The owner of a cheap coffee shop on Warsaw's Nalewki Street, Yehezkel Kotik, “woke up famous” by publishing a book in early December 1912, which he simply called “My Memoirs.” This book is a classic description of life in a Jewish shtetl. It paints a broad panorama of the economic, social, religious and cultural life of the Jewish community in the Pale of Settlement in the mid-19th century. Kotik’s “Memoirs” were published in Yiddish in 1912 and immediately received enthusiastic praise from critics and writers, including Sholom Aleichem and I.-L. Pepper. They found new life when their translation was published, first into Hebrew in 1998, and then into English in 2002. This publication is the first translation of “My Memoirs” into Russian.