The Glatstein Chronicles (20 page)

No matter how strongly my mother had campaigned against my leaving, she nevertheless had to give in. My father’s clothing business—by this time he had left Shimen Berger’s employ—was going down the drain day by day, and soon he would be forced to close up shop. Even his partner Ezra was beginning to show signs of surrender. Ezra had a proud, Gentile face, but his aging hands trembled, as did his round gray head and trimmed gray beard. He could neither read nor write but still considered himself an aristocrat, because his second wife was of vaunted Lithuanian origin and didn’t cover her hair, and because his son attended a Russian high school and spoke an ungrammatical Russian and Polish, but with the proper pronunciation. Common Gentiles and Jewish customers he would leave for my father to wait on. However, very often Father would also have to attend to Ezra’s refined customers, because if any of the latter began to haggle, Ezra would become touchy and let loose with a jab, “What do you think this is, the targ?” Targ was the Gentile market where secondhand clothes were sold almost for nothing.

Now, even proud Ezra bowed his head whenever odd customers showed up, peasants in coarsely woven coats, whom, in the better days, he had chased out, scattering them like frightened hens: “Go on, beat it! This store’s not for you. There’s nothing here for you.” Ezra himself did not as yet deign to wait on such customers, closing his eyes as Father pulled overcoats on and off, sighing like the Hasidic master Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev remonstrating with God: “A fine old age You’ve given me. What’s there to say, oy, Master of the Universe!”

This was the time when Poles had begun to settle a score with the Jews for having helped elect the labor deputy Jagiello to the Russian parliament, and not the out-and-out anti-Semite they had favored. The ensuing anti-Jewish boycott, begun as a jest, soon took a more serious turn, biting into Jewish businesses, which ground to a standstill. Even the prosperous Khazanov store passed many a day without a single ruble in sales. The money exchangers fled. Father sought to save himself by advertising in the Polish newspaper
Zhemya Lubelska.
Its rival, the
Polyak-Katolik,
reprinted the ad with an editorial raking
Zhemya
over the coals for carrying a Jewish notice.

My steamship ticket already lay in a tin box in the bureau. I counted the months, the weeks. By this time, even Mother would have liked to speed my departure, afraid that the business might eat up the several hundred rubles that had been set aside for my travel expenses. “Itskhok,” she kept reminding my father, “this money is sacred. It can’t be touched.”

“Ite Rokhshe, who’s touching it?” Father would reply.

In the evenings I was a regular at the café run by the Turks, whom we called Greeks. I drank lukewarm milk and broke off pieces of the thin, saffron-infused pastry, studded with raisins. I even confided to one of the proprietors that I was going to America. He asked me, when? I was always eager to show off my small stock of Turkish and answered, “In hon weeks”—“weeks,” of course, spoken in Russian. Then, for his benefit, I rattled off all the numbers in Turkish, from one to ten—bir, iki, üçi, dört, besh, alti, yedi, sekiz, dokuz, hon. The Turk beamed at my numerical proficiency in his language, which I had acquired from an appendix to a teach-yourself-Esperanto textbook. I even tossed in yirmi—twenty—and elli—fifty—so that he would know how far my Turkish extended.

The last few weeks prior to departure, I passed my days in the Saxony Gardens, where spring was in full bloom. My friends and I went about Lublin with our heads held high, like the heroes of Hamsun’s
Growth of the Soil.
Our group included: the painter, one of his eyes milky as herring milt, who had just returned from the Kraków Academy; the poet, recently back from Warsaw, bearing a stack of testimonials; the bushy-haired violinist, who had just completed his studies at the Warsaw Conservatory and had already appeared with the Hazamir orchestra; our “pessimist,” a professional cynic and misogynist, with moist palms and long, dirty fingernails, the eldest among us, who dabbled in the Upanishads, cited Schopenhauer and Weininger, and boasted that he preferred onanism to making love to women; the friend who’d spent a year and a half with a sister in Siberia, in far off Ufa, and therefore affected a Siberian accent when speaking Russian; and several well-read youths who were preparing themselves to becoming critics and who went around with volumes by Taine, Saint-Beuve, Belinsky, and, especially, our Brandes.

We strutted about like peacocks, as unreal as characters in literature. These were my Bazarovs, Nekhlyudovs, Karamazovs, Oblomovs, Sanins, Hamlets, and Don Quixotes. We were surrounded by spirited Gentile life, rather, by several such, Russian and Polish, each at dagger’s point with the other. There were also the many strata of Jewish society divided like Hindu castes, from the Untouchable paupers to the Jewish rajas, who rode around in carriages drawn by fiery horses. The surrounding streets churned with tailors, shoemakers, tinsmiths, cigarette makers, laborers in brickyards and sugar factories, tanners, ironmongers, teachers, water carriers, maidservants, stocking makers, glove makers, seamstresses, musicians, hairdressers, tycoons, religious-court adjudicators, rabbis. Oblivious to all of it, we sparred with ready-made phrases and went home to mama for supper and some pocket money.

The poet recited a poem about spring. His sad, lilting voice caressed and smoothed out the inharmonious lines. Strongly influenced by poets of the sort that asked “the little birch trees to pray for me,” he appealed to the flowers and spring breezes to bestow I no longer remember which of their favors on him. We all thought highly of him and placed great hopes on his becoming our local star. Even I, who had already written whole packs of poems and stories, considered myself his inferior. I envied his melancholy lines that quivered like a stammer and proclaimed themselves poetry before one grasped the sense of the words.

The poet’s father was a wealthy man. The family lived in a non-Jewish neighborhood in one of the new apartment houses with mirrored hallways and couches on the landings, one of those buildings that everyone had run to gawk at while it was under construction. Their apartment was something to see—large, mirrored drawing rooms, heavy furniture, blue and red plush chairs, tall vases, cages with singing canaries, and a young, good-natured stepmother who looked as if she might be the poet’s older sister and who perfectly suited the modern decor. She went out of her way to be nice to her “child” and his friends. The poet had an ornately carved writing desk, where he kept his cache of poems, all copied in his meticulous handwriting. His very first poem, which he declaimed to me tearfully in his beautifully furnished study, was called “The Young Mother Is Dead,” and as its title suggested, it was a free adaptation of the Yiddish poem, “The Old Cantor Is Dead.” The poet made no secret of his debt, indeed, he boasted about how well he had mastered its melodious tone, and I commended him on his fidelity to the original. I simply found it hard to reconcile his tearful melancholy with the rich household, and felt that even if he was truly mourning his mother, it was ungracious of him to write an elegy when there was such a kind, agreeable, and understanding stepmother on the premises. At the time, I was writing nationalistic poetry and erotic fiction, but I regarded myself as a lower-ranking member in our little group of literary talents, and all because I envied the poet his divine gift for sorrow when, it seemed to me, he had everything in the world anyone could want.

We all enjoyed the poem about spring, even more than the actual season itself. The only dissent came from our professional cynic, who dismissed it with a coarse jibe, citing whole passages from Homer in Russian and Heine in German to bolster his case. However much we took pleasure in his epigrammatic proficiency, the poem in no way suffered in our esteem.

We also talked about my forthcoming journey, and my friends admitted to envy, though they also pitied me for falling into the “land of yellow journalism.” At night, we continued our walks to the Saxony Gardens along class-divided routes, one street serving the proletariat, working men and women, the other, the route of high-school students of both sexes, externs, and assorted functionaries. Once inside the Gardens, we took to the dark paths, chasing every silhouette of a brown-skirted schoolgirl uniform.

On some mornings I took walks across the fields, going as far as the sandy stretch where my rich Aunt Khome lived in her own cottage, with her own chickens, a few ducks, even an occasional turkey, and two fair-sized maidservants, with calloused bare feet and hands that smelled of parsley, onions, and parsnips. The older one would often drag me to a secluded spot far from the house, across the tracks by the train station. There she would look into my eyes, her breath hot as fire, and sing me peasant love songs. Should I try to snuggle up against her, her voice took on a cold, husky tone, as she admonished me, “No, Yankele, no.”

Two weeks before my departure, I received a piece of bad news that dashed all the anticipated pleasure of the trip. All along I had been expecting that I wouldn’t be traveling alone but with a ship’s companion, a female one at that. She was a year and a half younger than I, tall, slender, and fair, with a turned-up Gentile nose and such deep brown eyes that whenever I saw her I couldn’t get over the contrast between her warm eyes and her icy blond hair. She already swayed like a woman, her haunches moving rhythmically, like millstones. She had unusually lively, chiseled legs, a rather wide mouth with thin lips that compensated for their thinness with a smile as bold as a wink. Her people were common stock, a family of butchers. Her mother and father, uncles and aunts, all had red hands with big, blood-stained nails, red faces, heavy feet, and coarse voices. She alone was delicate and refined. Her smile bore the traces of generations of forebears who knew what they wanted and knew how to get it, but on her lips the coarser desire emerged as gentler insinuation, with an added “I beg your pardon.”

They were our neighbors on the new street where we had moved, across from the butcher shops, both Jewish and Gentile, that displayed hanging calf and ox heads, with their pitiful, open, dead, velvety eyes. Even their family name—or, as we called it, “the German name”—was butcherlike.

In those days, many Jewish high-school girls were under the influence of Tolstoyan morality, and before it even came to a kiss, one had to wade through long passages from the New Testament: “Whosoever looketh at a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” One had to negotiate a complicated process of moral deliberation before one could even think of committing a sin—and sinning in this instance meant no more than holding hands, looking into the beloved’s eyes and declaiming poetry in the dark. I no longer remember which came to us first, the chicken or the egg, meaning Saninism or Tolstoyism, but both codes swirled around us, like the fiery swords protecting the Garden of Eden. At times one inclined to the hedonistic Sanin, with his urgings to seize the moment; at other times, to Tolstoy, with his belief that every action in this life must be a preparation for the Kingdom of Heaven to come. When all this morality-playing became tiresome, one let go a bit of one’s dignity and made the acquaintance of a seamstress or a stocking maker. Of course, their fingers were notched with needle stabs, but they more than made up for it with their heartrending Jewish folk songs, arms ready for a warm embrace, and the modest request that you “Fear God and the tongues of the righteous.” Everything else in the joyful union of two young people came to pass with no need for prefatory babblings from the New Testament.

My mother was aware—but derived no pleasure from the knowledge—that I had my eye on the butcher’s young daughter. She worried that the infatuation might lead to a match, and this didn’t sit well with her because, in addition to everything else, there was a blot on the butcher’s family escutcheon—a cousin of the girl’s had converted to Christianity and married a Gentile boy, a young butcher, and to spite her parents and drain even more of their blood had opened a Gentile butcher shop with her new husband, right next to their own. The unfortunate parents went about red-faced and ashamed to lift their heads in public. As for the bride, her belly kept swelling as she busied herself selling pork, with rare adroitness. My mother was afraid that I might fall in among such a family. Up to then I had exchanged perhaps a dozen words with the girl, but I grew excited when I learned that she would be traveling on the same boat with me to America, to join an uncle. (Her mother knew that in Lublin the family stain would haunt her forever.) We would be traveling together on the same trains and on the same ship, disembarking together at New York’s Castle Garden, the immigrant’s gateway to a new life. The girl’s mother was delighted that her child would be in the company of someone familiar, a respectable boy, who would keep an eye on her (and on her smile? I couldn’t help adding).

But for some reason—and to my utter misfortune—her plans changed and her departure had to be moved up by two weeks. The blow was totally unexpected. We ran into each other in town and she said with a smile, “You know, I’m leaving tomorrow.” There was nothing in her tone or expression to suggest that she was feeling the blow she had delivered. I was devastated. I felt abandoned and began to dread the long journey that lay ahead of me and that I would now be making alone. She gave me her hand, with its long, slender fingers, and said, “I’ll see you in New York.” That night I felt that I had just lost my first love.

Up to that time, the longest trips I had ever taken alone were from Lublin to Warsaw, to visit my Aunt Gnendl. My grandfather had showed me the way and we made the trip several times together. Only after he died did I begin to travel to Warsaw and back by myself. Naturally, with Grandfather we traveled fourth class. The train crawled along and managed to stretch a four-to-five-hour trip into twelve. We’d start out in broad daylight and arrive long after midnight. We’d ride and ride, past fields and villages, and all day long there was an unending parade of travelers. Fourth class cost almost nothing. Even so, there was frequent haggling with the conductor. It broke my heart to see grown-up, full-bearded, dignified Jews, who could ordinarily deliver a slap that would send you reeling, scurrying to hide under benches, their backsides in the air, like supplicants in the synagogue on Yom Kippur eve, awaiting the penitential flogging. Should an inspector board the train and catch sight of one of these stowaways, the unfortunate soul would be dragged to his feet and thrown off at the next station. I couldn’t stop worrying about this poor Jew, imagining him all alone in some peasant village, wandering about the tiny railroad station, chewing on his black beard, mulling over the commerce he was hoping to transact and how hard it was to make a living, as difficult as splitting the Red Sea. Circulating among the down-and-out riders of fourth class were also the gamblers and cardsharps, looking for dupes.