1938. The Jewish population of Warsaw is 270,000 or about a third of the city's inhabitants. Freed in 1918 from the yoke of the partitioning powers, Warsaw has become a vibrant metropolis, where the arts and innovation flourish and where the Jewish intelligentsia forms an intrinsic and vital part of the avant-garde. At the same time, Warsaw is also, to a large extent, a bilingual city where knowledge of Yiddish, the language spoken by East European Jews, is sufficient to allow one to shop, study, work and enjoy the theater. In short, it is a center of both Polish and Jewish culture.