‘I would not open a Jewish cafe in Germany today’

When US-born, Paris-raised Sonia Simmenauer relocated to Germany in 1982, her grandmother sent her a letter explaining why they would never speak again.

“I was a traitor,” says the concert agent from her home office in Berlin. “Most of the family of my grandmother and grandfather had died at the hands of the Nazis. Germany was solely the country of the evil. So she decided that she had had a granddaughter, but didn’t have her any more.”

Her grandmother kept her word for the remainder of her life, but for the rest of Simmenauer’s family, particularly her Hamburg-born father, “with time, it got easier”. Walter – an amateur cellist – had left, aged 12, with his family in 1938, fleeing to France where they survived the war under false names.

He finally made his peace with his daughter’s relocation when she opened a Jewish cafe in Grindel, in the part of his home city historically known as “Little Jerusalem”. Its synagogue had been destroyed during the war, but its Jewish school, the Talmud-Tora-Schule – attended by her father after he had been forced to leave his state school – had survived. It was finally reopened in 2007 and Simmenauer decided: “If there is a school, there is a future. But if there is a school, there needs to be a cafe.”

When she heard – on erev-Pesach – that the proprietor of the old printer’s shop was calling it a day, she told him of her dream. Though he was not Jewish, his response sealed the deal. “The light in his eyes – there was something so adamantly enthusiastic about the idea that I knew I had to do it.”

Café Leonar opened in 2008, serving lashings of chicken soup and borscht, along with the cakes of the grandmothers of each of the staff. Simmenauer took charge of the Käsekuchen (cheesecake) and Mohnrolle (poppy seed roll). Diners also tucked in to Kugelhopf (yeast cake) and Schokomohnkuchen (chocolate seed cake).

The name, once she alighted on it, seemed too obvious for words. But it took the old printer to suggest it, when he presented her with a brown envelope full of old factory brochures. It was that of Leonar, the photo paper company established by her grandfather in Hamburg, combining the names of its two founders, Loewenthal and Arndt. By complete serendipity, her son’s names are Leonard and Arnold.

Café Leonar became the home of a salon featuring readings from Jewish authors, torah discussions and sessions on psychoanalysis and, for a time, even housed a shop selling books and Judaica.

But slowly Simmenauer began to feel burdened by the weight of “beautiful stories” and “all their trauma” that was being placed on her shoulders – by the descendants of both Jews and Nazis.

“From the moment it opened, we had a flow of people coming with bags, either metaphorical or real, with things that they had found in their homes that remained from the Jews who had been living there. They wanted us to take this all and put it in the cafe and I didn’t want that because you couldn’t stop.

“This was all so emotional that I couldn’t take it any more. From one side and the other, they were coming and having a cup of coffee and giving me a story. They left, liberated, but now I had it [the story]. So at a certain point, I said the pot is full.”

I tell Simmenauer why this tale is so up my strasse. In 1939, my grandfather fled from Berlin – where he had managed the Cafe Uhlandeck – to London. There he found his haven, serving refugees from Nazi Europe in the cafes of Finchley Road – or Finchleystrasse as it became known, due to its large number of German-speaking newcomers. There is another connection. Cafe Balsam, which he established in the 1940s, was the favourite restaurant of the Amadeus Quartet and where they rehearsed before becoming world-famous.

“We are all following the line of history,” responds Simmenauer, who, apart from being a salonnière, has devoted her life to string quartets, founding her own specialist agency, Impresariat Simmenauer. We are talking via Zoom, but I picture us chatting over a slice of Jüdischer Apfelkuchen and a steaming black coffee, to the strains of two violins, one viola and a cello.

After two years, she passed Leonar on to her son, Arnold, and it is still a heimishe destination in Hamburg, though now run not by Jews but Persians. She has also since passed control of her agency to Arnold. His passion for the profession, she says, is “the greatest gift a parent can imagine”.

When she opened Leonar, local police suggested having an officer at the front door. “I said if we have a policeman in front of the cafe, we will have only Jews coming in. And if we don’t, it’s open for everybody and then we risk nothing.”

But, she adds mournfully: “Today is different. Today, after all that happened in Israel [on October 7], Jewish places are in danger. A lot of Jews have been attacked either physically or their houses or by mail. It’s a horrible time.

“I would not open a Jewish cafe today. I still run a Jewish salon in Berlin, but we have now police and security.”

Simmenauer says she is grateful she was able to establish Leonar when she did. “It was a fantastic time. And it was a time when this all needed to come out, just before it disappeared.”

Two Violins, One Viola, A Cello and Me by Sonia Simmenauer, is published by Harcamlow Press (£12.99)