Figure 2.3. Yiddish caricature depicting Tłomackie 13 as a literary café, published in Ber Isaac Rozen, Tlomatske 13 (Buenos Aires: Tsentral-Farband fun poylishe yidn in Argenṭine, 1950)
Tłomackie 13 was the gathering place for writers, poets, and journalists from different shades of the Jewish political spectrum, and somehow the space accepted them all. Ravitch wrote that there were four to five hundred members of the professional association, who were paying dues, but the place was always full of people, whether they were members or not, whether they paid or not.62 Zusman Segalovitsh remembered the place as the bude (den). “Without it,” he wrote, “we could not live. Its door was always open. We felt free there.”63 Kadya Molodowsky was one of the very few women who, while teaching children in Jewish schools in Warsaw, made a name for herself as a Yiddish writer and journalist. She used to visit Tłomackie 13 but felt marginal in what was experienced as mostly a homosocial, masculine space. In her memoir of Warsaw in the 1920s, Molodowsky wrote that from her perspective, “it was always dark” in Tłomackie 13. There was, she wrote, “a medley of different ‘institutions’ in one place. By day, there was a café-restaurant.… People would eat, talk, and some played chess.” However, it was difficult for Molodowski to understand “how Yiddish writers could sit over chess boards with furrowed brows … when there was so much poverty [in Jewish Warsaw].”64 Molodowsky made it clear that Tłomackie 13 might have fulfilled the role of café, but it was hard for her to find a place there as a woman writer who was mostly concerned about children and the poverty and desperation of Jewish life in interwar Warsaw.
Ephraim Kaganowski wrote that Tłomackie 13 became a professional institution only for the newspaper guild, and writers of poetry and fiction were merely “tolerated” there. He claimed that the publishers of the daily newspapers opened the door for the “unfortunate writers, who nevertheless gave the place a particular charm.”65 Kaganowski might have been correct about the real source of money and power within Tłomackie 13. However, the place was also significant to the development of all highbrow Yiddish literature. The best example of this development was Literarishe bleter (Literary pages, 1924–1939); the most important literary and cultural Yiddish weekly journal in interwar Poland and around the world was located, physically and symbolically, within the walls of Tłomackie 13. Initially, Ravitch, Markish, I. J. Singer, and Nakhmen Mayzl edited and published the new periodical at their own expense. Later it was part of the Boris Kletskin publishing house, and Mayzl became its editor in chief. Literarishe bleter was highly influenced by a similar Warsaw literary magazine, Wiadomości literackie (Literary news), which was published in exactly the same years, between 1924 and 1939, and was the most important journal of Polish literature and culture in the interwar period. Mayzl wrote in his memoir, “We read Wiadomości literackie with great enthusiasm; we were impressed by its large canvas, and we were jealous.”66
Mayzl and his friends, who closely followed the developments in Polish literature and culture, decided to do something similar in Yiddish, and their efforts saw much success with Literarishe bleter. The similarity between these “twin weeklies,” as Aleksandra Geller has called them, is closely related to Warsaw cafés, because both the Yiddish and the Polish journal were rooted in café life.67 Significantly, this was one of the few points of contact between the Jews who were active in Polish and those who were active in Yiddish, at the same time that two groups experienced an ever-growing chasm.
Jewishness and Polishness in Interwar Warsaw Cafés and Cabarets
Wiadomości literackie was created and edited by Mieczysław Grydzewski, who came from an acculturated Jewish family and even converted to Protestantism but never denied or tried to hide his Jewishness. According to Grydzewski, the very idea of the journal was “born between two tables at Café Ziemiańska on Mazowiecka Street.”68 Grydzewski often criticized the separatism and “backwardness” of Jews who did not acculturate into Polish culture. Grydzewski and Wiadomości literackie were closely related to Skamander, the most important and active modernist Polish literary group in the interwar period.69 The prominent members of Skamander were Tuwim, Słonimski, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Kazimierz Wierzyński, and Jan Lechoń. Of the group, which was described by the Jewish-Polish poet and writer Aleksander Wat as a constellation of talent “one encounters once in a hundred years,”70 the most gifted and versatile were Tuwim and Słonimski. Słonimski was the son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. His grandfather Ḥayim Zelig Słonimski was, we might recall, a maskil, the founder and editor of the journal Ha-tsfirah. His good friend Julian Tuwim was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Łódź and had a remarkable gift for verse, writing not only modernist poetry but also for cabarets and for children with much success.71
The friendship between Tuwim and Słonimski, and their poetic activities, took place mostly in the aforementioned Café Ziemiańska. However, the group was created on November 29, 1918, in another café, a small establishment called Pod Picadorem on 57 Nowy Świat. The poster advertising the founding of the café exuded a mix of artistic and political exuberance: “Countrymen! Workers, soldiers, children, seniors, people, women, and dramatic writers! … A great tournament of poets, musicians, and painters, daily from 9 to 11 p.m. Young Varsovian artists, unite!!!”72 The opening night of the café was a great success. Słonimski recalled that Pod Picadorem was arranged to resemble the newly created modernist clubs and cafés in Russia. The great Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who was involved in such a café, was admired by the Skamander group.
Słonimski wrote that everyone “could enter Pod Picadorem Café for as little as five marks. They were selling neither vodka nor meat there.” According to his account, it was a small café where “sober poets used to read their poems aloud in front of random audiences.” Words such as “liberty, independence, Poland, communism, and revolution did not have the sound … of disappointment; we were full of strength and hope. In the evening, on the day of the opening of the café, all the elite of contemporary Warsaw came.”73 In December 1918, the newspaper Świat reported that “Café Pod Picadorem has nothing to do with Parisian Chat Noir or Lapin Agile. Quite different in its character, it is something between an ordinary Parisian café, and even a Berlin café, and a Warsaw cabaret. It was established for the public, … which should support not only the café itself, with its electricity, heating, and the servers dressed as Dutchmen, but also the poets associated with [it].”74 The poet Kazimierz Wierzyński described the interior of Pod Picadorem as making an “odd impression.” This is because futurist artists painted the room “in a manner full of fantasy and humor. It took a while to get used to the overwhelming chaos of their work. Waitresses dressed in some kind of costumes with Bretonne bonnets moved in these ‘futurist frames.’ … A flier on the table announced the dictatorship of the proletariat.”75 Thus, Café Pod Picadorem functioned as both a café and a poetry cabaret, where poets “performed” their poetry, something that was quite new in Poland but became more widespread in the 1920s and 1930s.
In the electric atmosphere of the café, the poets established the group Skamander and its journal. In the first issue of the journal, they articulated their poetics: “We want to be poets of the present, and this is our faith and our whole ‘program.’ … We know that the greatness of art does not appear in subjects but in the forms through which it is expressed, … of words transforming a rough experience into a work of art. We want to be honest workers in that game, through our efforts hidden under frivolous shapes.”76 However, in early 1919, just a few months after the “grand opening,” Pod Picadorem had to move to the basement of the Europejski Hotel, and it closed down soon after, in April 1919, due to lack of funding. The success of the café, which enabled the creation of the most important Polish poetic movement in the first half of the twentieth century, could not sustain it economically. After less than a year, the Skamander poets settled, together with others, into a more permanent and more financially stable home at Café Ziemiańska. Mała Ziemiańska—“little Ziemiańska,” because there were other branches of Ziemiańska in Warsaw—at Mazowiecka Street 12, was established on April 14, 1918, and became the most important literary and cultural café in interwar Warsaw.