of World War I brought a deterioration of the economic and political position of Warsaw Jews. Both the tsarist authorities and the Polish nationalists saw Jews as supporting the German war effort. It is not surprising that many welcomed the defeats of the Imperial Russian Army in the spring of 1915 and the brief German rule during the war years. After the war, on November 1918, Warsaw became the capital of an independent Polish state freed from Russian rule. A large civil service now made its home in the city, and Warsaw was the focus of the country’s political and cultural life. After the Bolshevik revolution, as some forms of Jewish culture in Soviet Russia were suppressed, Warsaw’s importance for the cultivation of Jewish cultural life increased even more. At the same time, the migration out of eastern Europe to such cities as New York, Berlin, and Tel Aviv attracted many figures central to Jewish culture. The migration to and from Warsaw during the early 1920s, in addition to sharpening of political, ideological, and literary alliances, created a dynamic but also very tense atmosphere in the city. The young Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, who settled in Warsaw in 1923, wrote that “the Zionist, socialist, and communist movements snatched most of the young people. Organizations, clubs, and libraries sprouted like mushrooms after a rain. Jewish Poland, in these first years after the war, experienced a spiritual revolution.”50
In terms of urban space, the heart of Jewish Warsaw still revolved around Nalewki and the nearby Grzybów district, but Jews could now be found in significant numbers throughout the city. The interwar period ushered in a cultural and political struggle over the nature of the newly independent Polish state, as well as over what it meant to be Polish and Jewish. Increasing numbers of educated and acculturated Jews used Polish as their primary language of communication, and some of them became highly prominent in Polish literary and cultural life. At the same time, Polish nationalism and anti-Semitism became stronger and more vocal. A large part of Warsaw Jewry strongly identified with Jewish nationalism, religious orthodoxy, socialism, communism, and “folkism.” Literary and cultural movements also became highly politicized, and the choice to write in Yiddish, Polish, or Hebrew was more aligned along political lines.
These deep divisions within Jewish culture, as well as some points of contact between different people and groups, were centered