The power of this book is not merely in reminding the reader of the lost world of Jewish cafés but in showing how comparative analysis illuminates what is common and what is unique about Jews as a social group and the institutions they create.
A Rich Brew takes us on a spectacular tour of urban Jewish cafés across several continents, invigorating our sense of Jewish modernity in the making.
[Pinsker] has uncovered a vibrant, far-flung network of neighborhood cafes that were patronized by Jewish writers with a taste for coffee, conversation, and difference.
The focus on examining individual cities is one of the book’s strongest points, as each chapter is a mini-historiography of class, religion, ethnicity, and gender. More than anything, however, A Rich Brew is an examination of the role of nostalgia for home in shaping everything from café discussions to creative output to historical reflection.
A great strength of A Rich Brew is the attention given to precisely what is absent from [Jürgen] Habermas’s text: the physical spaces of cafés and their relationship to the bourgeois public sphere. It is marvelous to see how much a literary historian learned about places (and people) from his close scrutiny of literature and art.
A Rich Brew is an enjoyable, well-written book, accessible to a wide audience. Pinsker does a fine job introducing the reader to the larger historical contexts, especially of each individual city under examination; offers clear overviews of representative Jewish literary and artistic personalities; and, most importantly, brings to life the many (but now defunct) cafés that stand at the heart of his narrative.
Anna Shternshis, University of Toronto:
The best part of this book is that it offers a new cultural history of Jewish modernity by utilizing literary studiesusing examples of poetry and prose written in and about cafés, it gives voice to artists who populated these cafés.
Robert Alter, Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley:
Shachar Pinsker, in part building on research he did for his admirable first book, Literary Passports, has produced a scrupulously documented and finely instructive account of the role of cafes in modern Jewish culture. A Rich Brew, providing apt discussions of many long-forgotten or unknown texts and a generous sampling of photographs of the sundry cafes, should be of considerable interest both for historians and students of modern Jewish literature.
Allison Schachter, author of Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century:
A Rich Brew is an innovative work of Jewish cultural and literary history that illuminates how the café served as a laboratory that nourished Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From the European cafes of Odessa, Warsaw, Vienna, and Berlin, to New York and Tel Aviv Jaffa, Pinsker charts a new account of the public spaces of Jewish culture and the new literary and cultural forms that where imagined there.
Ruby Namdar,author of The Ruined House:
Shachar Pinsker concocts a rich and pleasing brew of material culture, history, sociology, and text analysis to explore the roots of modern Jewish culture as we know it today. Describing the café as a 'thirdspace,' a liminal zone between the intimate and the public spheres, Pinsker follows the emergence of Jewish culture from the synagogue and the traditional house-of-study and its recreation as a modern, urban, secular intellectual heritage. Masterfully constructed and beautifully written, A Rich Brew is an illuminating and pleasurable read.
Reading Religion:
Pinsker’s greatest strength is in assembling evocative descriptions, both of individual cafés, and of cafés as a species of urban space. He expertly weaves together real-life accounts of cafés, including many in the journalistic-literary genre of the feuilleton, and their fictional depiction in the work of some of the most important Jewish writers of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Pinsker packs his history with titillating behind-the-scenes snapshots of a cast of fascinating and enigmatic Jewish figures in cafés throughout history . . . makes for engaging, as well as nostalgic, reading, and begs the question: what has replaced the café in contemporary Jewish life?
Shachar Pinskers absorbing new work of nonfiction, A Rich Brew, uses the café as a vehicle both to describe the development of modern Jewish culture and to delve into the topics that drove its progression.
Metropole:
A captivating tale of Jewish intellectual life, fueled by caffeine and good company in cities across the world.
Marginalia Review of Books:
Weaving stories of writers, artists, activists, and revolutionaries in the cafes of Odessa, Warsaw, Vienna, Berlin, New York City, and Tel Aviv, Pinsker takes us on a journey from Moses Mendelssohn’s philosophical writings in Berlin’s Gelehrtes Kaffehause in 1755 to the funeral of the last Yiddish-speaking café owner in 1979 Tel Aviv, 'attended by a crowd of thousands.'
Hadassah:
This meticulously researched book pays tribute to an electrifying network of cafes that once incubated modern Jewish culture.
Pinsker takes the reader on a journey across the important centers of modern Jewish culture: Odessa, Warsaw, Vienna, Berlin, New York and Tel Aviv, using a host of different sources and making for a captivating read.
Pinsker makes clear the vital role literary cafes played in 19th- and 20th-century Western Jewish culture in this smart volume.
Pinsker . . . believes that cafés in six cities created modern Jewish culture. Its the kind of claim that sounds as if it might be a game-changer, and there are enough grounds and gossip in A Rich Brew to keep this customer engrossed from cup to cup.
A Rich Brew evokes the sense of lingering in a timeless café, savoring the flavor and scent of good coffee and the conversation that goes along with it.
Shachar Pinsker masterfully documents the impact of café life on Jewish culture throughout the civilized world. . . . A Rich Brew is aptly named. Engagingly illustrated with many contemporary photos and cartoons, it offers a deep dive into the café world of six cities that gave birth to modern Jewish thought and culture.
Adam Gopnik:
[H]ugely entertaining and intimidatingly well researched, with scarcely a café in which a Jewish writer raised a cup of coffee from Warsaw to New York left undocumented.
