The Glatstein Chronicles (3 page)

In the closing chapters, we meet a third representative of Polish Jewry, a well-to-do lawyer closer to Yash’s age, who becomes his companion on an excursion to the nearby resort town of Kazimierz. A fully acculturated product of the big city, Neifeld becomes Yash’s informant on Polish-Jewish relations just as Steinman was his guide to internal Jewish history and affairs. “Take deep breaths,” Neifeld says, “Polish woods can cure the sickest heart.” Both men would like to credit their native land with as much commendation as truth permits. But they cannot ignore the contrary evidence of Polish hostility, and the daylong excursion of Neifeld and Yash to Kazimierz, where King Casimir according to legend once cohabited with the lovely Jewess Esther, becomes yet another of the several leave-takings from Poland that culminate in Yash’s final farewell.

Among this book’s several interwoven themes, let me highlight two. Neglect of the Jewish woman is implicit in Yash’s inability to save his dying mother. At the hotel where he rests after the bereavement, a female relative comes seeking his help. He disappoints her, and then in a dreamlike dramatic sequence he feels helpless to rescue women from the predators who seek to harm them. One imagines that Glatstein visiting Poland must have experienced occasional pangs of guilt, yet they surface in the narrator only in relation to women who need his protection. At a later point in the book, Steinman and the narrator attend an evening dance that the hotel proprietor has organized for his guests. The sister-in-law of the young genius, one of the rabbis’ wives, turns up, and explaining somewhat shyly that she loves to dance, invites one of them to take a turn with her around the dance floor. They decline and instead they allow her to be swept away by the most brain-damaged of the guests. When she leaves in dismay, they do not offer to accompany her home in the dark. “Neither of us was very gallant,” Steinman comments, with good reason. Steinman also realizes that his spinster daughter has devoted her life to serving him. Finally, when Neifeld recounts how the Jews of Poland sacrificed Esther to King Casimir to achieve their ideal of Polish-Jewish symbiosis, he extends criticism of Jewish manhood to the national level. The narrator acknowledges his own and his society’s failure to do right by their women, and rather than ascribe their failure of “manliness” to historical conditions, he takes the blame on himself.

In this connection, Yash is reminded of “a Spanish book I once read”—the allusion is to
Autumn and Winter Sonatas
by Ramon del Vale-Inclán. Like the momentary recollection of Sholem Aleichem’s Fishl-Dovid at the outset of the journey, this evocation of the
Sonatas
at its conclusion adds a psychological and literary substratum to Glatstein’s story. The Spanish work in question has been described as “decadent in every sense of the word”: It depicts the last adventures of the Marquis of Bradomin, an aging Don Juan, who does not hesitate to seduce yet another young virgin despite the attendant anxieties of an arm lost in combat. As apparently alien to Glatstein’s Yiddish culture as any work could be, this tale nonetheless reflects Yash’s state of heart and mind on the eve of his departure from Poland. Though the narrator gives no hint that he (or his author) had indulged in sexual misadventures, he shares Bradomin’s torment over his waning powers:

Yash substitutes the psalmist’s “hand” for the fighting arm that Bradomin lost in combat. His vow evokes the Jews by the waters of Babylon, weeping as they remember Zion, unable to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land. The psalmist says, “If I forget Thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither … if I do not keep Jerusalem in memory even at my happiest hour.” Yash had pledged his writing hand to an unnamed “Thee”—to the “Jerusalem” of Polish Jewry, since Jews were in the habit of re-creating their sacred space wherever they were permitted to sojourn. Familiar as he is with the works of decadence and modernism that insist on the untrammeled freedom of the self, Yash applies their libidinous passion to the Jewish predicament, which more than ever requires the allegiance of its cavalier. He fears that his writing hand will be blasted along with the object of his longing. Bradomin’s need to prove his sexual prowess stirs Yash’s fears of a shrinking talent just when he most needs his powers to do “Thee” justice.

Will the Yiddish writer fail his subject as the Jewish male fails his women? The book includes several auguries of such failure. On his deathbed, Steinman inspirits the Jews with a melody, but once their conductor ceases to animate them, they are like an abandoned choir that stops in mid phrase. The young Messianic genius writes eye-popping stuff, none of which has yet been published, and—we are made to realize—never will be. Neifeld seems to offer a promising artistic strategy when he draws the narrator’s attention to the song of a nightingale they hear on the road. “There was no trace of degrading sweetness in the nightingale’s song, no concession to debased popular taste.” This tribute suggests an “utterly unsentimental” and “intellectual” aesthetic ideal for the book itself, yet shortly after he has described this ideal of song, Neifeld brings himself to tears singing a Rosh Hashanah melody of a cantor named Slowik (Polish for “nightingale”) whom he remembers from childhood. What form of art, then, is adequate for the task that Yash knows he must assume?

As Yash contemplates his return to America, the packed suitcases beside his bed seem to him “the only real and solid objects in this world of shadowy forms.” The voyager who had originally hoped to shake off the “miasmas” of responsibility now sees nothing so clearly as the baggage he carries back with him. The poet will have to do his best to deliver all the messages that were entrusted to him by desperate men and women. The hybrid form of autobiographical fiction allowed Glatstein to record the actuality of Polish Jewry through the conduit of his own experience, fusing memory and observation, the private and the communal, as intricately as Lublin and New York are fused in him. In place of the suitcases, Glatstein provided these books, “the only real and solid objects” he could retrieve from a world he was otherwise powerless to rescue.

Editor’s Note:
Although a bowdlerized English version of Book One,
Ven yash iz geforn,
was published in 1969 as
Homeward Bound,
I did not choose to adapt it for this edition but commissioned a new translation by Maier Deshell, retaining only the earlier title. By contrast, Book Two,
Ven yash iz gekumen,
had been finely translated by Norbert Guterman as
Homecoming at Twilight
(1962), requiring only slight emendations. Since Mr. Guterman died before I began this project, I took on the responsibility of editing his translation and of bringing both works together in a single volume.

These translations are as faithful as felicity will allow. One of the finest English translators from Yiddish, Maurice Samuel, believed that translations should never require glossary or footnote, even if this meant inserting explanations—lengthy explanations when necessary—within the text. The present work does not go quite that far. Given that history, geography, and cultural features may create difficulties for different sectors of our readership, we have preferred to provide explanations outside the text, without encroaching on the original. We had in mind the common reader, including students of literature, who want to discover a new American work as much as possible “as its author intended.”

The title gave us the most trouble. When Glatstein called his books by the name of their otherwise unnamed narrator, he doubtless expected readers to make the association between
Yash,
the implied author, and himself. The English reader is, alas, scarcely any more familiar with the name of the author himself, so that calling the book
The Glatstein Chronicles
may produce an analogous effect. One of the passengers on his ship calls the narrator “Gladdy,” but the nickname’s Scandinavian provenance suits the speaker more than its subject. We use “Glatstein” in the title the way schoolboys might refer to one another, “Hey, Glatstein, how about that book you were writing?”

Translations from the poetry of Jacob Glatstein may be found in
Selected Poems of Yankev Glatshteyn,
trans., ed., and with an introduction by Richard J. Fein (Philadelphia, 1987);
The Selected Poems of Jacob Glatstein,
trans. with an introduction by Ruth Whitman (New York, 1972);
I Keep Recalling: The Holocaust Poems of Jacob Glatstein,
trans. Barnett Zumoff (New York, 1993); Jacob Glatstein,
Poems,
selected and trans. Etta Blum (Tel Aviv, 1970);
American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology,
ed. and trans. Benjamin and Barbara Harshav (Berkeley, 1986); and in other anthologies of modern Yiddish verse.

In the absence of a full-scale biography of Glatstein, readers may consult Janet Hadda,
Yankev Glatshteyn
(Boston, 1980); and Avrom Tabachnik, “A Conversation with Jacob Glatstein,” trans. Joseph C. Landis,
Yiddish
1 (Summer 1973): 40–53.

1.
Glatstein’s column, under the pseudonym Itskus, ran in the
Morgn Zhurnal
between September 14, 1934, and April 29, 1938. This excerpt is from “A Writer’s Day of Rest,” November 27, 1936.

2.
The date given in Jewish lexicons is August 20. I am grateful to Pawel Sygowski for his investigations on my behalf and to Monika Garbowska for her help throughout.

3.
“Introspectivism,” in
American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology,
ed. and trans. Benjamin Harshav and Barbara Harshav (Berkeley, 1986): 774.

4.
I have treated this subject and these books by Glatstein in the following essays: “Language as Fate: Reflections on Jewish Literature in America,” in
Studies in Contemporary Jewry,
vol. 12 (Oxford, 1996): 129–147; “The Yiddish and Hebrew Writers Head for Home,” in
Ideology and Jewish Identity in Israeli and American Literature,
ed. Emily Miller Budick (Albany, 2001), chapter 8.

5.
The Sholem Aleichem story is “Home for Passover” (Af peysakh aheym, 1903), trans. by Julius and Frances Butwin in
The Best of Sholem Aleichem
ed. Irving Howe and Ruth R. Wisse (1979): 89–102.

6.
I. Bashevis, “Fun der bikher-velt: “Ven yash iz geforn,”
Zukunft
44, no. 3 (1939): 182, 183.

7.
For a fuller description of Glatstein’s actual trip to Poland and analysis of the
Chronicles,
see Avraham Novershtern, “The Open Suitcases: Yankev Glatstheyn’s
Ven Yash Iz Gekumen,
in
Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon: Essays on Literature and Culture in Honor of Ruth R. Wisse,
ed. Justin Cammy et al. (Cambridge, MA, 2008): 255–298.

A jak poszedł Stach na boje.
Zaszumiały jasne zdroje,
Zaszumiało kłosów pole,
Na tęsknotę, na niedolę …
• • • • • • • • • • •
• • • • • • • • • • •
Stach śmiertelną dostał ranę.
Król na zamek wracał zdrowy …

And when Stach went out to battle
The clear streams rippled
The corn fields murmured
Of longing, of misfortune …
• • • • • • • • • • •
• • • • • • • • • • •
Stach received a mortal wound
Home the king rides safe and well …
—From “When the King Rode Forth to Battle,” by Maria Konopnicka (1842–1910)

No sooner did the ship pull away from the dock than I instantly felt myself subject to maritime law. Only then did I begin to understand that which I couldn’t quite grasp when I was a law student, the necessity for a separate body of jurisprudence pertaining to the sea. For just as the moon holds sway over the tides, or, as some would have it, over the whole human psyche, so does the ocean have an imperceptible effect upon those who would cross it. Footsteps lighten, manners soften, voices lilt. Aboard ship one suffers minor hurt rather than inflict hurt on fellow passengers. Gestures become more polished, behavior more formal. One lives under the mystical spell of the sea and behaves accordingly, altogether differently than on dry land. Parental admonitions that once went in one ear and out the other suddenly make sense. Everyone circles the deck, strolling like lords. A fine, silken cord connects one man to his fellow, even his fellow female. The merest exchange of greetings—“Good morning, good year”—spans the gap. I also began to appreciate the tenderness of the terms “shipboard brother” and “shipboard sister.” Nor did this metamorphosis occasion anxiety, because it affected everyone to the same degree. Aboard ship, in contrast to their alter egos on land, strangers find themselves tossed together, and yet, wonder of wonders, God’s world with its manifold souls stays in balance even here, where we tread softly and scarcely recognize the sounds of our own voices.

I looked for a secluded corner, away from the throng, where I could get a grip on my excitement. The red, yellow, and green flares of the launches that accompanied our ship like some exotic marine vegetation receded farther and farther away, extending our circle of solitude. We had escaped, leaving behind all sentimental reminders of relatives and attachments to terra firma. Now that the
Olympic
had pulled away from land, it formed its own little planet, with its own population, its own way of life, even its own invisible leader, the captain, whose existence you could deny without any damage to your peace of mind.