For twenty years between 1918 and 1938, Tłomackie 13 was the address of the association. On the map of Jewish literature and culture during the interwar period, Tłomackie 13 was one of the most important locations. The association was established on March 24, 1916, shortly after Y. L. Peretz’s death in 1915, and was meant to preserve his legacy, as well as to unite and support Yiddish and Jewish writers in Poland. This effort seemed to echo Menakhem-Mendl’s 1913 fictional “scheme” to open such a café for all Jewish writers that would also provide them financial support and protection. To some extent, Menakhem-Mendl’s plan was implemented in Tłomackie 13.52 When activities in Tłomackie 13 began to take place, it served as the address not just of a professional association but of literary and cultural movements that attracted many people. There were drinks, coffee, and simple food on the premises. A number of rooms were furnished with tables and chairs, works of art, and many newspapers, as well as chess and other games and a gramophone with music. The premises functioned as a social meeting place not only for members (i.e., journalists and writers) but also for actors, artists, teachers, guests from abroad, and others who were interested in Jewish culture. In addition, the association offered a large variety of literary readings and parties both for its members and for the general public.53
As we have seen, in the years prior to World War I, many young Jewish writers and journalists were attracted to the cafés in the center of Warsaw, away from the Jewish district. After the war, the attraction did not stop. However, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that the most prominent Polish cafés in interwar Warsaw were associated with “assimilated” or even “converted” Jews, Tłomackie 13 came to fulfill the function of a “literary café.” This happened despite the fact that it was not a privately owned business. This was something that became evident to many people who knew the place, spent much time there, and wrote about it. Thus, Eliyahu Shulman wrote that “Tłomackie 13 was a real literary café, a literary gathering place in the European manner, … the nerve center of Jewish literature and life.”54 Photographs of Tłomackie 13 in the Yiddish press also depict it as a renowned literary café, or kibitzernya, a Yiddish term that was brought to Warsaw from New York City’s cafés (figure 2.2).
Figure 2.2. Photograph of Tłomackie 13, published in Illustrirte vokh (Warsaw), August 17, 1928
Isaac Bashevis Singer, who as a young man made his first foray into Yiddish literature in Tłomackie 13, called the place “Der shrayber klub” (the writers’ club), which was the title of his first autobiographical novel, serialized in 1956.55 Bashevis Singer claimed that “the entire modern Polish Jewry gathered in the writers’ club,” which was also a second home for him and for many others like him.56 He described the first time he went into Tłomackie 13 in 1923 as a young aspiring writer, following the footsteps of his older brother, Israel Joshua. He was in awe of the revered figures, about whom he had heard and read so much before:
Before I opened the door … I tried for some time to summon courage. Why am I trembling like this?—I asked myself—after all they are only flesh and blood.… They also don’t live forever.… I opened the door, and I saw a hall. Opposite, on the other side of the hall, there was a buffet, like in a restaurant. The writers sat by the tables. Some of them ate, others played chess, and some chatted. All of them seemed terribly important to me, full of wisdom and higher knowledge of the kind that elevates man above worldly troubles.… I expected someone to ask me who I am, what do I want, but no one approached me. I stood there with wide-open mouth.57
Bashevis Singer’s retrospective look at Tłomackie 13 beautifully captures his perception of the place as a “literary café,” a place of lofty cultural aspirations, which was nevertheless a space of “flesh and blood,” where people not only wrote, conversed, and debated but also ate, drank, chatted, played games, and gossiped. He also compared, with a mixture of wit and reverence, the space of Tłomackie 13 to a Hasidic synagogue. When Hasidim, he wrote, wanted to have a synagogue of their own, they rented a room and installed shelves full of books, an ark filled with scrolls of Torah, a table, and a few benches. When writers, journalists, and activists wanted to create a space of modern secular Jewish culture, they did the same: they rented a hall and put in some tables and a kitchen, and everything needed was there, as long as people showed up.
Food and drink were central to the place. According to Kaganowski, the owner of the kitchen that served the simple meals, coffee, and tea in Tłomackie 13 was a waiter in one of the city’s many cafés prior to World War I. He was known to everyone as Max, and he ran a café that catered to the “aristocracy of the Jewish underworld.” After an accident and a heart attack, Max could no longer serve these “big guests,” but he wanted to re-create that café feeling in Tłomackie 13, together with his wife, who cooked the food. He never understood, according to Kaganowski, what kind of a place it was and what all those people were doing in such a place, a mixture of café, restaurant, lecture hall, and a space for other activities.58
The vexing mixture of cultural activities, both “high” and “low,” is evident also in a caricature published in the Yiddish press, with the title Oyfn Olimp (On the Olympus; figure 2.3). The cartoon describes revered luminaries—Jewish and non-Jewish, from the ancient and from the recent past—looking from heaven above at Tłomackie 13 below, where there is music and dancing. The caption describes Y. L. Peretz asking, “What kind of literature is it?” Sholem Aleichem, who presumably knows better about such matters, answers, “This is how ‘Jewish Culture’ is created.” The cartoon captured Tłomackie 13 as a space of sociability, with food and drink and people listening to music and dancing but also at the heart of poetic revolutions and literature.
Many of the younger writers who migrated to Warsaw in the years after World War I were not happy with the state of Yiddish literature and sought a change. The modernist Yiddish poets, writers, and artists Melech Ravich, Uri Tzvi Greenberg, Peretz Markish, and Israel Joshua Singer (Isaac’s older brother) used Tłomackie 13 as a platform to launch their new, revolutionary style of Yiddish literature. They articulated their poetics, as well as their frustration over the attitude of the older Yiddish literary establishment toward them, and established modernist groups and small magazines such as Khaliyastre (Gang), which brought the expressionist mode into Yiddish literature.
Stormy debates over the current and future character of modern Yiddish literature took place in Tłomackie 13. Isaac Bashevis Singer called Tłomackie 13 “the temple of Yiddish literature” and “the bourse,” the stock exchange of Yiddish literature in Poland.59 This was not a place like Café Fanconi in Odessa, where presumably business activity also took place, but a place of literary and cultural “business.” Thus, writes Bashevis Singer, it was “always filled with young talents who came from every corner of the country … with the will to make a revolution in literature. They strolled in provincial fur coats and boots. In the little magazines they published … they used a difficult archaic Yiddish, thickened with provincialism.”60 The poet Melech Ravitch, who moved to Warsaw in 1921 from Vienna, remembered how lively and full of contradictions this thirdspace was. In the same building of Tłomackie 13, he wrote, the office of the youth movement of Mizrahi (Orthodox Zionist Jewry) was also located.61 The wide stairs of the building were full of Jews in traditional garb