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 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 of the twentieth century, he notes how it was particularly associated “with a ‘degenerated’ masculinity of melancholic, pale, bookish Jewish men” (117), apparently linked to tensions about Jewishness. He ends the chapter with a further discussion of gender, noting the growing place of women in Viennese cafés in the interwar era and the sexually charged nature of the literature that was written in and about them. It is during this same period that women writers, too, including Vicki Baum and Veza Canetti, joined the coffeehouse culture alongside their male colleagues.

The migratory experience from East to West intensifies in the chapter on Berlin, where the reader is (re)introduced to a host of personalities coming through the city and some of its most notable cafés. In the penultimate chapter on New York, Pinsker follows the café as it immigrates along with many Jewish authors and poets from Europe to America, and as the cafés migrate from neighborhood to neighborhood in the American metropolis. Through the presentation of the poem “In kafe” both in Yiddish and in English, and through a deeper textual analysis of the same poem, Pinsker forcefully challenges male Yiddish writers of the day who “could not believe that a woman [namely, Anna Margolin (alias of Rosa Lebensboym)], could write such mature and artistically accomplished poems” (215). The chapter is the first to bring the discussion of literary cafés past the Second World War, a chronological trajectory taken up in the final chapter on Tel Aviv-Jaffa. There the immigrants’ coffeehouse story crescendos. The influence of German Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany is not only felt in the discussions around tables (about literature, language, and property speculation!), but also in the very architecture of the buildings. The chapter ends on a melancholic note with the closing of the last major literary café, Kassit, and with it, as the conclusion suggests, the end of coffeehouses as sites for the creation of Jewish culture.

This book is a welcome continuation of Pinsker's work on the literary café, a project started years ago in a series of reflections on Jewish literary cafés published in the Hebrew daily Haaretz. 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.