An Excerpt from Chapter: Everyday Life
Social Mobility
The living conditions within the Warsaw Jewish community in the interwar period encouraged social mobility within Jewish society. This mobility did not necessarily involve economic advancement, but was manifested in the acquisition of education, an openness to general culture and a growing connection with the local intelligentsia. The location of the Jewish neighborhood near the political and cultural centers of the city and the country played an important role in these advances.
Seeking economic and social change led families to move from apartment to apartment within the Jewish neighborhood. For example, a wealthy family of seven moving to Warsaw might initially find quarters in a four-room apartment at the intersection of Smocza and Pawia Streets (the border of Compounds III and V). Perceiving the area as inferior, the family could later very well move to an elegant five-room apartment on Ceglana Street (Compound VI next to Compound VIII). 
Shulim Rosenberg's life story serves as a good example of this phenomenon. Shulim's father was a shoemaker. His family lived in a small room with a kitchen located above a workshop, with family members sleeping in the tiny kitchen. At a young age, Shulim stopped studying in heder because the family could not afford it. Among their neighbors in the building were educated people, whose children included two doctors and a singer, and one of whose home’s even had a piano – the essential symbol of class identity in that period. Under the influence of his educated neighbors, together with that of his older brother – a worker who was involved in writers' circles (that included, among others, Isaac Bashevis Singer) – ten-year-old Shulim enrolled himself in school , and began reading books he borrowed from one of Warsaw's libraries. Having managed to save a small sum of money from his work as a tailor's apprentice, Shulim bought a ticket to a concert of the Philharmonic. He describes the experience “as having been born again.” As an adult, Shulim joined the Jewish intelligentsia and befriended maskilim, writers and artists, such as Marek Edelman of the Bund, and the artist Yosl Bergner. 
This processes of acculturation also affected Warsaw’s Orthodox Jewish community. In Hasidic circles, it was the women who carried the banner of acculturation, with many them studying in schools where Polish was the language of instruction. They read Polish literature, attended Polish theater, and dressed according to the modern fashions of the Warsaw elite. As a contemporary observed:
A new era arrived and the first to march into this era were the daughters of the wealthy Hasidim [...] little girls are suddenly grown up and now they appear in silk dresses. [...] They are visited by young, unfamiliar boys with shaved faces, who come from distant worlds [...] The parents look at them with apprehension, because they disappear with the girls to an unknown world. Matchmaking today is arranged out of "love," and love makes use of a foreign language. They read books and dance in halls and cafes that are foreign [...] The girls go to a place where the city lights shine. 
A notable exemplar of the change led by women from Poland’s ultra-Orthodox society isIta Kalisz, the granddaughter of Simcha Bunim Kalisz, the Rebbe of Warka and the daughter of Menachem Mendel Kalisz, the Rebbe of Otwock. Ita was educated by private teachers, who recognized her thirst for learning. Her cousin smuggled newspapers and books in Yiddish and Polish into her home for her to read. She would slip into shows and concerts through the back door, entering them in the dark so she would not be noticed. At the end of the performance, she would flee from the hall before the lights would come back on. Over time, she developed a deep passion for the outside cultural world. As a woman who was not required to study in heder, it was easier for her to interact with the secular world than it would be for a young man. Ita continued her secret studies even after she was married off at the age of fifteen to a student her father chose for her, a scion of a Gerrer Hasidism family. This arranged marriage was part of her father’s strategy to keep his daughter within the Hassidic world and protect her from the winds of secularism swirling in the atmosphere at that time.
In the Hassidic elite circles, women were expected to be familiar with contemporary Polish literature, so part of the rite of inspecting the bride prior to the marriage – carried out by female family members of the prospective groom – included testing the young woman’s knowledge about the work of contemporary Polish authors. Ita passed this part of her inspection with flying colors.
Ultimately, her father's plan was unsuccessful. Her marriage failed, as Ita, continuing to draw closer to Western culture, left her husband. She returned to Warsaw, began working in various public institutions, and rented a room on Kremlicka Street together with her two sisters, who had also abandoned their parents' house and religion. This room served as a "literary salon" for young Jewish intellectuals, poets, artists and writers, who, like the daughters of the Kalisz family, came from Hassidic homes. It provided a cultural space for people who, like the granddaughters of Simcha Bunim Kalisz, were grappling with the transition from the old, Hasidic world to the new, secular world. Describing the meetings that took place in her “salon” in Warsaw, Ita writes:                               
And so, our modest four-by-four room served as a shelter for these boys and girls, the descendants of grand Rabbis and prominent Hasidim in Poland. But there were differences between the world of boys and that of the girls that was rooted in the fundamental differences in the education they received and their daily lives in their parents' homes. While the girls were more easily freed from their parents' guardianship and they pulsated with a spirit of independence, the Hasidic boys felt as if their peyot were still rolled up behind their ears, and a Hasidic melody still buzzed within them. These young men were still connected to the fading reality of a yesterday that was quickly fading, and in the very roots of their souls still felt close to it. These boys, who had their eyes on a better world, were caught between the culture of the past and the secular culture that was unfolding before their eyes on the Jewish street – and they had a hard time of it. But their lack of means and lack of elementary preparation in secular studies frustrated their aspirations.
Later, Ita moved to Berlin for several years, where she again established a literary salon. She then left for Paris, from where she immigrated to Israel.   

Ita Kalisz