Mapping Urban Cafés, Migration, and Modern Jewish Culture
Mapping these urban cafés and their interconnections, spreading from eastern and central Europe both to North America and to the Middle East, helps us to chart the spatial history of modern Jewish culture and literature in a new way. Using the coffeehouse as our lens reveals Jewishness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a network of transnational migration.32 Thus, examining the confluence of the thirdspace of the café, the urban environment, and the diversity of multilingual Jewish culture enables us to better understand crucial aspects of Jewish modernity. Previous attempts to explain how Jews became modern often resort to concepts such as Jacob Katz’s “neutral” (or “semi-neutral”) society of modernity, a public sphere in which one’s religious or ethnic identity may be left at the door.33 As in the case of Habermas’s public sphere, the assumption of religious neutrality is problematic and does not describe well the reality of Jews in different places and within variable political and cultural contexts. Likewise, the terms “emancipation” and “assimilation” have been the tools of analysis for scholars of modern Jewish history for generations. But these are contested terms with many different and conflicting meanings. The ideologically fraught term “assimilation” presupposes the existence of static majority and minority groups. Even the more precise one, “acculturation,” hardly captures the subtle variations of the various dominant groups to which a given group of Jews acculturates.34 Ultimately, these terms are often too rigid to illuminate the actual development of modern Jewish culture, which, as we will see throughout this book, is fundamentally diasporic and transnational, no matter where it is provisionally located.35
The subtle variations of Jewish acculturation are intimately related to Jewish migration, because it is this fundamental fact—that Jews have been on the move—that became a hallmark of Jewish modernity. Of course, we have long studied and written about Jewish migration. But we have focused almost exclusively on immigration, framing it from the point of view of arrival to a new country or city, rather than on the itineraries of people and institutions as they move and the networks they have created. As Rebecca Kobrin has pointed out, we know a lot about Jewish immigrants in various cities around the world but not about the transnational character of the movements that brought them from one place to the next or about the links forged between those places.36 As the example of Agnon’s life and work in and about the café hints, by exploring the café, we are inevitably exploring how Jews got to that café and where they went after they left. In other words, studying this one very specific place illuminates the transnational cultural entanglements of Jewish migrants. Thus, while each chapter of this book focuses on a particular city in its unique geography, politics, and culture, the interconnected cafés allow us to explore and analyze the migration networks of diasporic Jewish culture created at their tables.37
Parallel issues arise as we try to understand modern Jewish literature. Dan Miron’s recent attempt to describe what he calls “the modern Jewish literary complex”—in terms of “contiguity” rather than “continuity”—is crucial to apprehend the true reality of Jewish literature, a “vast, disorderly, and somewhat diffuse” body written in many languages and places.38 The challenge with the concept of contiguity is its abstract nature; in order to be useful, it needs to become concrete. Using the café as a lens both elucidates and makes concrete the spatial history of modern diasporic Jewish literature, in Jewish and non-Jewish languages alike, and illuminates the many manifestations of Jewish culture, as they have been created in the café and clashed in the café and carried forth from the café.
It is clear that café culture and modernism, which flourished in the period covered here, were inextricably linked, in that “literary cafés, journals and publishing houses encouraged the development of new styles of writing to meet new realities and needs.”39 Indeed, “literary cafés”—places such as Café Griensteidl and Café Central in Vienna, the Café des Westens and the Romanisches Café in Berlin, and the cafés of the Left Bank and Montparnasse in Paris—were indispensable for the creation of European modernism.40 What is often overlooked is the fact that these places, essential for the development of modernism, were not only attractive spaces for many Jews; they were sometimes identified, for better or worse, as “Jewish spaces.” Scott Spector has warned that “Jewish modernism” is “a complex field of self-contradictory tensions and inversions,” and therefore “its story cannot simply be narrated, but can perhaps best be captured by representing a constellation of moments in its elastic life.”41 By using the café, and writings about the café, as the focal point of such constellations of moments and spaces, we see how Jewish culture and modernism emerged side by side, each shaping and being shaped by the other.
This book offers a wide-ranging exploration of Jewish café culture in Odessa, Warsaw, Vienna, Berlin, New York City, and Tel Aviv. The reasons to focus on these cities are manifold. First, it is true that these six cities are far from the only places in which Jewish café culture was manifest; Lemberg, Budapest, Prague, Paris, Buenos Aires, and Jerusalem surely come to mind.42 While this book deals almost exclusively with Ashkenazi Jews, there was also robust café culture in urban centers of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewry: Baghdad, Cairo, and Tangier.43 However, the six cities that this book explores provide a good illustration of the principal crossroads of Ashkenazi Jewish migration in eastern and central Europe, North America, and the Middle East, and thus of the Jewish modernity that was created there. Second, these cities were at one point or another—and, in some cases, continue to be today—centers of modern Jewish culture in multiple languages: Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Russian, and Polish. In the space of the cafés of these cities, intense exchange between Jews and non-Jews, and between Jews of different political and cultural orientations, took place. Looking at the cities and their cafés helps us to see how Jewish modernity was created along networks of migration, as Jews were pushed out or chose to leave some areas to migrate to others, bringing the cultures they had created within one city’s cafés with them to another.
As will become evident, this exploration of the role of urban cafés in modern Jewish culture follows not only a geographic-spatial axis but a chronological-historical one as well. As we journey across continents alongside the Jewish migrants, we will also journey through time to explore the unfolding histories of modern culture, of Jewish culture, and of café culture. In some cases, these histories overlap, and in others, they diverge. Thus, in eastern and central European cities, we will focus mainly on the period between the mid-nineteenth century—following the revolutions that swept Europe around 1848—and the 1930s, when the rise of the Nazis, World War II, and Sovietization eradicated much of café culture and the modern Jewish culture that flourished there. As our narrative spreads beyond Europe, so too does our chronology. In New York City, the development of both multilingual modern Jewish culture and café culture begins toward the end of the nineteenth century with the migration of Jews from European countries and ends in the post–World War II years. In Tel Aviv, these same processes occur between the first decade of the twentieth century and the 1960s.
This book does not present a linear cultural history with clear points of beginning and ending for modern Jewish culture and café culture. Instead, it charts a spatial history and cultural geography of Jewish modernity through the lens of the café, through the embrace of both national and transnational contexts, and through partly overlapping geographies and chronologies. Moreover, while the book is organized