A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture by Shachar M. Pinsker (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture by Shachar M. Pinsker Sarah E. Wobick-Segev Shachar M. Pinsker. A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2018. 384 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000825 Shachar Pinsker's recent work A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture takes the case of six cities—Odessa, Warsaw, Vienna, Berlin, New York, and Tel Aviv—to map out a "spatial history and cultural geography of Jewish modernity through the lens of the café" (13). As Pinsker has shown in his previous book, Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe, cafés were central sites for the production of modern Jewish culture. Continuing his interest in café culture and contributing further to the spatial turn that has inspired a number of recent scholars in Jewish studies, Pinsker presents the café as a site of sociability, communication, and exchange. Rather than limiting his discussion to individual cafés or even to specific cities, Pinsker argues that these cafés, through and by virtue of the guests who attended them, were connected through experiences of migration. As a consequence, he shows how the predominantly male coffeehouse guests who frequented literary cafés, migrating within Europe from city to city, and from Europe to America and Mandate Palestine, served in effect as agents in the creation of diasporic Jewish culture. At the heart of his work is an important assertion: urban [End Page 499] coffeehouses across Europe and beyond were instrumental in creating a "network of mobility" that the author likens to the Silk Road. The role of the café in this process and its consequences are significant: "Transnational Jewish modernity," Pinsker argues, "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" (15). The first chapter, on Odessa, sets the tone for the rest of the book. Intertwining stories of authors, artists, newspapermen, and dramatists who frequented cafés with examples from literary works by many of the same figures about cafés, Pinsker demonstrates how the café was a thirdspace (à la Edward Soja)—a site where reality, imagination, memory, and representation merge. The chapter successfully plots out the development of Jewish culture in and through Odessa's coffeehouses, from the early years when the founding generation still was hesitant to embrace the coffeehouse as a site of sociability and creation, through the café's heady heyday as the home of Jewish movers and shakers, to the early Soviet era when cafés fascinatingly continued to play a role in the literary works of Jewish authors, even after many had left the city. The next chapter on Warsaw reveals a city caught up in political debate, activism, and the failed revolution of 1905. Warsaw's cafés further served as a setting for clear gendered and sexual tensions. Indeed, Pinsker is to be applauded for his diligent attention to the question of gender throughout the book. In the writings of male authors, as Pinsker reminds his reader, women in the café are frequently depicted as objects of sexual desire and anxiety. The chapter ends on a controversial note. In some ways breaking the narrative thread of the book, which seeks to point to how cafés created modern Jewish culture, Pinsker discusses cafés in the Warsaw ghetto under the Nazis and how they could help, at least in the short run, in ensuring the survival of Jewish artists, musicians, and writers. Sites of corruption and collaboration, the ghetto cafés tell the tragic tale of the destruction of Jewish culture more than its creation or even preservation. In his third chapter on Vienna, Pinsker interrogates the myth of the Viennese café and the Jewish role in it. Continuing his nuanced analysis of gender, Pinsker plots out the changes in the gendering of the Viennese café. First, at the turn...