The Glatstein Chronicles (38 page)

“Mr. Finkel, you’re wanted,” one of us finally had the courage to say. Steinman was looking at him, as though begging him not to make a spectacle of himself and to put an end to the cry that was growing more panicky by the minute.

“And suppose she divorced me—would I move a finger?” Finkel said with murderous calm. “Is there anything in the world that can make me move from where I am? Have I or haven’t I the right to be a man and listen to a Jewish word?”

Finkel, who only a short while before had been so submissive to his second wife, now looked like a fierce revolutionary. His calm disappeared, and he spoke loudly, so that she could hear him.

“Mr. Finkel! Mr. Fin-kel!” she kept on chanting, without raising her voice. It was the constant repetition that was so maddening. Now a real duet began. After every “Mr. Finkel!” he would roar, “And suppose she divorced me—would I move a finger?”

This hostile exchange went on for several minutes. All of us sat there frozen. Suddenly Mrs. Finkel, who had looked so helpless sprawled on the porch floor, gathered her strength like a female Samson making one last effort to shake the pillars of the temple, and got to her feet. She looked colossal as she ran past us, saying in a voice softer than before, as though whispering a secret, “Mr. Finkel!”

She did not stop, and Finkel straightened his cap so composedly that it was clear the revolution had been crushed. He smiled meaningfully and said, addressing all of us, “My second wife!”

He seemed to expect us to say something, but we were too embarrassed to look at him. He got up quietly and went after his wife. Both vanished from sight. The empty chair kept a little of Finkel’s rebellious spirit, rocking gently, but it stopped finally, a symbol of defeated manliness. The episode dejected us. Nobody had anything to say.

“He is a decent old fool, you can’t help feeling sorry for him,” Steinman said finally, starting to get up from his chair.

“Is it our fault?” one of us said. “Mr. Steinman, you’re not going to punish us because of that nitwit?”

“Heavens, no. There’s no question of punishing anyone. But it’s time to go. Even the most beautiful story has to end.”

“Now, listen to me, Mr. Steinman,” one man said calmly, taking his watch from his pocket. “You can see for yourself: We have a good two hours before lunch. It’s hot outside, and here we are sitting in an Eden-like shade. And it’s to Paradise you have just taken us—now you’re not going to break off your story like that, are you?”

“Now, now, you mustn’t be greedy—you want to eat up everything at once. Why don’t you leave some of it for tomorrow?” Steinman was resisting, but it was obvious that he would let himself be persuaded.

“All because of that shrew?” One of Steinman’s listeners who had been silent so far threw that in.

“That’s right!” the others exclaimed. “You’ve found the right word for her!”

“The word is apt indeed,” Steinman said. “A troublemaker if I’ve ever seen one. Xanthippe was a gentle lamb in comparison.” He burst out laughing, and this laughter served him as a transition to resuming his story.

“Well, let’s see,” he said reflectively. “I believe we’ve gotten to the point of Jozefa Kubi’s yarmush. I was getting thinner and thinner on her marvelous soup, and she wasn’t getting any closer to her husband in Paradise. Finally I decided I’d had enough.”

Steinman was gradually rocking himself back into his previous mood, and we were admiring how he tuned up his voice like a violin. Finkel was suddenly back in his chair, though no one had seen him come back. He looked more dead than alive, and the tufts of hair stuck out from under his cap more wildly than ever. Out of pity we pretended not to see him, and Steinman almost deliberately kept his eyes off him as he resumed his narrative.

“I was starving but I got back to Poland somehow. Now I was a man with experience, and I began to earn a living teaching children Hebrew and German. I could rattle off Hebrew quite decently, and I became known as ‘the German teacher.’

“Later I got a job as agent with the German consul. I was also unofficial legal adviser, interpreter, and writer for the German newspaper in łódź. With all these jobs I managed to eke out a living.

“At about that time there began to be talk about a new movement among the Jews, which was likened to the movement of that False Messiah, Sabbatai Zvi. In the synagogues it was discussed fearfully and referred to as a new sect. Elderly Jews whispered about it among themselves so that the young people shouldn’t get wind of it. The sect had been founded in Russia, and the news cast a cloud of fear over Polish Jewry.

“And who do you think was the founder of this movement? Jacob Gordin. Gordin’s physical appearance was a movement in itself—part Russian peasant, part rabbi. He was cut out for the religion which aimed at reconciling Judaism and Christianity—needless to say, at the expense of Judaism. His ‘Brotherhood’ or ‘Biblical Brotherhood’ preached complete assimilation, not only political but also religious assimilation.

“Gordin was a half-baked scholar, a man full of energy, a real volcano. I met him often on my trips to Russia as a young newspaper correspondent, and I can certify that he had no idea of what he was trying to do. His program could even be defended, but I am so angry at him that I won’t lift a finger to justify him. He was a Christianized Jew, a Russian who wanted to turn Jews into illiterate peasants by preaching to them to go back to the soil. I don’t have to tell you that many Jewish reformers still look upon this as the panacea to cure all Jewish troubles. It’s an empty dream. When there is a pogrom, the hooligans find out easily enough where the Jewish peasants live, and they aren’t spared. Unless what the reformers really have in mind are Jewish peasants who have stopped being Jewish, who are indistinguishable from their neighbors, and go to church with them every Sunday. Because if the Jewish peasant adheres to his faith and looks for a prayer quorum, a
minyan,
on Saturday, he won’t be spared during a pogrom. Don’t fall for such silly theories.” Steinman spoke as though debating heatedly with some imaginary opponent.

“Gordin was a Tolstoyan. He wanted to keep the ethical teachings of the Torah and throw all the rest overboard. He thought he would extract a few moral rules from the Book of Books. You may well imagine what this extract looked like. He aimed at a new moral doctrine, somehow connected with work on the soil. Gordin tirelessly preached this bloodless new Judaism.

“The way the Jews saw it was much simpler. To them the sect was a first step toward complete conversion. They absolutely refused to argue about it, and whenever the name of Gordin was mentioned they spat in disgust. Jacob Gordin had several helpers with resounding names—Priluki, Yelisov, Portugalev, and one Jew with a name as common as Joseph Rabinovich. A Jewish historian who has since become famous was also quite interested in the movement—and the term
interested
is a gross understatement!

“Among the people there were stories that this Jewish-Christian sect observed the Christian New Year’s Day, but blew the shofar on that day. They wore prayer shawls at the services of the Brotherhood, but over them they wore a cross on a chain. Needless to say, Jesus was recognized as a Jewish prophet. Those were the stories told about the Brotherhood in Poland. Jacob Gordin did everything he could to bring Jews and Christians together.

“I ridiculed the movement as much as I could in my writings. I shot the most poisonous arrows at Gordin. To no avail: the movement was gathering strength. But what I could not achieve with my pen, one terrible Russian pogrom did achieve. A bloody pogrom made a mockery of the Brotherhood. Afterward Gordin tried to reassemble the remnants of his organization, but in vain. Somehow Jews no longer wanted to fraternize with Christians after the pogrom. He even tried to do some agricultural work himself, and thus achieve salvation for himself, but he realized there was no future in it, and he went to America.

“In America his reforming zeal was reawakened. First he tried to reconcile trash and literature and then, once again, Judaism and Christianity. His Jews were Gentiles, and his Gentiles Jews. The plays he wrote were just like the prayer shawls with crosses on them. May he rest in peace, but he was a mediocre writer.

“Jewish life in the 1880s was a sorry spectacle. Jewish life in Poland had become greatly impoverished—well, how shall I express it?” Steinman paused, then his eyes lit up suddenly and he cried out: “Stupid man that I am. Here I’m looking for a metaphor to illustrate Jewish poverty at that time, but the fact is, the situation was exactly what it is today, not a bit different. Poverty exuded from every Jewish caftan, just as it does today. The time was ripe for a big vision. I supposed that for the very reason everything was so miserable, a shining miracle must be coming about. I plunged into Jewish lore. I wrote many stories about the Khazars, the fantastic Jewish hope for a Jewish kingdom on the Caspian Sea. Many of my friends had left for America. I was left alone, and I warmed my heart recalling the figures of Eldad Hadani, the Jewish traveler who is wandering to this day spreading unfounded hopes, of the wealthy Jew Hasdai Ibn Shaprut, who addressed an epistle to the Khazars, but whose letter took so much time traveling that by the time it reached its destination, the Jewish kingdom was no more than a legend.

“At that time I also took upon my weak shoulders the heavy task of defending the Jewish community of Amsterdam against the accusations leveled at it by the Spinozists. Why did the Jews excommunicate one of their own, and why did they have to strike at him so ruthlessly? This was a great, fundamental question. Spinoza had a sharp mind, but he was not harmless. He nourished a dream like Jacob Gordin’s, he wanted to make peace between Judaism and Christianity. Until then, all we knew about Spinoza came from Christian sources; I undertook to portray him on the basis of Jewish texts.

“Then, suddenly, a new light dawned in our exile. A new peacemaker appeared—not another cockeyed Jew who reads the Bible with one roving eye on the New Testament. This one was a peacemaker of an entirely new kind. We heard the call: ‘It’s up to you to transform the myth into reality.’ It was like when a composer of genius creates a new melody, one that has never before existed but that instantly everyone wants to hear over and over again. Well, when the Jews pronounced the name of Dr. Theodor Herzl—the new peacemaker—it was the same sort of thing.

“A new ray of light had appeared in Jewish life. The formula in the prayer book that we had been repeating mechanically for many centuries took on real weight and substance. I am referring of course to the formula ‘Next year in Jerusalem’—next year, which will spell the end of our troubles.

“Only now did we realize that we had quietly become renegades to our faith, that our prayers and lamentations had grown stale and their meaning blurred. With the name of Herzl our prayers came to life again—Zion was close to us, within our reach. ‘Next year in Jerusalem’ was a goal to be attained in our own lifetimes, not in the Beyond.

“All this meant an enormous amount of work. We Polish Jews had become diffident after the experience of so many False Messiahs. We had to give the Messianic idea a rational basis. The traditional Messiah is associated with the Resurrection of the Dead, and his appearance is heralded by various signs. We had to find a middle course between faith and deeds. We had to transform allegory into logical theory, a poetic image into reality.

“Herzl was a poet, but he was a realist in politics. We young men sensed this at once. We undertook to familiarize the public with the seemingly utopian idea of building a Jewish state in our own era.

“The vague aspirations of Dr. Leon Pinsker’s ‘Back to Zion’ movement were transferred to the new movement, and this one was less of a leaky vessel.

“When it comes to miracles, most people either shrug their shoulders or express frank incredulity. But I saw the great miracle with my own eyes. Jewish backs straightened up again. This was the ray of light in our exile. We were proud to be Jews, we began to take practical steps toward realizing the great dream.

“Yes, my friends, I attended the first Zionist Congress in 1897. I had the great privilege of standing close to him, where I could look right into his eyes. It was the biggest moment of my life. I burst into tears when I was face to face with him. I’m not ashamed to admit that I kissed his hand—not the way one kisses a priest’s hand but the way I used to kiss my father’s hand when he came back from the synagogue glowing with saintliness.

“Herzl was only a year or two older than I was. But this young man embodied a great legend. He organized the will of us all. He was like a great painter who creates a figure in which all the dreams of an enslaved nation are embodied. Doctor Herzl’s face was the noble image of a people which henceforward will never give up hope.

“Doctor Herzl spoke to me in his native Viennese German, which I did not quite understand. When he spoke, he seemed to become more human, more Jewish. He even spoke with a nasal twang. From the platform, too, he spoke with this twang, and it made him sound perfectly natural, the very opposite of oratorical.

“But though not an orator, he spoke with fiery warmth that we do not encounter today. It was not mere eloquence but came from a deep inner faith. He never tried to persuade. Other speakers are always selling you something, but you trusted Doctor Herzl at once. Even when he discussed facts and figures, he made them seem to float in the air like cabalistic signs. His dry figures, I might say, were poems. The millions that, according to the petty ideas of the time, would be the cost of redemption seemed formidable enough, but when Doctor Herzl mentioned such sums, I would have sworn he already had them in his pocket.

“At the Zionist Congresses I also used to run into a little man with a paunch—a real diplomat’s paunch—whose cutaway looked as though it had been molded on him. No, he had no lion’s voice. Any peddler has a lion’s voice. His was more like a bear’s. He was a tremendous speaker, and he wielded the weapon of satire like a master. Doctor Herzl rarely indulged in wisecracks or funny stories, but Dr. Max Nordau’s wit had the crack of the whip. He was the child prodigy of Europe and was looked upon as the greatest living public speaker. Doctor Nordau’s face was so intelligent that at first I could not imagine how such a man had ever gotten caught up in a dream. But scholar that he was, he could soar to great heights and take the public with him. He made you laugh, but he could sing, too, and he developed his arguments the way a great architect constructs a building. When he had finished speaking, I had the impression that his speech stood there right next to him, four-square, and that both he and I were admiring it.