Reddit mentions of A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture

Re. cafes, instead of Hitler, there's a review of A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture in a recent issue of the New Yorker that makes the point that even the grandest cafes were accessible to nearly anyone:

> The Israeli Nobel laureate Shmuel Agnon wrote of his first experience as a kid from a town in Galicia visiting a big-city café in Lviv: “Gilded chandeliers suspended from the ceiling and lamps shining from every single wall and electric lights turned on in the daytime and marble tables gleaming, and people of stately mien wearing distinguished clothes sitting on plush chairs, reading big newspapers. And above them, waiters dressed like dignitaries.” All that for the price of a coffee.

> ...

> 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.