Unseen Soundwalks

The now non-existent Ceglana 1 is an address of almost mythical proportions in the history of Jewish culture thanks to Yitskhok Leybush Peretz, the father of modern Yiddish literature, who lived at this address. The Peretz House on Ceglana Street became a real cultural institution. Publishers, musicians, artists, theatre types, locals and visitors ‘from all four corners of the world’, as Peretz’s close friend, Gershon Lewin, used to say. He claimed that ‘being in Warsaw and not visiting Peretz was like being in Rome and not seeing the Pope’. Shabbat gatherings at Peretz’s house in Ceglana Street have gone down in Jewish cultural history as the stuff of legend. Peretz was born in 1852 in Zamość. He was a lawyer by profession and ran a private practice in his hometown. In 1887, for political reasons, he lost his licence granted by the tsarist authorities for supporting the Polish national cause as well as socialism. He made his Yiddish debut in 1888 (he had previously published in Hebrew), and this date mark