The Glatstein Chronicles
New Yiddish Library
The New Yiddish Library is a joint project of the Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature and the National Yiddish Book Center.
Additional support comes from the Kaplen Foundation, the Felix Posen Fund for the Translation of Modern Yiddish Literature, and Ben and Sarah Torchinsky.
SERIES EDITOR: DAVID G. ROSKIES
Jacob Glatstein
Edited and with an Introduction by Ruth Wisse
Translated by Maier Deshell and Norbert Guterman
Yale University Press
New Haven and London
Book Two: Homecoming at Twilight
RUTH R. WISSE
In June 1934, twenty years after he had arrived solo in New York City, Jacob Glatstein was summoned back by the family to the bedside of his dying mother in Lublin. Had he not been called for, it is unlikely that he would ever have returned to his birthplace. Glatstein at thirty-seven was then in the “middle of life’s journey”—precisely in the middle as it later turned out—married and the father of three children, employed in the editorial and news departments of the Yiddish daily
Morgn Zhurnal,
and hotly involved in Yiddish literary initiatives. First and foremost a poet, a Yiddish modernist with a growing reputation, he was at work on his fourth book of verse. Even less conducive to a transatlantic crossing than his personal circumstances was the turbulent international climate. With Hitler newly installed as chancellor of Germany and anti-Semitism on the rise in Poland, Jews were frantically trying to get out of Europe rather than in.
The voyage turned Glatstein prophetic. Initially buoyed by his release from daily routine, he became increasingly aware at every stage of his trip of the political drift of Europe toward fascism, communism, and anti-Semitism. By the time he returned to the United States, he had assumed responsibility for the Jews trapped on the Continent. For the next four years he sounded the alarm in a weekly newspaper column that warned alike against Hitler and Stalin and against the political apathy of Western democracies that allowed murderous regimes to prevail. “Who is crazier,” he asked in August 1935, “the maniac Hitler driving the 600,000 Jews of Germany to their death at 90 miles an hour or the impassive bystanders watching it happen?” Why were American Jews silent in the face of mounting anti-Jewish attacks in Poland? He hammered at Soviet Russia’s repression of freedoms; the Arab pogroms against Jews in Palestine disturbed him all the more because Joseph Stalin hailed them as part of a Communist Revolution. With the nations engaged in constant swordplay over Jewish heads, he wrote, “the Yiddish writer feels like a strategist maneuvering invisible armies in legendary lands. No one has chosen him, yet he speaks into the wasteland where he hears only the echo of his own voice.”
1
Glatstein had always emphasized the subjectivity of poetry. No less subjectively, he now registered the growing threat. What became his most famous poem, “Good Night, World” (dated April 1938, in response to pogroms in Poland), slammed the door on the “big, stinking world” and made its way back to the twisted ghetto streets in an emotional-intellectual tangle of pride, sorrow, anger, regret, resolve, and dread. “Wagons,” a much softer lyric of the same year, sounded “bells of silence” for a community of Jews approaching its final hour. More than death, each member fears to remain alone in a world without fellow Jews. Glatstein found multiple ways, through lyrical wit and transparent paradox, to express the ironies of a private sensibility that is nonetheless subject to the common Jewish fate.
The most obvious literary outcome of the journey home was the book before us—the fictionalized personal account of a Yiddish writer who returns to Poland in 1934. Apparently conceived as a trilogy, this project was begun shortly after Glatstein returned to New York. The first installment appeared in the little magazine
Inzikh
(In the self) in 1934, and the book
Ven yash iz geforn
(When Yash set out) was published three years later. The second volume,
Ven yash iz gekumen
(When Yash arrived), appeared in installments in the New York weekly
Yidisher Kemfer
and as a book in 1940. A 1943 collection of Glatstein’s poems announced that the final volume of the trilogy was about to appear under the title
Ven Yash iz tsurikgekumen
(When Yash returned). But only a couple of fragments of that intended book ever surfaced, turning the missing third volume into the unresolved conclusion of the project. The “Yash” scheme was conceived as filial homage to Polish Jews and did not survive their destruction.
The narrator Yash, bearing the nickname of the author, is the central figure and consciousness of the two books. Though his name appeared only in the Yiddish titles, whatever we are told about him in the book corresponds to what we know about the life of Jacob Glatstein. In fact, we learn more about the author from these novels than from any other autobiographical source—about his childhood, family, voyage to America, early difficulties of adjustment to the new language and surroundings, and the various jobs that supported him as he wrote poetry. There are no apparent discrepancies between the author’s biography and the parts of it he discloses here. Which is not to say that any great intimacies are revealed: as Glatstein told an interviewer in 1955, he did not feel comfortable with personal disclosures except through the veil of poetry, and could not write about himself, “or about my loves or about my non-loves—feelings about my wife or a beloved and things of that sort.” Long after they had abandoned religious observance, the virtues of modesty inculcated by Judaism continued to influence most Yiddish writers, Glatstein emphatically among them. He supplies in these books only the kind of information about himself that conforms to the scheme of his literary voyage. Future biographers still have their work cut out for them.
The community register of Lublin, Poland, then under tsarist administration, records the birth of three Glatsztejns in 1896. The one who concerns us here was the son born to Icek (Isaac), aged thirty, and his wife, Ita Ruchla, born Jungman, aged thirty-two, on August 7 (or 19th, according to the Julian calendar still in use under the tsarist regime).
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Yankev, Yankele, Yash, or, in English, Jacob, considered himself fortunate to have been born into a traditional family—his maternal ancestors were rabbis. He received a traditional religious education with incremental exposure to secular subjects as he matured. Raised in the shadow of the nearby Lublin fortress and prison, Jacob experienced the roiling political conflicts around him from inside a large, cohesive, and supportive clan. The paternal Glatsztejn (Glatshteyn) tribe of seven brothers accounted for a large part of the boy’s education. One uncle ran the religious cheder the boy attended in the equivalent of third grade. A second uncle, a tailor, introduced him to secular literature, and a third was cantor of Lublin’s largest synagogue. Following in their father’s footsteps, his two male cousins became choral directors and composers, while he himself developed a vital attachment to music. His interest in literature he attributed to his father, who sold ready-to-wear clothing for a living but encouraged his son to read the latest Yiddish and Hebrew publications in the hope that the boy would become a writer.
Literature was a popular sport in the Russia and Poland of Glatstein’s youth, and disproportionately so among Jewish youth, for whom many other competitive avenues were blocked. In describing his high school education at the Krinski Commercial School, the author underscores how futile it felt to prepare for professions from which Jews would be barred, and how much cheerier it was to spend the time in autonomous artistic and literary pursuits. Glatstein said he could not remember a time when he was not writing. His friends debated the merits of writers the way Americans did baseball greats. Relaxation of tsarist censorship after the abortive revolution of 1905, though only partial as compared with the liberties enjoyed in Vienna or New York, encouraged an explosion of talent in journalism, belles lettres, theater, music, painting and sculpture, secular scholarship, popular entertainment, and politics. From early boyhood, Jacob accompanied his grandfather on his visits to Warsaw, the cultural hub of Polish Jewry, and by his early teens, on his own, he made the obligatory pilgrimage of every aspiring writer to the Yiddish “master,” Yitzhak Leybush Peretz. One of Glatstein’s early stories was apparently accepted though never published by the mass-circulation Warsaw Yiddish daily
Fraynd
(Friend). Had he remained in Poland, he would probably have moved to Warsaw to join one of its burgeoning literary and intellectual circles.
As it happens, however, the family member who proved most decisive in Glatstein’s life was the youngest uncle who had moved to New York. Polish nationalism, with its intolerant by-product anti-Semitism, persuaded Glatstein’s parents to let him join that uncle very shortly before the outbreak of World War I. When he arrived at what was then the most crowded place on earth, his local relative could not leave his job in a cigarette factory to meet his ship. It took the eighteen-year-old some time to find his footing. While trading in one unsuitable day job for another, he attended night school, first to learn English and then to study law.
And yet New York was not altogether alien. With its critical mass of unsettled youth, the Lower East Side offered Glatstein the same kinds of literary opportunities he had found in Lublin and Warsaw. Yiddish, the common language of several million immigrants, generated newspapers, theater companies, publishing houses, humor magazines, a music industry, and an aspiring high literary culture. By the time he joined it, the local Yiddish literary community had already produced two literary “generations”—the so-called Sweatshop Poets of the turn of the century and the
Yunge,
the breakaway literary “youth,” who emphasized their greater aestheticism, inwardness, and preference for quietude to socially relevant verse. World War I accelerated the independence of the immigrant community from its European origins, to the point that after the war cultural influences began flowing from the new world to the old.
Once Glatstein had started law school and saw that he
could
become an American lawyer, he realized that he did not want to, gave it up, and threw in his lot with Yiddish literature. Together with another law school dropout, Nahum Borukh Minkoff, and Aaron (Glants) Leyeles, he launched a new poetry “movement” called
Inzikh
through a manifesto and accompanying anthology of verse that demonstrated aspects of their theory in practice. As its name suggests,
Inzikhizm
or Introspectivism—the third indigenous Yiddish poetry “movement” in America—insisted that poetry filter everything through the prism of self, which, in turn, mandated the use of free verse so that every new poem could emerge in the rhythm appropriate to its subject and creator. “The world exists and we are part of it. But for us, the world exists only as it is mirrored in us, as it touches
us.
… It becomes an actuality only
in
us and
through
us.”
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The signatories declined to write on Jewish subjects or in a Jewish style simply because they composed in a Jewish language, or to use the accepted Hebraic spelling for words of Hebrew derivation.
Glatstein’s first book,
Yankev Glatshteyn,
published almost simultaneously with the
Inzikh
manifesto of 1920, demonstrates some of the consequences of this insurgent spirit.
Lately there is no trace left
of Yankl son of Yitzhok [a traditional form of his name]
but for a tiny round dot
tumbling dazedly through the streets
with limbs clumsily attached.
The violence of the age has done violence to the person he was. That tiny dot from the first letter of Glatstein’s name alludes to “dos pintele yid,” the distilled Jewish essence of the young man who felt himself exploded into fragments. The new poetry expressed the sensations of an immigrant whose language is all that remains of his formative world. But by reverse inference, fragments of Yiddish could also create a new cultural homestead. Disconnected letters, after all, do join together to form meaningful, complete poems. Glatstein was able in one of his poems to summon up a Jewish childhood through the mere syllables of Yiddish nursery speech, and in another to evoke the sweetness of Torah study through the remembered translation of a word from the Song of Songs.