Almost all of the men and women who appear in this book migrated from one city to another, or to many others, sometimes for a few weeks or months, sometimes for years. Without fail, they find a café, or more than one, in each of these cities, compare them, take something from one café to another, and create the ebb and flow of the interactions and negotiations that occurred in them. Though they are Jews on the move, between cities and between cafés, they remain Jews, even as they pick up new languages, passports, identities, politics, and sometimes even a new religious identity. The result, it becomes clear, is that urban cafés are at the heart of Jewish modernity, and a better understanding of their crucial position reshapes our understanding of modern Jewish culture.
In order to bring readers into the world of Jewish café culture, this book makes use of newspaper articles, memoirs, letters, and archival documents, as well as photographs, caricatures, and artwork. However, the material that has survived the passage of time is partial. The cafés themselves and the activities that took place in them belong to the ephemeral realm of everyday life. We have no immediate, physical access to these cafés, which is particularly disappointing, since the reason why they were generative was precisely their palpable reality. Alas, most of these places do not exist today, and the one or two that do resemble a museum more than a living institution. As with all history, we must make do with what is available; we must resort to the written descriptions of these places, fictional and factual alike, and to photographs, drawings, and paintings. Like all evidence, these are subjective and yet highly instructive. Each of our sources refracts the reality of cafés in different ways, distorting some aspects, illuminating others. The gaps and imperfections of our sources can be frustrating, and yet they are in some way fitting, reminding us of the fundamental ambiguity and constructed quality of the café—its thirdspace—and its ephemeral qualities.
Literary works—stories, novels, poems—that take place in cafés and that were written by Jews in Hebrew, Yiddish, German, English, Russian, and Polish are a particularly crucial source. Texts such as Agnon’s Tmol shilshom, which are rife with descriptions of cafés, are important sources because their writers, who were habitués of cafés, constantly employed the coffeehouse as a thirdspace. These literary texts are not to be taken simply as historical documents, but they give us a better understanding of how Jews—locals and migrants, poor and rich, bohemian and bourgeois, as well as the writers themselves—experienced the space of the café as a contested locus of urban Jewish modernity. Throughout this book, we will give special attention to the feuilleton: the hybrid literary-journalistic form of the sketch that mixed cultural criticism with storytelling. The feuilleton originated in Paris’s newspapers in 1800 but became popular all over Europe in the period covered in this book. The feuilleton also became central in modern Jewish culture all over Europe and beyond, in German, Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Polish languages. As we shall see, the feuilleton was also linked to Jewishness and café culture from the time Heinrich Heine wrote his Briefe aus Berlin (Letters from Berlin) in 1822.44
The literary texts considered in this book were written by a broad expanse of Jewish authors, including Heinrich Heine, Sholem Aleichem, S. Y. Agnon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Joseph Roth, Isaac Babel, Theodor Herzl, Else Lasker-Schüler, Sholem Asch, Julian Tuwim, Leah Goldberg, Aharon Appelfeld, and many writers who are not as well known today. In one way or another, these writers made the café a dominant aspect of their fiction, poetry, essays, and memoirs, using this thirdspace as a microcosm of urban, modern Jewish experience on multiple continents. Transnational Jewish modernity was thus born in the café, nourished there, and sent out into the world of print, politics, literature, visual arts, and theater. In this way, what was experienced and created in the space of the coffeehouse influenced thousands who read, saw, and imbibed a modern Jewish culture that redefined what it means to be a Jew in the world.
1
Odessa
Jewish Sages, Luftmenshen, Gangsters, and the Odessit in the Café
In Odessa, the destitute luftmenshen roam through cafés, trying to make a ruble or two to feed their families, but there is no money to be made, and why should anyone give work to a useless person—a luftmensh?
—Isaac Babel, “Odessa,” 1916
In 1921, after World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, and Russian civil wars, many Jews left Odessa and migrated to other cities in Europe, America, and Palestine. Among them was Leon Feinberg, a Yiddish and Russian poet, writer, and translator. He traveled first to Tel Aviv but shortly thereafter settled in New York City. In 1954, Feinberg published a poema, a novel-in-verse titled Der farmishpeter dor (The doomed generation), that gave a voice to a generation of Jews who grew up in Odessa and ended up in America. They experienced from afar the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust, as well as the Stalin purges. The first part of his novel-in-verse is “Odessa,” a poetic representation of this port city at the turn of the twentieth century. Several of the poems follow Nyuma Feldman, a character from the poor neighborhood of Moldavanka, who speaks “Odessan language”—Russian tinged with Yiddish—and goes between Café Fanconi and Café Robina in the city center. In these cafés, historical figures mix freely with fictional characters crafted by celebrated Jewish writers such as Sholem Aleichem, S. Y. Abramovitsh, and Isaac Babel.1
What are these cafés, and why were they important for Feinberg and others who remembered them so vividly in New York and elsewhere after many years? The cafés played a key role in the development of modern Jewish culture in the port city of Odessa, as part of an interconnected diasporic network that developed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Odessa’s history is unique, especially in the half century before the collapse of the Russian Empire and the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the subsequent Sovietization of the city. In this period, the southern city of Odessa was perceived as a center of newfound Jewish freedom from strictures of both Jewish traditional life and the Russian regime. The mythic status of Odessa and its persistent image as a “Jewish city” have been documented by historians and literary scholars alike.2 Odessa cafés have been part of both the history and the myth of the city and thus are our first example of a thirdspace, that liminal space between the real and the imaginary that can help us to understand both. Examining the confluence between the city’s cafés, its urban modernity, migration to and from the city, and multilingual Jewish literary and cultural activity enables us to see the role of Odessa in Jewish modernity in eastern Europe. Through the lens of the café, we can better understand Odessa as an anchor in the silk road of transnational modern Jewish culture in a time of far-reaching urban migration, a period of transition from traditional forms of Jewish cultural expression to modern, secular ones.
Compared with other European cities of distinction and culture, nineteenth-century Odessa was very young. Established in 1794 by the empress Catherine the Great on land conquered from the Ottoman Empire on the site of the Black Sea fortress town of Khadzhibei, Odessa received its name—after an ancient Greek settlement called Odessos—the following year. Catherine sent notices throughout Europe offering migrants land, tax exemptions, and religious freedom. In addition to a nucleus of Russian officials, Polish landlords, and Ukrainians, many non-Slavs responded to her call. Within a few decades, a new city emerged, energetic and quite different from any other in the Russian Empire. With handsome streets laid out by Italian and French architects, a harbor sending shiploads of grain to every Mediterranean port, and the leadership of a series of tolerant and economically progressive administrators, some of whom were foreign-born, Odessa’s economic foundations were established alongside its cultural ones. Thanks to its status until 1859 as a porto franco—a free port, exempt from taxes—it attracted wealthy foreign merchants and exporters. Within a few decades, it became a sizable city and soon commanded an international reputation as the preeminent Russian grain-exporting center. Thus, from its beginning until the city became known as the capital of Novorossiya, the empire’s “wild south,” Odessa was multinational, multilingual, and multiethnic. It attracted migrants of all types and creeds, with substantial numbers of Greeks, Turks, Italians, Armenians, Tatars, and Poles as well as some French,