ROBIN HIRSCH is a former Oxford, Fulbright, and English-Speaking Union Scholar, who has acted, directed, taught, and published on both sides of the Atlantic.  He was born in London during the Blitz, the son of German Jews who had fled Hitler.   This complex history informs much of his work both as a writer and as a performer.

He is the author of Last Dance at the Hotel Kempinski: Creating a Life in the Shadow of History (UPNE, 1995; paper, 1996), for which he received two NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts) Fellowships and the Robert and Adele S. Blank Jewish Arts Award.  It is perhaps the only Holocaust-related memoir to have been called “very funny” by the New York Times; Jewish Book News called it “one of the best books ever written on the long arm of the Holocaust.”  

He is also the author, with the collaboration and interference of his children, of FEG: Stupid Poems for Intelligent Children (Little, Brown, 2002), called “splendid . . .  sophisticated . . . witty . . . frolicsome” by Publishers Weekly and “searingly smart and challenging” by the New York Times.

In 1977 he founded the New Works Project, a peripatetic experimental theatre company in New York City, which developed more than two hundred new works for the American theatre, including his own acclaimed solo performance cycle, Mosaic: Fragments of a Jewish Life (“completely glorious” according to the Village Voice), with which he has toured both the US and Europe.

Also in 1977 together with two other artists—Irish-American actor Charles McKenna and Argentinean-Canadian-Italian painter and sculptor Raphaela Pivetta—he opened a tiny one-room café on a tiny one-block street in New York City’s Greenwich Village: the Cornelia Street Café.

Over the years it grew to include two bars, three rooms upstairs, a performance space downstairs, and more refrigerators than anyone could keep track of.  There, for more than 40 years, in addition to award-winning food and drink, Cornelia presented work by thousands of artists in every conceivable genre (and quite a few inconceivable ones): from science to stiltwalking, from Afro-American poetry to Latin jazz, from Shakespeare at Midnight to the entire Iliad as an experiment in Breakfast Theatre; from Suzanne Vega singing her first songs to Eve Ensler launching her Vagina Monologues, from Senator Eugene McCarthy (the good Senator McCarthy) reading his poetry to Dr. Oliver Sacks reading his prose, from American Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffmann to Romanian Poet Laureate Nina Cassian, from Benoit Mandelbrot, the inventor of fractal geometry, to David Amram, the inventor (with Jack Kerouac) of jazz and spoken word, from members of Monty Python reading children’s books to members of the Royal Shakespeare Company honoring dead poets on their birthdays.  

Cornelia received many honors: she was named Best New York Poetry Series by The Poetry Calendar, Jazz Venue of the Year (ten years in a row) by The NYC Jazz Record, among the 100 Great Jazz Cubs of the World by Downbeat Magazine (also ten years in a row), Best of New York Food by The Village Voice, among New York’s Top 100 Restaurants by Time Out, Where Magazine’s Best Neighborhood Ambiance, Zagat Nightlife’s Award of Distinction, and The Wine Spectator’s Best Wine-by-the-Glass Program.  In 1987 Mayor Ed Koch proclaimed her “a culinary as well as a cultural landmark.”

Robin has some academic credentials of his own.  He holds a joint Ph.D in Literature and Drama; his translations, criticism, memoirs, stories, poems, plays, and theatre reviews have been published in Modern International Drama, Culturefront, Forward, The Village Voice, The Soho Weekly News, Western Humanities Review, The New York Jewish Review, The New York Times, Brooklyn Rail, New English Review, The NYC Jazz Record, El Urogallo (Madrid), the Jewish Quarterly (London), Recourseaupoème (Paris), etc.  He co-produced with Bernard Brightman the award-winning album on Stash Records, Cornelia Street: The Songwriters Exchange (1980, re-issued 1990, 2006).  He has taught Literature, Theatre, and the Humanities at Universities in Europe and the United States, and toured the US for the National Humanities Series.  He has served as a Literature panelist for NYSCA and a board member of the Writers Room, an urban writers’ colony in NYC.  But even in the company of great minds he has always managed to have fun. And indeed, of all his titles, the ones Robin is proudest of were self-bestowed: Minister of Culture, Wine Czar, Dean of Faculty at the Cornelia Street Café.

And indeed, of all his titles, the ones Robin is proudest of were self-bestowed: Minister of Culture, Wine Czar, Dean of Faculty at the Cornelia Street Café.

And what is the Minister up to now?  He is working on The Whole World Passes Through: Stories from the Cornelia Street Café, Volume I of which was published in 2017 to coincide with Cornelia’s 40th birthday.  It is at once the biography of a beloved New York institution and the continuing autobiography of its author.

Whole World celebrates a culture which has almost vanished, eclipsed by the proliferation of streamlined coffeehouses which have somehow managed to isolate patrons rather than bring them together, but which, centuries ago, had as its source a bean from Ethiopia, which was held sacred in certain Middle Eastern cultures, and which at the apogee of Western civilization had thousands of small shrines in large cities where worshippers congregated in a spirit of literacy, wit, good fellowship, and democracy.

The Cornelia Street Café was forced to close in January 2019 (15 months ahead of the curve . . .) by vile landlords who had taken over the building. 

 So, it’s over, my dear.  You had a wonderful life, you made wonderful friends, you created a wonderful community.  But thousands of your admirers, your comrades, your co-conspirators will remember you, cherish your memory, and raise a glass: “Cornelia, vin extraordinaire!”
- from  the concluding story, “Losing Cornelia”

In Whole World, Robin picks up the personal history begun in Last Dance and finds in the midst of a myriad of other people's stories the continuation of his own.