For many years the Bund’s address in Warsaw was Przejazd 9. With the years, this address became so identified with the Bund in Warsaw that it was often used as a synonym for it. In the same way, Nowolipie 7 became a synonym in Poland for the Folkstsaytung and the Bund’s Central Committee.
Our location at Przejazd 9 acquired its popularity gradually, due perhaps in part to the centrality of narrow Przejazd Street where the various arterial streams of Jewish communal life in Warsaw came together. Right after the First World War, the Workers Aid Committee (Arbeter-Hilf Komitet) opened an inexpensive soup kitchen for workers there. Also after the war the Central Council of Trade Unions (Tsentral-Rat fun di Profesioneyle Fareynen) also took up its location there. During the Polish-Bolshevik war years, when, because of its antiwar stance, the Bund was declared illegal and its offices closed down by the Polish government, the Bund’s Grosser Club on Karmelicka 29 was also shut down. It was at that time that the Bund quietly began using the location at Przejazd 9 for party purposes. The workers soup kitchen was still there, and people would often be entering and leaving, especially at lunch time, and so for that reason it was easier to conduct party business there without drawing the attention of the authorities. Also around 5,000 books from the library of the Grosser Club were brought there. When the Polish-Bolshevik war was over, the Bund’s “General Worker Cooperative” (Algemeyner Arbeter Ko-Operativ), to whom the soup kitchen now belonged, created a Workers Corner (Arbeter Vinkl) there legally—a kind of tea café, where workers could come in the evening and have a cup of tea, eat a piece of bread and herring, and read a newspaper. In one of the rooms, a reading room was created with newspapers and journals (mounted on wooden sticks, as was the custom in Polish coffee houses). The Grosser Library was reopened there and began functioning again. Abram Stoller and I, who at that time worked in the party Secretariat of the Warsaw Bund, began to work on party matters there, under the protective mantle of the Workers Kitchen at the Cooperative.
In 1922, when the campaign began for the elections to the Polish Sejm (parliament), we set up the central office for it in the Workers Corner. The election campaign was now legal, so, as a matter of course, the Workers Corner stepped forward as an official Bund office, remaining so after the elections as well. In this way Przejazd 9 became the official address of the Warsaw Bund.
Along with the growth of the Bund and its party work, the activities in the Workers Corner also increased. The location became too small for the various branches of the Bund’s activities. The Grosser Library1 moved to its own large room at Leszno 36, the room belonging to an affiliate of the workers cooperative in that house, and the Workers Corner then became a purely party office. During the day, the Workers Soup Kitchen continued to function, as well as the Party Secretariat. In the evening the character of the place changed dramatically. It teemed with people. Bundists came there simply to have a good time, talk to their friends, or read a newspaper. In addition, all kinds of meetings and sessions would take place of party groups, Tsukunft circles, and all kinds of committees—some purely Bundist ones, others party trade union ones, and more. Often larger party meetings would take place there, as well as other events—mostly on Saturdays and Sundays—readings, literary evenings, and sometimes, simply, entertainments.
A vibrant life went on there 18 hours a day. At 6 in the morning the people who worked in the Soup Kitchen arrived. At around 9 in the morning the work of the Party Secretariat would begin. Around noon, lunch would be served and the rooms would fill up with workers who ate there. The lunch period would be over by three o’clock in the afternoon. The rooms would barely have been cleaned up, when at five o’clock, party people would begin to appear. From eight to eleven o’clock at night, all the rooms were occupied with meetings: in one of the larger rooms, sometimes two or three smaller groups would meet at the same time in the various corners of the room. Sometimes people who were just hanging around would have to be asked to leave so as to provide space for still another group meeting.
In this very stream of people that, evening after evening, filled up our Warsaw party premises, one person would always stand out, a central figure whom one saw threading his way through the thick crowds, and that was Comrade Abram. Abram Stoller was Secretary of the Bund organization in Warsaw, as well as Secretary of the Workers Corner. He was different from other secretaries. Normally a secretary stays seated at his desk and the clients come to him. Abram, quite the reverse, was a mobile secretary, coming to his clients. He was seldom to be seen in the office. He was always among the crowds in the various rooms, looking for his clients: the secretary of a party group, the representative of a craft committee, a member of a union Executive Board, a representative of Tsukunft, or SKIF, or YAF, or sometimes just an ordinary person who needed the help of the party with some personal matter. With a little notebook and the stub of a pencil in his hand, he would, in his own shorthand, write down all the action items that needed doing. At the same time, he was always embroiled in the personal concerns of people, always knew what headaches someone had, and never forgot to ask how things were going with this or that worry. He would listen, offer some counsel, write something in his little notebook—and then quickly run off to another corner of the room to grab yet another client. Again one would see him take out his little notebook and his stub of a pencil, and again write something there—only to watch him make his way through the crowd to someone else, and so on and on. Although he wrote everything in his little notebook, he seldom had to look at it. He navigated his way clearly through the labyrinth of hundreds of details; he had them all in his head.
The house where the Workers Corner was located was old. The gate was always wide open, because in the courtyard, in the so called “officine” opposite the entry gate, there was a movie theatre (“Fama”) where we, by the way, often held meetings and Saturday morning events. The Workers Corner was located in the front building on the first floor. Wooden stairs, worn from uncounted thousands of feet that constantly climbed up and down on them, 16–18 hours a day, 365 days a year, led to the Club. The furniture in the seven-room premises was old and worn: simple wooden chairs and benches, ordinary square little restaurant tables that were left over from the early years of the Workers Soup Kitchen. But no one took any notice of that. Life seethed and bubbled in every room, and two streams of people never stopped their movement, one coming, one going, in and out, without interruption, from before noon until late into the night.
But the cramped quarters that were so beloved by us had become too small. We had to think of moving to a new location, a larger and more comfortable one. And not only that, but the landlord of Przejazd 9 had long wanted to get rid of the Bund, and he chipped away at this for so long that he eventually got an eviction notice from the court before we had a chance to find a new, suitable space. The Warsaw Secretariat of the Bund temporarily relocated to a small apartment on Nowolipie 3, where it stayed for almost a year. We finally found a suitable location on Długa 26, and in 1936 we moved there.
The house at Długa 26 was one of the well-known large buildings in the Jewish quarter. It had three large courtyards. The premises of the Bund were located on the first floor of the second entrance. The house already had some Bundist history behind it: it was the location of Hendler’s Printshop where, for a time, in 1920, we printed our illegal literature. Also the Transport Workers Union rented a neighboring apartment.
The new location of the Warsaw Bund was much more spacious and attractive than the one at Przejazd 9, and we felt a renewed life. As before, the new locale was full of people. In addition to the party club and the Warsaw Party Secretariat, an array of other party institutions was also located in the new premises, including the soup kitchen of the Workers Co-op.
1.At a certain point in time, the Grosser Library became a part of the Kultur-Lige (Culture League). Herman Kruk became its director and he began an energetic campaign to broaden its activities. The library burgeoned, containing tens of thousands of books. It then rented its own space on Leszno 13 where a study room was set up, as well as a large reading room with hundreds of journals and newspapers from all over the world. The library was free to all. It was the largest lending library in Warsaw and deserves an honorable place in a history of the cultural life of Warsaw Jewry.—BG