Urban Espresso Bar my Closerie Des Lilas

The place I spend most of my waking days is certainly the Urban Espresso Bar at the Botersloot in Rotterdam. When I’m there I sometimes imagine myself the poor (Jewish) intellectual in interbellum Paris or Vienna, without wealthy sponsors or mistresses, indeed with few personal acquaintaces; just me and my books as my only serious personal belongings, overthinking life. Anno 2013 with a latte or mint tea instead of pernod for comfort. In those days in 20’s and 30’s Paris with the old world shattered, the future was uncertain and the living hard.

Permanently low on cash, but not willing or able to cut my drinking expences, with a violent urge to revisit and frequent the Bar and observe the people and forget the things I want to forget. Sometimes I dream about writing my great novel. Sometimes I write a short piece for this blog, but mostly I just sit and read and contemplate. For me the future is also a constant uncertainty and bother for I lack a decent trade. I had my own personal war in the past and with Brussels threatening many historical and proud nation states and their restless populace, I can imagine a third European catastrophe on the horizon. Let me not forget the Islam, which wasn’t a problem for European Judaism in the 20’s.

Somehow despite the horrors of the holocaust and the second world war, I personally mourn the first war most. Perhaps I do because I so urgently feel for the old Europe. The Europe of my great grandfathers Vienna and Austro-Hungary. Maybe also because for me and my family the Jewish question was solved with zionism and resolved in Palestine before the second started.

I immediately felt a bond with Hemingway after reading his novels, and the more I read about his days in Paris and the more I read his fellow writers of the same period the more intimate this feeling became. I wanted to read more, I longed for more. After Hemingway came Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Joyce and Pound; ‘I am homesick for my own kind…’

And then I discovered the Jewish authors Zweig and Roth and his The Radetzki March’.I am currently reading the correspondences of above mentioned Joseph Roth (1894-1939) in ‘Joseph Roth – A Life in Letters’.

Roth was born in Brody, Galicia, on the eastern edges of what then was Austro-Hungary. He was born in the same year and close to the probable birthplace of my paternal grandfather who was born near Lviv. Both cities are now part of the Ukraïne. After Roth finished his university in Lviv he moved to Vienna and started working as a journalist. Many Jews from the peripheries of the empire moved to Vienna in those days. So did my grandfather, who must have read many of Roth’s articles in the Viennese papers. As a journalist for the Frankfurter Zeitung he travelled a lot through and wrote a lot about the Europe between the wars. He was especially critical of Germany and rising Nazism, which led him to a permanent life of exile in Paris where he died. And in what is considered his masterpiece ‘The Radetzki March’ he mourns the destruction of the Habsburg Empire of which he was a loyal subject.

I can’t come to terms with the seemingly endless surges of European self doubt and self hate. I am and always was a proud European and also a proud Jew and Zionist, I don’t regard this contradictory. Jews were outstanding Europeans (the void they left because of the holocaust is an European tragedy).

How can a European have any doubt if he only glosses on the great thinkers and writers and politicians raised on this great continent. Even now, with European power done for and our fast progression into an illiberal federalist European Union I can’t really envy the Americans. How lonely it must feel when ones history is so short and an entire ocean denies one the roots and monuments of civilization? I can surely die peacefully without ever having seen the New World, but could it be so the other way around?

Such are the thoughts that come to me sitting at the Urban Espresso Bar, my Closerie Des Lilas. A longing for a better world, a mourning for a lost generation, a concern for the fate of future generations. And then I finish my Latte, say my goodbyes and walk home across the Meent to my appartment in Crooswijk. As an owl into the night.