The link between Jews and cafés, however, becomes more pronounced starting in the nineteenth century. As modernity, the café, and urban life all flourished, so too did secular Jewish culture. Whether called café, Kaffeehaus, kawiarnia, kafe-hoyz, beit-kafe, or any other name, the institution was especially dominant in urban, literary, and artistic life in this period; across many countries, people gathered, wrote, discussed, and debated issues within the café’s walls.16 These urban cafés were especially attractive for Jews in Europe and beyond because Jews did not always find a warm welcome in more exclusive meeting places such as clubs. This was also true in taverns, in which many Jews did not feel comfortable, in spite of the fact that many taverns were also owned by Jews.17 The relatively new institution of the café—often called a “tavern without wine”—emerged as an appealing alternative. It was usually, but not always, inexpensive, felt exclusive without feeling restrictive, and offered a certain degree of freedom from the increasingly prying eyes of the government.18
Cafés, in spite of taking deep roots in various cities and becoming an essential vehicle of culture for numerous countries, always retained an air of “otherness”; both the institution and the drinks that were consumed there did not originate in the local soil.19 This “otherness,” and the mix of the national and transnational characteristics of the coffeehouse, might have something to do with the fact that many cafés were owned by Jews; even more Jews were consumers who frequented these cafés and became their most devoted habitués, or Stammgäste.20 The link between Jews and cafés was evident not only in fin-de-siècle Vienna or Berlin but also in the new Russian city of Odessa and in the emerging metropolis of Warsaw, as well as in New York City—the new center of Jewish migration in America—and the “first Hebrew city” of Tel Aviv in Mandatory Palestine. From the mid-nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century, cafés in many cities were deeply, though never exclusively, identified with Jews and with Jewish culture.
As Agnon’s life and novel reveal, these urban cafés—in particular those known as “literary cafés”—were especially alluring spaces for Jewish writers and members of the intelligentsia who were migrants, exiles, or refugees. Many of them were struggling to make ends meet and eager to find company in a new city; the café was often for them a substitute for a home and a community. However, cafés were not only a home away from home or an escape from a rented, cold room; they were also spaces in which complex and often tense social and cultural negotiations took place. The urban café was one of the few places where Jews could become part of non-Jewish social circles and spheres of activity. Thus, it was essential to modern Jewish acculturation. Though the processes of integration and acculturation—the acquisition of the cultural and social habits of the majority group—are both hallmarks of Jewish modernity, repeated again and again in different facets of life, there is still much we do not know about the way these processes played out. As we will see, urban cafés—and their intimate relation to the press, literature, theater, art, and politics—played a key role in the creation of modern Jewish culture and an emerging Jewish public sphere.21
The more we look, the more we discover the café’s astounding influence. However, we must not be tempted to idealize the café. Jürgen Habermas, writing in the 1960s, declared the coffeehouse as a key example of “the public sphere of bourgeois culture.” For Habermas, the coffeehouse—as it arose in early modern, increasingly capitalist Europe—was a space in which private individuals come together as a “public” distinct from the state. He claimed that such a public sphere emerged as a realm of communication that gave birth to both rational and critical debate.22 London’s coffeehouses in their golden age, between 1680 and 1730, provided the individual with access to a wider strata of the middle class than was ever before possible and thus enabled more people to communicate with each other informally, with fewer of the restrictions of class hierarchy that had long dominated British life. Habermas’s public sphere is built, thus, on its accessibility to individuals, who come together without hierarchy, through their discussions of literature, news, and politics, a broadened notion of participation that helped to form a new civic and liberal society.23
This vision of the coffeehouse as an emblem of the public sphere has been essential and influential, but it is built on an ideal. In Habermas’s eagerness to see the roots of a liberal, civic society, he neglected much of the messy historical reality. His assumption that everybody had the same unfettered access to the social and cultural institution of the café is too simplistic.24 Moreover, the applicability of Habermas’s framework to this study is evident but also limited. For him, the coffeehouse as a space of the public sphere reached its heyday in London of the eighteenth century and fell into a state of decline through the nineteenth century, when it was “invaded by private interests.”25 However, the period between 1848 and 1939 was the golden age of café culture across Europe and beyond and thus constitutes the chronological backbone of this book. In fact, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw not so much a decline but a further transformation of the public sphere.26
Such transformation of the public sphere, and of the role of café as a cultural institution, was contemplated by the Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin. In his essay Berliner Chronik (Berlin Chronicle, 1932), he uses various Berlin cafés as a chief “guide” around which he arranges his “lived experience” in the city as the “space of his life … on a map.”27 Benjamin attempts to divide Berlin cafés of the 1910s and 1920s into “professional” and “recreational” establishments, but he quickly notes that his classification is superficial inasmuch as the two categories coincide with and collapse upon each other. Benjamin thus demonstrates an enduring truth about the “lived experience” of the café, defined by a subversion of distinctions between private and public, professional and recreational, bourgeois and bohemian, and literary and consumer culture.
Benjamin’s failed attempt to clearly define various types of cafés leads to a more complex understanding of the café as an institution and in terms of a place and space.28 It becomes clear that the café has been (and perhaps still is) a place of commerce that revolved around consumption, leisure, and the spectacle of commodity—in other words, the epitome of bourgeois culture. At the same time, it was a place of the bohemian and the avant-garde that aspired to undermine the values of that bourgeois consumer culture. The café has been a space in which the enunciation of identity, the celebration of lived experience, and the grappling with contested meanings took place. Thus, it is more productive to study the café as a “thirdspace,” a concept that emerged from the work of cultural geographers on the “production of space” and “lived environment.” Challenging notions of space as an abstract arena and passive container, cultural geographers posited unified physical, social, and mental conceptions of space by emphasizing its continual production and reproduction.29
“Thirdspace,” as we will use it as a critical tool to study the café, emphasizes the interplay between subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined. Thirdspace is crucial to our exploration of the urban café in general and of its role in modern Jewish culture and literature in particular. It functions as a geographical concept that enables us to understand the café in the way it is located at and mediates between the real and the imaginary, the public and the private, elitist culture and mass consumption. In the context of modern Jewish culture, the thirdspace of the café sits on the threshold between Jew and gentile, migrant and “native,” idleness and productivity, and masculine and feminine.