Singer eventually transposed the complexities of that space—the habit of argument and the uncertainty of origin, the pensive love stories shared and the brave assertions never quite backed up—into the humbler cafeterias of the Upper West Side.

The talk and arguments that went on in the cafés covered every imaginable subject under the Jewish sun, and the Gentile ones, too. Emigration, Zionism, assimilation, the flight to America, the urge to stay home. The cafés “are the meeting place of the like-minded,” a journalist wrote in the early years of Berlin’s café culture. “The merchant who wants to consider his affairs and the status of his stocks with someone; the journalist who must hear the latest and must catch up on the day’s events from the newspaper; the man of private means who does nothing and yet wishes to appear as something; officers, students, in short, everyone who has any kind of interest at all in public life.”

The cafés became theatres of flirtation and romance as well, especially in interwar Vienna. “The presence of so many women in the cafés,” Pinsker notes, “is described in literary texts by mostly male Jewish writers.” One of them, Melech Chmelnitzki, wrote a Yiddish poem titled “Beautiful, Strange Woman in a Noisy Café.” The cafés remained, though, largely a male preserve. Vicki Baum, who began her literary career in Vienna and went on to write “Grand Hotel,” adapted into the movie for M-G-M, said, acidly, “I don’t remember a ladies’ room in the Kaffeehaus.”

Each café town had its own character. In Vienna, the café city par excellence, the Jewish cafégoer wanted to seem not Austrian but, instead, a sophisticated cosmopolitan. City pride was the keynote. The patron writer-saint of the Viennese café in the first third of the twentieth century was Karl Kraus, who was at once Jewish and anti-Semitic, a satirist of the cafés and a habitué of them. In Berlin, you had a smaller Jewish population and a simpler problem: the choice seemed more narrowly poised between being Jewish and being German.

And finally, in New York, as café culture was exported, the model of the central café in which all kinds come together often gave way to the neighborhood café that belonged to a subsect, usually on the political left. Emma Goldman, as a young Russian immigrant, found herself at home in New York when she arrived at a Lower East Side café that was well known as an anarchist hangout. The melting pot of New York, curiously, produced the most distinct and separate crucibles, each annealing the complexities of identity into political causes. In every case, you could see your life in a single commercial space.

Pinsker, lovingly attentive to the habitués of his cafés, leaves the economics of the cafés quite shadowy. The rule, still in place in much of Europe, was that you need buy only a cup of coffee to occupy a seat indefinitely. Customer loyalty is the commercial principle here. Better to sell the same writer a hundred cups of coffee than to sell a hundred writers one cup of coffee, since the hundred-cup man is almost certain to return for the next hundred, and the hundred after that. Recent scholarship has made the case that repeat business is worth much more to a small enterprise than new business, given the stability of “recurring revenue.” The one proviso would seem to be that there has to be enough room for new customers to find a place. The café can’t become too exclusive a club and remain profitable. This may be why the adjective regularly applied to the café is “grand,” or why so many cafés in Europe were exceptionally large spaces, even if, to judge by contemporary drawings and photographs, they were seldom close to being fully occupied.

In one of the greatest of café comedies, Charlie Chaplin’s “The Immigrant,” the tramp, newly arrived in America from an unnamed but clearly Eastern European place of origin, tries to put off the arrival of a check he can’t foot simply by ordering more coffee. And it mattered that what café habitués were habituated to was drinking coffee. Pinsker is oddly reticent about how the coffee was made and dispensed. For coffee is in itself a kind of wonder drug—a stimulant that seems to ease attention-based tasks. The shape and meaning of a café surely has much to do with the connection between coffee and social stimulation. Indeed, one of the historical functions of coffee was to not be alcohol. European cultures that had always drunk beer instead of unsafe water were liberated from their own stupor by the rise of caffeinated brews. The cafés were training playgrounds in attentiveness. They made the town alert.

What, then, of the Habermasian vision of the café as an arena of civil society, and of civil society as the foundation of enlightened societies? Certainly the café could be the foundation of emancipated life—that was why Agnon’s generation rushed there so ardently. But the study reveals a paradox of some poignancy: no matter how elaborately articulated, no matter how high its ceilings and how dignified its servers, civil society can’t protect cosmopolitan communities from assault when it happens. The café may have been a foundation, but it could never be a fortress. The most heartbreaking scenes in Pinsker’s book are from Warsaw, where much loved ghetto institutions like Café Sztuka stayed in business right up to the final expulsion of the Jews to Treblinka, in 1943. Singers sang and dancers danced, with the forbearance of easily bribed Germans, and while many condemned the frivolity (and the implicit collaboration with the Germans) of these last cafés, the writer Michel Mazor rightly praised their “continuous existence in a city which the Germans regarded as a cemetery—was it not, in a certain sense, the ghetto’s protest, its affirmation of the right to live?”

Pinsker ends his book with a melancholy account of a couple on the Lower East Side of Manhattan who attempted to open a classic Central European-style café a decade or so ago and failed. The rent was too high, the clientele too restless. Still, the streets of every American city these days are littered with coffee shops that attract hordes of laptop-equipped patrons aspiring to fill them for as much of the day as possible. The standard thing to say, in differentiating our post-Starbucks civilization from the vanished café civilization, is that, where in the classic cafés the point was to interact with your fellows, the point of spending a day working in a Starbucks, or in its cuter and more local-seeming rivals, is never to interact with your fellows. Spending the day online, one may be in touch with friends and advocates and lovers, but they exist outside in the ether, not inside the coffee shop. We aren’t sharing space in a modern coffee shop; we’re simply renting it.

Yet all those lonely and alienated Jewish writers were elsewhere, too—lost in books and newspapers, which were the true pastime of the café. What matters is not the words of the person at the next table but the feeling of nearness—the sense of being able to carve out an identity among other identities, of being potentially private in a public space and casually public even while lost in private reveries. Those subtle habits of coexistence are taught by the simultaneous clack of keyboards in a glass-front espresso chain as much as by the jostling of elbows in Warsaw as the pages of the Literarishe Bleter were turned. Mere silent proximity of social kinds seems an ignoble and inadequate social ideal. But it remains the first principle of the more potable forms of pluralism. ♦