The Glatstein Chronicles (13 page)

How I envied the cobblers’ and tailors’ apprentices, guys of fourteen and fifteen, who by day lugged heavy tubs of water for their employers, but after work dressed up in brightly colored shirts, cracked pumpkin seeds, and romanced girls. They belonged to the youth wing of the Bund. When someone needed slapping around, they were the ones to do it. When a shop owner was in violation of the regulated business hours, they were the ones to break his windows. More than once I told Father that I envied them, but he snapped back that the revolution would get along just fine without me. Mother, for her part, agreed, and Grandfather sought to buy me off with a three-kopek coin if I would recite for him a chapter from the Five Books of Moses. He was no great scholar, so it gave him much pleasure to hear me rattle off a scriptural passage, even throwing in a bit of commentary. Grandfather believed that there was no better talisman against revolution than a biblical text. “Let the revolutionaries tend to themselves.”

By that time I had discovered the treasure trove in my Uncle Velvl’s house. He owned hundreds of books, from popular novels to the latest proletarian literature, but would sooner lend you money than let you borrow one of his books. He claimed that whenever he loaned out a book, he felt that something was missing from the house, as if a chair or a table had been removed. You were welcome to sit in his house and read—that with greatest of pleasure!—so long as you didn’t carry off one of his precious books.

Velvl was my proletarian uncle, as opposed to Uncle Khiel-Osher, who, by that time, had become my teacher. Uncle Khiel-Osher, eldest of the seven brothers, was a tall, handsome man, indeed, the handsomest man to be seen in the bathhouse. The black hair of his beard still vied for supremacy with the gray, and his eyes were youthful looking. His only blemish was a bulging bit of intestine on the right side of his body that he kept in place with a truss.

Khiel-Osher’s school was considered third-grade level. Its studies included a smattering of Talmud, as well as some biblical Hebrew. On Christmas Day, when Jews customarily refrained from the study of sacred texts, he would take out a grease-stained volume of the Talmud, as if it were some kind of contraband, and read to us the account of how that person—referred to as Yosl Panderik—the man who would be God, was toppled from his glory. He read on and on, until the ultimate punishment was pronounced, eternal immersion, said Uncle Khiel-Osher, “in boiling let’s-not-mention-it-by-name.”

Uncle Khiel-Osher was a good-natured soul, with little jokes for every calamity. He allowed his pupils, literally, to crawl all over him. This didn’t bother him, nor was he irked that his second wife didn’t do right as a stepmother by the daughter of his first marriage, devoting herself entirely to the twins they had together—and that she henpecked him to boot. The twins would have crawled all over him, too, but the two baby girls were still creeping on their stomachs. They slithered about like snakes, always moving in tandem, turning at the same time, with never a hair’s breadth between them, and ate off the floor. Because of their disdain for the stepmother, the schoolboys had no warm feelings either for the two little worms crawling about, and would surreptitiously step on a little hand or foot, taking delight in the stepmother’s shrieks: “Damn that Khiel-Osher. They’re killing my twins!”

Uncle Velvl, my working-class uncle, stitched gaiters for a living. His fingernails were discolored, his hands corroded by acid. He pounded away on strange, tall, wide-bellied Singer sewing machines, singing as he worked, popular theater tunes by Abraham Goldfaden. He was very poor and had a reputation in town as an enlightened person, almost a heretic, although his entire heresy consisted solely of the fact that he sometimes talked during services in the synagogue. His place stank of leather. Unfinished pieces of work lay scattered everywhere and gave off a smell that almost tasted of salt. He had no apprentices and did everything himself, standing humped over the sewing machine, like a camel, singing out loud. He was the first among the brothers who unapologetically raised his children to be workers. One daughter became a seamstress, his son a housepainter, and another daughter he even saw fit to marry off to a shoemaker.

The seamstress, Beyle Perl, was a Socialist Zionist, who actually tried to recruit me to the cause. I must have been about seven or eight and she was probably seventeen, a strapping girl, with long, thick braids. She talked to me about Dr. Theodore Herzl, about the workers’ struggle for a better life, and arranged for us to meet one Sabbath afternoon to visit the organizational headquarters, just off the new road. However, my younger brother betrayed me, and my pants and boots were confiscated to prevent me from going out. Father commented that the Zionist revolution would also carry on without me. As for me, I could swear that those impounded boots forever destroyed my chances for a political career.

Be all that as it may, Uncle Velvl’s free library was still at my disposal. I threw myself on the Socialist pamphlets, but they turned out to be somewhat dry and hard, like brittle cookies. I looked into “heretical” books, but they didn’t give me as much pleasure as did the storybooks and the writings of Sholem Aleichem.

The books drew me to Uncle Velvl’s on Sabbath afternoons. Aunt Bine, who was related to us in several ways—she was Uncle Velvl’s wife, Father’s sister-in-law, and also my maternal grandfather’s sister—was a short, pious woman, a kindhearted soul, who asked no more from God than her share of poverty. By the time I would show up, she had already set out a plate of gooseberries, currants, pea pods, and beans. Uncle Velvl lay napping, nose up, snoring rhythmically, a sleep-inducing sound that spread through the house, like a cricket’s chirping. Aunt Bine, who always had a pious word on her lips, sat by the window, reading her Yiddish Bible aloud, in a drowsy, singsong voice. She knew that the books in the room were somewhat improper and would try to persuade me that, for a clever little head like mine, the study of Talmud was a far healthier pursuit. However, after this bit of edification, she returned to her Bible, spelling out each word meticulously and leaving me to share the perils of
The Family Tsvi.
I relived the horrors of the pogrom they had experienced, as I chewed the mealy beans, the sour currants, the reddish gooseberries with their tiny filaments, and the fleshy sour cherries that filled my mouth with the winy taste of a bounteous summer. I read the poems of Dovid Edelstadt, the Yiddish-American “proletarian” poet, returning to the front of the book, after each reading of a poem, to look at his picture, admiring his refined face and handsome beard. His “working class” seemed to me a tribe of princes who suffer like water carriers under their heavy burden. I had trouble making the connection between Edelstadt’s “working class” and the begrimed laborers of our own city.

One Sabbath afternoon, while I was caught up in Edelstadt’s verse, I heard several shots, followed by sounds of running in the streets, shouts, and wails. I rushed down the dark stairs of my uncle’s house. On the ground floor lay the bloodied figure of a man, half-seated, half-reclining. His head was hidden by a cap. There was blood on the stairs. Within a minute, the whole town became aware that young Atlasovitch had been shot. The next day, hectographed fliers, plastered throughout the city, proclaimed that he had been executed for betraying his party’s secrets.

Young Atlasovitch was the son every Jewish mother in town dreamed of having. A pious youth, with curly, blue-black hair, fair skin, and deep-set, almost girlish, eyes, he was a good student, and from a fine family. His stern father was a man of few words, but secretly proud that the young boy he was raising, his only son, was somebody special. He kept quiet about it, for fear of the evil eye, but he was certain in his heart that one day his son would brighten the dark Exile.

Suddenly, young Atlasovitch had strayed from the path. His father turned gray overnight, but otherwise gave no sign of his anguish. He remained stolidly silent and withdrew into himself. The old man could scarcely be persuaded to attend the funeral. He walked proudly, head high, not at all like a mourner, while his wife, the unfortunate mother, beat her head with her fists. Strangers wept over the young tree cut down before its time, a sacrifice to the unruly times, but the father still walked on proudly, looking straight ahead. After all the respects to the dead had been paid and the time came for reciting the mourners’ kaddish, as all were waiting with lowered heads, old Atlasovitch drew himself up, spat several times into the grave, and, instead of proceeding with the prayer, cried out, “May his name and memory be erased.” Then he turned his back on the mourners and returned home, his stride quick and unwavering.

After all the many rehearsals, after all the woes, the revolution, when it finally arrived, burst upon us like some grand festivity. Waking up that morning, one knew that the day was going to be exceptional, a blessed day—knew it as the child does who opens his eyes and, in a haze of sleep, before his first conscious thought, feels a sweetness coursing through its limbs at the realization that today was a holiday and there would be no school. On that festive day, the sun struck the windows with so much light that it almost shattered the glass. There was sunshine and joy in every street and on every face. Officers kissed Jewish girls, aristocrats fell on Jews’ necks. People walked about freely, carrying the red flag. Everybody was singing, music played. Father raised me high on his shoulders, over everyone’s head, and, pushing through the crowd, said to me, “Don’t ever forget, Yankele, that you were lucky enough to see all this with your very own eyes.”

A slight, skinny kid, riding aloft on my father’s shoulders, I felt light as air, like a flag fluttering in the wind. The tsar had granted a constitution! Soldiers fraternized with the crowds, Cossacks laughed, Kalmuks with leathery faces flashed their white teeth, the sidewalks sang. All day long there was marching. Girls’ braids flaunted red ribbons, red banners waved, people cried for joy, knelt in the street and made the sign of the cross. Young Hasidim with goatees and billowing coats hopped and sang as on the festival of Simhat Torah. Many shops and stores hung out red flags, commerce was at a standstill. My little heart was bursting with joy. Perfumed hands tickled me with flowers and showered me with confetti. Father lifted me so high that I felt unsteady in his grip. Any moment he would put me down and I would be crushed by all this happiness, by the high heels of the women’s shoes, and the Cossack horses that, for the moment, were standing quietly on the sidewalks among the crowd, amiably neighing. I devoured it all, excited by all the activity that swirled around me.

Hundreds of comrades had gathered at the jail to talk to the political prisoners through the barred windows. The knitted, creased faces of the prisoners were visible, crying and laughing. Any moment now, the gates would be flung open! People were singing and shouting, embracing, laughing aloud at our boundless good fortune. Women, who otherwise would never be seen in the vicinity of the jail, were now singing beside the soot-covered workers of the iron foundry:

And all the while, my father was saying, “Yankele, never forget this.”

But moving through the crowd like shadows were several pious, gray-bearded Jews, separated from the tumult and exhorting us to leave. These killjoys had darkened faces and bent backs, as if crushed under the sorrowful weight of the massacres of 1648 and all the many other Jewish catastrophes. Jeremiahs, prophets of doom, they wandered through the crowds, warning, “Jews, go home! This is not your celebration.”

The next morning, awash in shame, heartache, and fear, people spoke about the long night of terror, of the bullets that rained down on the workers gathered at the jail, of the raging Cossacks, the flowing blood, the packs of roaming officers and soldiers, of spies and hundreds of arrests, of how Tsar Nicholas had signed the constitution with his right hand and abrogated it with the left. Last night’s joy had turned into panic, its tattered remnants still strewn on the streets. Janitors swept up the dirty confetti.

The revolution was suppressed and almost driven from my childish consciousness. As we grew older, all that remained were stray reminiscences. The revolutionary resistance, which had started out with such hope and joy, was dead, its spirit gone. The workers had lost all courage. They had had their golden opportunity, and lost it. When would there be another? Spinsters, aging by the moment, instead of songs of revolution, sang of bridegrooms who could never be. Garment workers, backs bent over their sewing machines, heads bowed, sang snatches from Yiddish operettas, finding consolation in such devil-may-care sentiments as: “Oh, money’s nothing but sorrow, / Here today, gone tomorrow.” There were poverty-stricken engagement parties and even shabbier weddings. Young women covered their hair and donned wedding veils for any man whosoever. Poverty became widespread. Scrofulous children with bulging eyes, massive heads, and wide little bottoms splashed about in the mud. From time to time, typhoid fever came calling. Several of our sensitive young men, who had read too much Schopenhauer, took that pessimistic hypocrite literally and committed suicide. Funerals increased and the revolution was yesterday’s dust.

We, the city’s golden youth, refined young men with too much time on our hands, consoled ourselves along the dark paths of the Saxony Gardens by reading Maxim Gorky’s
Mother.
We saw the shadows of the blackened workers, the gloomy factory walls. We heard the call to strike. We admired the posters of a working-class mother, a towering figure with upraised fists, a proletarian Joan of Arc. But now “revolution” took on an aesthetic tinge. We subjected its protagonists to our critical eye, analyzing their actions to determine whether they were “psychologically consistent.” Our literary gauge was Ibsen’s Nora, slamming the door on her unhappy marriage—should she have left her husband or not? We debated Knut Hamsun’s
Hunger
and Gerhart Hauptmann’s
The Weavers.
While the other side of the park was swarming with aristocrats, brokers, and Jews pecking like hens at crumbs of a livelihood, we went about like Hamlets, twirling our walking sticks—a twirl this way, “to be,” a twirl that way, “not to be.”