Rich Brew by Shachar M. Pinsker

Author:Shachar M. Pinsker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NYU Press

5

New York City

Kibitzing in the Cafés of the New World

My New York remains the New York of the cafeterias, the salesmen, the evening session students, the countermen, the kibitzers.

—Alfred Kazin, 1951

New York nights, multicolored and aflame,

White, loud, impertinent.

Broadway. Nights full of café to café.

—Aaron Glantz Leyeles, 1963

In 1940, Alfred Polgar, the Jewish writer, feuilletonist, and café habitué, arrived in America after fleeing Nazi-occupied Vienna. Nearly a decade later, Polgar wrote a short story called “Sein letzter Irrtum” (His last error). In the story, an exiled Austrian editor declares, “In America, there are no coffeehouses where one could sit for hours at a time, and if there were, they would not be at all congenial; and if they were, they would long have gone out of business.”1 The quote encapsulates a truism held by many people that European cafés cannot really exist in ultracapitalist America. However, the fictional editor, and perhaps Polgar too, was unaware that New York City had a long history of coffeehouses and café culture that intersected with the history of the city’s Jews, especially in the period between the 1880s and the 1960s. New York cafés were imported from Europe along with the many migrants who arrived in the New World. These cafés fascinated non-Jewish writers and intellectuals, who tried to make sense of them. They were experienced by immigrant Jews as both similar to and different from cafés in eastern and central Europe. Eventually, New York cafés became important points in the constantly evolving and increasingly mobile network of modern Jewish culture that stretched from Europe to America and beyond.

Both the history of Jews and of coffeehouses in New York began in the colonial, revolutionary, and early republic periods, and both were linked, perhaps not surprisingly, with capitalism and commerce. On September 1654, twenty-three Sephardi Jewish refugees from Brazil arrived at New Amsterdam, as it was then called, and were granted asylum. After the surrender of the Dutch to the British in 1674, the city was named New York, and English manners and customs were rapidly introduced, including the English coffeehouse. A number of New York coffeehouses—the Exchange Coffee-House, the Merchants’ Coffee-House, Tontine Coffee-House—achieved renown as sites of commerce and exchange, including the early New York Stock Exchange.2 Jewish merchants visited these coffeehouses, and the first synagogue building of Congregation B’nai Jeshurun was purchased in 1826, at an auction in the Tontine Coffee-House on the corner of Wall Street and Water Street.3

In the 1830s and 1840s, migration from German-speaking countries into the U.S. was on the rise. Many of the immigrants lived in a dense five-block stretch between Canal Street and Rivington Street known as Kleindeutschland (Little Germany). A group of German Jewish migrants, including Henry Kling, Isaac Dittenhoefer, and Henry Jones, began meeting every Sunday morning at a café owned by Aaron Sinsheimer on Essex Street. These gatherings culminated in 1843 in the formation of B’nai B’rith (Sons of the covenant), a secular fraternal organization combining the traditions of Judaism and the Free Masons.4 The

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