Polish Bookstores, Jewish Publishers, and their Salons

Jewish families were among the most prominent publishers of Polish books in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and their homes and bookstores created spaces of interaction between acculturated Jews and Polish cultural circles. Jewish publishers and booksellers hosted some of Warsaw’s most popular salons in their apartments and bookstores, transforming contact with non-Jews from economic and cultural involvement to social interactions. Salon gatherings, meanwhile, combined cultural and political discussions, drawing Jewish publishers into the Polish national community. This paper will focus on the salon in the home of Solomon Lewental, one of the most prominent publishers of Polish literature in the last third of the nineteenth century. The home of Lewental and his wife, Hortensja, was a gathering place where visiting artists, musicians and writers from abroad mingled with Polish intellectual and social elites and the acculturating Jewish circles of which the Lewentals and their children were a part. After Solomon Lewental’s death, journalists and editors who gathered at the family’s salon frequently made editorial decisions in the Lewental home for the Polish newspaper published by Hortensja Lewental. While the salons and bookstores of the Lewentals and other Jewish publishers provided an alternative to ethnic conceptions of the national community, however, the limits of social integration as Jews is evident in the Lewental family’s conversion to Christianity, a path common to other Jewish publishing families of the period.