The Glatstein Chronicles (2 page)

The unsettling freedom of America comes across in the poetry, prose, and journalism that Glatstein wrote over the next fourteen years. Many a poem seems to be inspired less by a strong emotion, observation, or incident than by an exotic word, such as
Brahma, Sesame, Sheeny
(pejorative for Jew), or the random sounds of
Tsela-tseldi
that the poet is eager to try out in Yiddish. The term
experimentation
hardly suffices to describe the many subjects that Glatstein addresses, the poses he adopts, and the poetic variations he attempts. Unlike his Yiddish contemporaries and predecessors who were raised mostly on Russian, Polish, and German literatures, Glatstein also read Anglo-American literature, including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce—expatriates like himself, who rendered the disintegration of their inherited traditions as masterworks of wasteland and exile. In a short essay, “If Joyce Wrote Yiddish,” Glatstein demonstrates how playfully a Yiddish poet could write ultramodernist prose, by using the perceived breakup of his native language to reinvent it in new combinations.

Opportunities and liabilities of Yiddish writing in America were one and the same. Though only decades removed from what scholars marked as its “beginnings” in tsarist Russia in the 1860s, modern Yiddish literature was already dispersed with its speakers to Argentina and Australia, emerging under political conditions as diverse as Bolshevik Russia and British-ruled Palestine. Never before in history had more than ten million Jews communicated in the same language: to be part of Yiddish literature meant staying abreast of developments all over the world and reaching a potential readership from Berdichev to Buenos Aires. Migration and travel became prominent subjects. Yet the same freedoms that allowed Jews to write as they pleased in Yiddish encouraged most of their fellow Jews to start using the languages of their adopted lands, or at least to ensure that their children learned languages of opportunity and professional advancement. Had he been just a little younger when he arrived in New York, Glatstein himself might have written in English, joining a literary community with more American-centered concerns. For a writer, language is fate—his raw material at one end of the creative process and his marketplace on the other.
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Glatstein came to understand that his fate as a Yiddish poet, in a Jewish language, was indivisible from that of its speakers.

The Glatstein chronicles stretch like a tightrope across a chasm. Book One, “Homeward Bound,” opens as the poet sets out for his native city and ends with the train conductor’s call for “Lublin!” Book Two, “Homecoming at Twilight,” picks up the hero as he recuperates from his mother’s funeral at a Polish Jewish hotel and ends with his impending return to America. Missing in between is the action that was the ostensible purpose of the trip. Where is the reunion with father and sister? Where is the pivotal deathbed scene? While we readers experience nothing like the narrator’s bereavement, we lament the absence of the homecoming we anticipated but are destined never to know. The curtain remains drawn over the encounter between son and parents that was to have been the central “event.” Instead, the
before
and
after
Yash chronicles frame the eclipse of his entire formative world. It is likely that Glatstein intended to feature the reunion with his dying mother as the centerpiece of the concluding volume, which would have dealt with his return to America. In lieu of Book Three he wrote a cascade of poems that wrestle with a catastrophe dwarfing the “natural” death of a parent. When Glatstein’s father, brother, and family were murdered along with the rest of Polish Jewry, he evidently could not follow his intended literary scheme.

Yash begins his outbound journey in high spirits, delighted to be sprung from his daily routine. Pleasantly surprised by the fluency of his acquired English, he discovers that he is a consummate cosmopolitan, able to converse with passengers in Yiddish, Russian, German, and Polish, and, when necessary, to identify some sentences in Danish. As a professional newspaperman, he is curious about everything from the Sovietization of Russia to economic conditions in Chile, and as a student of the human heart, he is interested in the personal stories that flesh out the historical moment. Among the people he meets are a Schenectady socialist, a Jewish prizefighter, a socialite physician, a Wisconsin schoolteacher, members of a college student band, a pianist, and a painter. One of the passengers tells him, “You’re such a great listener, you have golden ears. Your ears are worth a million dollars.” This echoes what Glatstein wrote in one of his essays, “I have always liked human ears. I mean ears that can truly listen to someone else.” Those golden ears are the reason Yash transcribes many more aural than visual impressions, many more conversations than painterly scenes. He reports on encounters during the stopover in Paris and the train ride across Hitler’s Germany to Poland, encounters that convey the darkening mood of the continent.

But unlike the travelogue it otherwise resembles, this book moves simultaneously into the personal interior. On his first night at sea, rocking to sleep in his cabin, Yash is reminded of Fishl-Dovid, the overanxious hero in a story by Sholem Aleichem who is trying to make it home to his wife and children in time for the Passover holiday.
⁵
Fishl-Dovid has reason to worry, being rowed by a sadistic Gentile boatman across a thawing river. This momentary association discloses the world of Sholem Aleichem beneath the modernism of Jacob Glatstein, the nervous East European Jew who is embodied in the confident American, and the autobiographical impulse embedded in the reportage. The counterpoint between inner and outer voyages, past and present, literary inheritance and creative potential, continues from this point on. Memory interrupts and enhances the passenger’s experience of the world; experiences trigger memory and self-understanding.

The book may be better described in musical terms than in categories of plot, characters, and dramatic action. No sooner does the ship leave the dock than the narrator feels himself subject to “marine law,” whose function he had failed to appreciate when he was studying it in law school. The special qualities he attributes to life at sea are those of his prose: “Footsteps lighten, manners soften, voices lilt.” People suspended at sea move gently, allowing for slower-paced narration. Whereas many a novelist uses a travel conveyance to heighten dramatic tension among strangers forcibly held together over a limited time, Glatstein relaxes the tempo and loosens the tension to allow for more genuine and prolonged encounter and reflection. The book’s many allusions to music invite us to consider it in symphonic terms. Young and old, Jew and Gentile, European and American, male and female, coarse and genteel—the narrator arranges inharmonious voices so as to ensure that they do not drown one another out. The pulsating memories of the homebound Jew in troubled waters are like the solo instrument in this rich symphonic composition.

In boarding the ship, Yash has hoped to leave the newsroom and everyday life behind. “Maybe here I might succeed in ridding myself of the miasmas that had accrued to my being as a social animal, as a writer-for-hire, as Jew in a bloody world that—
pace
Shakespeare—demands only
my
pound of flesh.” It is not to be. On the second day at sea, the ship’s bulletin carries the news that Hitler has conducted a massive purge of the Nazi storm troopers (
Sturmabteilung
, or SA) and their leader Ernst Rohm. This would make it June 30, 1934. The news report suddenly sets Yash apart from the other Americans and Europeans he has been hobnobbing with and sends him in search of fellow Jews who will understand the menace to their tribe. Several days later, during his stopover in Paris, he learns of the death of the Hebrew poet Haim Nahman Bialik (July 4, 1934), who has provided the strongest spur and challenge to his career as a Yiddish poet. Thus, along with the travel encounters and the recovered memories, the third rail of the book is history-in-the-making—conveying the high voltage of the here and now.

Reviewing the first Yash volume shortly after its appearance, the not yet famous Isaac Bashevis Singer was dismayed by the absence of incident (“Jules Verne would not have wasted ten lines on a journey so bereft of adventure or romance”) and by the book’s apparently random organization (“At one point he lets his characters speak, and then, on a whim, he tells his own autobiography”).
⁶
Adept at racy storytelling, Bashevis Singer failed to appreciate Glatstein’s thematic approach to composition. The third chapter, for example, introduces a collection of Russians returning to the Soviet Union who try to impress Yash with the advanced state of their society. Expansive in the Slavic manner yet carefully toeing the Soviet line, they provide a truer composite picture of the USSR than the
New York Times
correspondent Walter Duranty was then offering the American public. These encounters in turn remind Yash of how the “revolution” first penetrated his consciousness when his father held him up to watch a workers’ demonstration in 1905 and instructed him, “Yankele, never forget this.” Juxtaposing the naïve beginnings of the Revolution as recalled by a Jewish child with the boasts of its newly minted Soviet citizens, including a Jew who veils his Jewishness, spares the author any need for disparaging commentary. The Communist boast crumbles under the forced optimism of its celebrants.

There is nothing random, either, in the contrast between the two parts of the Yash chronicles, the first moving out into the wide world, the second sealed almost hermetically inside Polish-Jewish society. Book Two is situated in a small Jewish sanatorium-hotel in a resort town between Lublin and Kazimierz Dolny recognizable as the real-life Naleczow, and as a literary knock-off of Thomas Mann’s retreat in
The Magic Mountain.
Mann’s imposing novel had not long before been published in Yiddish translation (by Isaac Bashevis Singer), and Glatstein must have derived bittersweet pleasure from transposing its Alpine loftiness into a miniaturized Jewish version. The sanatorium functions in both works as the symbolic setting for a civilization in crisis, and in each case the outsider falls under the spell of the hospice he has come to visit. But Thomas Mann shows the incurable infection lurking inside Europe’s grandeur, while Glatstein uses a parallel scheme to disclose the irrepressible vitality of the condemned community of Europe’s Jews. The opening sentence, pronounced before we know by whom, echoes the Bible’s “De profundis”: “Even from the muck will I sing praises unto Thee, my Lord.”
Blote,
or muck, is the Yiddish self-deprecating substitute for the “depths” from which the psalmist reaches for redemption. The whole book negotiates between the heights to which Jewry aspires and the misery into which it has been forced.

The stationary setting of this second book allows for greater historical penetration than horizontal coverage. Already in the concluding chapter of Book One, Yash had met aunts and cousins who were trapped in a spiral of bigotry and poverty and unable to leave Poland as he had done two decades earlier. The gates to America were almost sealed by then, and though the “land of opportunity” was then also temporarily mired in the Great Depression, an American in Poland was like biblical Joseph from Egypt, minus the salvific granaries or political influence. The image of Yash as an impotent Joseph first appears when he is appealed to by a seductive, unhappily married female relative, and it is memorably reinforced when a dozen petitioners approach him to carry messages to their American relatives. As compared with Glatstein’s actual voyage to Poland, which included arrangements for the publication of a volume of his poems, Yash meets with no fellow Yiddish writers but instead joins an assortment of Jews in a voluntary “ghetto” not strictly of their own making.
⁷
His sense of impotence grows with every demand on him that he cannot satisfy.

Framing Yash in the Polish chronicle are two powerful personalities, like older and younger prophets of modern Jewry. Steinman, whose “Even from the muck” sets the tone for the book, is a German-trained historian and custodian of Hasidic lore who serves the sanatorium guests as something of a modern Hasidic Master. He enthralls his listeners with stories of his life that are like a composite history of the East European Jewish intellectual, raised traditionally, exposed to the influence of the secular enlightenment, and drawn back to his endangered people. Steinman’s magnetic personality and his ideas about the holistic Jewish people are reminiscent of the Yiddish luminary Y. L. Peretz, whom Glatstein had met as a boy, and traces of that encounter may be found in Steinman’s paternal interest in this potential successor. Steinman excels at everything but succession: his devoted daughter is in no sense his spiritual heir, and there is no one remotely like him in the wings as he lies dying. Both the older man and the young writer realize that their personal affinity for each other cannot span the widening breach between the Jewish past in Poland and the Jewish future in America. The death of this public figure toward the end of the book signals the fading glory of Polish Jewry and allows Yash to experience the mourning for his mother that he had until then kept in check.

No less impressive than Steinman is a sixteen-year-old boy from one of the Hasidic dynasties that Steinman studies, a latter-day Nahman of Bratzlav (one of the early geniuses of the Hasidic movement), who wonders whether he might not be in the running for the assignment of Messiah. The boy invites the narrator home to visit his family—a rabbinic brother and rabbinic brother-in-law and their two wives—and to show off the literary fruits of his runaway imagination. The most dazzling of all the characters Yash encounters on this journey, the boy transcends the workaday world in his yearning to encompass all knowledge and to complete the work that God has left undone. “You’re a stranger here, you’ll go away soon, across the ocean,” he tells the narrator. “You will think that a confused young boy has been talking to you. But don’t be too sure.” We readers can’t be too sure either, for the boy’s poems and ideas impress us with their precocity and verve. Yet his brilliance, like a firecracker’s, threatens to explode in the process of shedding its light.