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migrants, the so-called Litvaks, had passed through its busy tenements over the years, some escaping Tsarist repressions and pogroms, others fleeing the poverty and limited opportunity of the shtetls. By the 1930s the Quarter had already produced several generations of attorneys, university professors, and doctors—two-thirds of Warsaw’s prewar physicians were Jewish, as were 37 percent of its lawyers—and though the predominantly Yiddish-speaking district had lost many former residentsto assimilation and upward mobility, its fundamentally ambitious and hardworking character had stayed the same.
    The mood on the streets that morning was uneasy, Spiegel later recalled, but there was no greater sense of urgency in the Quarter that Friday than in the rest of Warsaw: no panic, no preparations for mass flight, no visible deviations from the usual routine. The prevailing atmosphere seemed to be one of heightened tension, “collective nervousness.” Radios in shops were all tuned to the show of Zbigniew Swietochowski on Warsaw One, the main state broadcaster, who assured listeners that “we are strong, united and ready,” and customers—both Gentile and Jewish—anxiously awaited bulletins and updates, asking one another for the latest news.
    As always, Cordials Street teemed with frenetic activity before the Sabbath. Porters, horse-drawn delivery vans, droshki , bicycle rickshaws, trucks, and saloon cars clogged the broad road, bisected by the dual tracks oftram line 17. Pedestrians jostled one another on sidewalks lined with all manner of goods; hats, lamps, ladders, barrels of nails, pickles, pungent sauerkrauts, and umbrellas—Cordials alone boasted 28 umbrella factories. Street vendors stabbed the smoky air with their long skewers of bagels, neatly speared on sticks. Carp wallowed in murky tubs, waiting to be sold, clubbed, and cooked. And the Dubicki refreshment stand offered its famous lemonade, servedeither sweet with “pure sugar” or bitter and “doubly saturated.”
    The three- to five-story buildings that lined Cordials were equally crowded with billboards, advertisements, and multilingual signs bearing the names of small businesses and their proprietors: Jacob Stein, S. Goldstein, M. Grubstein, Lancev, Leningradter, Tyrman, Pik. Shops occupied the ground floors: opticians, tobacconists, pharmacists, and florists; haberdashers, factors, and travel agents; shoe stores, hardware stores, and bookstores. The artisans and craftsmen—tailors, cobblers, upholsterers, and radio repairmen—were generally relegated to the second floors, where rents were cheaper, while the wholesalers, small leather-goods factories, furniture and curtain makers, basket weavers, tinsmiths, and sweatshops filled out the garrets and cellars. Narrow passages tunneled through some buildings, where informal secondary markets for promissory notes thrived. Most small manufacturers around Cordials were paid with IOUs by “jobbers,” who resold theirproducts in stores throughout Poland. “Speculators who had money would walk in the courtyards that ran from Cordials to Zamenhof Street, and they would buy notes at a discount,” one participant in the trade recalled. The notes were discounted depending on their term and the reputation of the jobber, and they formed the backbone of a back-alley banking system in the Jewish Quarter.
    Rear courtyards were the real hubs of economic activity throughout the district, and enterprising landlords like Abraham Kalushiner rented out stalls for mini interior shopping plazas, over which apartments doubled as workshops. The Spiegel family rented such dual-use accommodations three blocks west of Cordials, at 30 Peacock Street. Their atelier occupied the front parlor of the ground-floor apartment, and Boruch, his two sisters, his parents, and his older brother shared three small back rooms. It was crowded and loud, and privacy was nonexistent. But it was a typical living arrangement in the Quarter, which