The Glatstein Chronicles (24 page)

I studied the glum faces and it occurred to me that in twenty-five years such travelers returning to pay respects to the graves of forefathers will have disappeared. These were the last of a generation. Fathers and grandfathers were nearly gone, and one by one, the sons were also beginning to die off. Should
their
children ever think of visiting Soviet Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, they would go as one might visit Paris, Switzerland, or Italy. They would not be returning home but traveling to see the sights so that they might slap yet another sticker on their suitcases. The familiar Poland will have died, and with it the longing or the hatred for that Poland. There will be tourists, but no one going home to see a dying mother or father, or to mourn dead parents.

A case in point among my traveling companions were a father and son, the father on his way to visit brothers and sisters in Minsk, but the son headed for the brave new world of the USSR. There was a chasm between their expectations. The son had delicate features. A native of Boston, he had earned an engineering degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology but ended up working in his father’s garment factory. “A Jewish engineer has a Chinaman’s chance of finding a job,” he said to me sadly. To get beyond such Jewish hopelessness and uncertainty, he looked to the great opportunities for educated young people that existed in the Soviet Union.

“That’s America for you! Go ahead, don’t become a radical, spend your best years studying, become an engineer, and see how those Boston snobs and anti-Semites react if your name happens to be Goldstein, Cohen, or Greenspan.” This was the father talking, a former labor supporter who had become something of a boss in America. “They write a lot about the critical situation of Jewish youth in Poland, Romania, and Germany, but they’re silent about what’s happening to Jewish young people in America. There’s a new Inquisition at work there—fathers who make their sons doctors, lawyers, and engineers are leading them to the slaughter. Forget it! There are simply no opportunities for Jews. My son graduated with honors. He’s a mathematical genius, just what he needs to work in his father’s tailor shop! That’s why you’ve got to hand it to the Soviet Union, though I disagree with many of the things they’re doing over there. They’ve done away with that whole dirty Jew-Gentile business. But I’ll tell you the truth, it could be much worse. When I remember my son’s friend, Faber, I hold my tongue. That man was absolutely brilliant. I tell you honestly that my son, who’s no slouch himself, was only fit to shine Faber’s shoes. If he hadn’t been born a Jew, by now Faber would have been the most famous engineer in America. So, where is he now? Sitting on death row. It just tears my heart, when I think about that young man. I’m sure he acted out of sheer bitterness. Here was a Jewish engineer, utterly hopeless—something must have snapped in his head out of desperation. On top of that, he fell in with a bad crowd that also ensnared his younger brother, and instead of becoming a famous engineer, he became a famous thief and murderer. Now for sure he’ll get the electric chair and nothing, no doctor, can help him. There’s no cure for him anywhere.”

“You shouldn’t exaggerate American anti-Semitism,” interjected a Jew with a pointed beard, speaking in a Galician accent. “All the professions are overcrowded. It’s an economic problem facing the whole country, nothing to do with anti-Semitism, God forbid. Anti-Semitism is when there’s a direct assault on Jews from the government, when it’s a matter of legislation, when there’s an organized attack against Jews, when Jewish blood flows, may Heaven protect us. Let us not be sinful or ungrateful. American Jews have much to be thankful for.”

The fields rushing by were dusty and poor, the grass yellowed and dry. Laughter rang out from the other coaches, but our little ghetto resounded with Jewish sorrows. As crowded as our car was, one Jew after another kept stumbling in. “Where is a Jew headed?” we asked one another. “Poland? Romania? Czechoslovakia, you say? Really! Where … where … where?”

As the train pulled into the Gare Saint-Lazare in midafternoon, a heavy rain was falling, and even though it was the beginning of July, every drop imparted a cold bite.

The porter carried my bags on his back from the station to the hotel, a distance of a few streets. He turned into a packhorse under the heavy load, his figure bent, his bandy legs moving one step at a time, like an elephant’s. From the hotel window, everything looked uncommonly common. The rain had something to do with this, there being nothing like a downpour to wash away the distinctive features of houses, roofs, and passersby. A side window looked out on a little crooked street, twisting between brownish houses with peeling walls. A man in a beret, hands thrust into his pockets, scampered like a cat between the narrow walls, turned around, and ran back. Everything began to take on the aspect of a scene from a novel by Eugène Sue. A woman walked along the narrow sidewalk on high, crooked heels, tottering back and forth, as if she were clambering up a wall. She moved so unsteadily that it seemed as if the dirty little street was going to spew her out, like slops from a pail, against the opposite wall, and send her little straw hat, perched on her head like a beret, tumbling to the ground. I felt uneasy. The woman looked up at the window and yawned. Her face was impassive and sad.

The rain never stopped. I lay on the bed, wondering what key might unlock this new city for me, but the rain washed away all thought. A maid, a woman of about thirty, entered the room, handed me soap and towels, and ran me a bath. She came in and left, scarcely looking at me. I felt uneasy again. I heard her rustling in the hallway, and all I could think of was her indifference. Something was bothering me. I was becoming more anxious by the minute, and it took me a while to admit that I should take hold of myself and maybe probe the reasons for my anxiety, even though it was easier to just lie back and give in to my mood of rain-soaked weltschmerz. But once I opened the door to self-questioning, there was no going back, and I had myself a heart-to-heart talk. I asked my idiot self whether I didn’t resent the fact that Paris, from the first moment of our encounter, had not shown me its full Maupassantian and Balzacian face.

The maid returned, turned off the faucets, and shut the door behind her. I splashed in the tub and gave in to my feelings of disappointment. There was a large clock across from my hotel window that marked the steady passage of the minutes. I was scheduled to leave Paris that night and time was running out. How best, in a brief span, to experience this foreign city? I took a taxi to hunt down my addresses, one address, a second, a third—everyone was away on vacation. I was alone in a rainy city, among rain-drenched monuments. (It occurred to me how much the foreignness of a city is marked by its monuments and police uniforms.) The taxi rattled over a bridge and the driver half-turned to me, gesticulating with short movements of his hand. When he spoke, his facial muscles tightened, as if he were in pain, though his speech was soft and musical.

The Café Dome was quiet; only a few banquettes were occupied. People were sipping coffee and reading German, Russian, French, and English newspapers. A painter, who had been to America several times and whom I recognized, was sitting by himself. He was short and stout, with tiny legs, like a dachshund’s, and a dour, Oriental face with slanty eyes. I went over to him and told him that I had just arrived from America. This made no impression and he gave me a cold look. But once I’d begun the conversation, I felt I had to plow on. My being a writer did not impress him either. Under no circumstances would he allow his place in the artistic firmament to be diminished by association with an artist of possibly lesser standing and, to establish my credentials, he asked what kind of writer I was and did I know so-and-so. When I told him that I knew this one and that one, he still wasn’t sure of me, but he must have decided that his reputation would suffer no risk from a civil chat. Accordingly, he said, in an almost friendly tone: “I have some terrible news for you. Bialik is dead.”

I was stunned. He pulled out a telegram signed by Meir Dizengoff, a founder and longtime mayor of Tel Aviv. “Old Dizengoff won’t survive this,” said the painter. “He’s a sick man himself, with maybe one foot already in the grave.” The news hit me like a bolt of lightning, the shock one always feels whenever one hears of the death of a fellow writer—a blow to the stomach, dread, and finally relief that you’re still alive. “A great Jew!” the painter continued. “What am I saying? The greatest Jew, a truly great man.” I was afraid to say anything lest I break the mood of his lamentation. “Haim Nahman Bialik was the greatest Jewish poet since Yehuda Halevi,” he shouted. “He was certain to receive the Nobel Prize.” I screwed up my courage and ventured to join in the threnody: “He had such youthful eyes, an imposing head, a thick neck, like a laborer’s, and slightly stooped shoulders that bore a good part of the Jewish national burden.”

“You knew him?” the painter asked, narrowing his slanty eyes.

“I didn’t know him, I only saw him. Three times,” I replied, and waited for the painter to ask for the details.

The painter, however, was awash in his own sorrowful memories, swimming in his tears, like a fat duck on a pond. He labored to inform me that there was a vast difference between his dead Bialik and mine. For me it was the national Hebrew poet who had died, of whom every Jew in the street could claim a part. But for the painter, whose life was closely bound up with the Land of Israel, who was himself a national artist, a poet of the palette one might say, who was an intimate of the deceased and a frequent visitor in his house, a regular at the poet’s famous Saturday-afternoon gatherings—for him Bialik’s death was a deep, personal loss. To what could he compare it? It was as if he had lost an uncle who was also a great scholar. The whole city might be mourning a stately Jew, a great personage, and a noble being, but this was, after all, his own beloved uncle. Did I understand?

I was vanquished and capitulated completely, especially when the painter informed me that he owned considerable property in the Land of Israel—“real estate, as you Americans call it”—all of it bought from the sale of his paintings. “Real art sells,” he said, “despite what those foolish fellows here in Paris want you to believe.”

I had no choice but to offer up my own meager scraps of Bialikiana. I recalled the first time I saw him in the midst of a noisy gathering, a banquet tendered him by Yiddish writers to honor the great Hebrew poet. Bialik addressed us—no, spoke rather, in an intimate, conversational voice, like a spider spinning a web, sending out strands in all directions, fine, delicate strands, well-chosen biblical verses, talmudic phrases, as well as worldly observations, without overstepping the bounds into alien territory, only enough to indicate how much world culture a contemporary Jew should help himself to in order to stock his own reservoir of particular Jewish wisdom. The important thing, he said, was to cultivate your own vineyard, because it contains all and all can be found in it. Everything he said seemed spontaneous, but there was a plan to this apparent spontaneity, he was weaving the fine strands into a deliberate design. This we realized only after he had sat down. While he was speaking, it all seemed pleasant enough, like words heard in a daze. Only after he had concluded his talk were we aware that all those innocent strands he’d been spinning were, in effect, a spider’s web and that the fly he had trapped in it was—the Yiddish language. It lay in the web the poet had spun, almost suffocated to death, and stirred memories of all the tens of Jewish languages mentioned by Bialik, which Jews had created in their millennial wanderings and which had all disappeared. One Jew in the Land of Israel, he averred, was worth ten in the Diaspora.

After Bialik took his seat and we Yiddish writers realized that he had read us out of existence, the room erupted in Jewish warfare. God! What a sorrowful war! Barbs flying in all directions. Bialik sat serenely through the tumult, more secure in his convictions than we in ours, but less appealing in his self-satisfaction. Unable to pierce Bialik’s calm, we grew angrier and more belligerent—more tragic and, therefore, perhaps more in the right. Among us there were also idealists, the descendants of Jewish martyrs who were prepared to go along with Bialik. Eyes zealously ablaze, noses atwitch at the smell of their sacrificial offering, they were ready to bring to the altar their hybrid-tongue, the last Diaspora jargon, as a sacrifice to Hebrew, the one, eternal language of the Jewish people. Others agreed with Bialik for reasons of their own and took sadistic pleasure in his remarks. They sensed a golden opportunity to dump their colleagues’ assets. They themselves had invested very little in Yiddish. Why, then, should it bother them if Yiddish were to be destroyed? Let it burn on the altar! Let the smoke rise to the heavens! Yet another group sought to match the attacker’s eloquence and proclaimed themselves exemplars of “the republic of Yiddish”: let the “enemy” see just what greatness Yiddish has produced. Much of their talk fell with a thud, like counterfeit coin. The most tragic were those struck dead by shame, as if their tongues had been cut out. They stood facing Bialik, in mute protest, pounding tables and, if I remember correctly, raising their fists. I was among the shamed and humiliated. I grieved for my own handful of poems, which stood to be destroyed in the war of the languages, and I pounded the table along with the rest.

Bialik’s cheeks reddened, his forehead glistened. He did not look us in the eye. When he finally spoke again, it was with something of the air of the Grand Inquisitor. If he had felt wounded by our demands that he give us back our mother tongue, he merely hunched his shoulders lower, under the weight of our complaints. Yet he had no words of comfort to offer. He threatened us with the cruel inevitability of history on the march, as if to say: “Poor, little calves, you tremble. Alas, you don’t want to be led to slaughter. Nevertheless, slaughtered you will be.”

A few days later, I found myself sitting with a colleague in a corner of a quiet hotel. Bialik sat between us. The colleague had been assigned by his newspaper to interview the great Hebrew poet. It turned out that Bialik clearly remembered my standing across from him in protest. He averted his eyes from me, as if he felt guilty over taking something from me that he couldn’t return. However, whenever I turned away, I noticed him stealing a glance at me. This was followed by a heartfelt Jewish sigh.