The Glatstein Chronicles (44 page)

Here she was with three small orphans to support. That had been his legacy to her—these three tiny tots were all she possessed. She was childless herself, the children were his, but what could she do? She pitied the poor little things, it broke her heart to look at them.

“A brother of his lives in America. He is a heartless man, a real scoundrel. I have his address. Now, do a good deed, not for the sake of a poor widow, but for the children. They are as good as your own children—for if they aren’t yours, they aren’t mine either. Tell him that if I have no news from him, I’ll do him a favor, I’ll put the three children on a ship and send them straight to New York.”

At that, the children, two boys and a girl, burst into tears.

“Shush, be quiet, I just say that to scare your uncle. Ah, what a dirty trick your father played on me! Some provider he was!” And she studied the ceiling carefully as she got up to go, as though her dead husband might be hiding there.

His breath was foul, with the stench of hunger. Apparently he knew it, for he would quickly cover his mouth with his hand after every few sentences. Then he would look at me in silence for several minutes.

He was just my age and had gotten exactly nowhere in life. Fortunately he was a bachelor. It’s easier to starve when you have no family.

Gradually his speech grew more literate—polysyllabic words such as you see only in books began to appear in his conversation.

Taking into consideration the material conditions of the collectivity as a whole, he said, and the circumstances of social existence as such, the conclusion is unavoidable that the individual is of no importance. It may even be argued that the collectivity, in the last analysis, consists of individuals who embody specific attributes of the mass at the climax of its development. On the other hand, among backward people, at the lowest level of evolution, the social physiognomy is more pronounced—and there was a great deal more like this.

He rattled off all these complicated sentences with extraordinary facility, making proper transitions, constructing logical pyramids of discourse. He confided to me that for all his uncompromising atheism, he always fasted Mondays and Thursdays, for his sad circumstances left no alternative. His face was longer than broad, with waxen features that recalled a candle gradually being consumed. He was a pitiful sight, but the moment he began to talk he sounded as though he were issuing a petition to the authorities.

“The intellectual drive that has characterized my tribe from time immemorial has driven me into the arms of education. Lacking the minimal prospects of material security, and despite the insignificance of education in the ghetto, I looked forward to the eventuality of some unforeseen development.”

His story turned out to be as follows. Twenty-some years ago he had completed six years of his preuniversity training, but when he attempted to obtain Polish credits for it, the Polish educational authorities refused to honor his accomplishment. So he sat down and began his course of study all over again, from the beginning, at home. By this time he had gotten as far as the seventh grade of secondary school, with only one more year to go to obtain his bachelor’s degree. But he is at the end of his tether, he has no strength to finish, for he has had nothing to eat. He has a bit of roof over his head—his married brother gave him a cot in a dark little room. His uncle could be his salvation—that is to say, his mother’s uncle who lives in America. But his situation must be put to his uncle solely in terms of education.

“In spite of the hopeless situation of the Jewish people and that of the educated youth in particular, education is an end in itself, which is transcendental and practical in its very impracticality,” he said as he rose to leave.

A middle-aged man with two or three flecks of gray in his not very full black beard walked in.

From his pocket he carefully drew a paper yellowed with age, which had been mounted very cleverly on a piece of cardboard. It folded in four. “This speaks for itself,” he said extending it to me. He chewed on a strand of his beard, looking at me expectantly.

“And what does it say?” he asked suddenly, with a very solemn air, as though putting me to some kind of test.

It was a letter signed by President Hoover, thanking him for having written him and conveying the president’s warm personal regards.

“You do know English,” he said after a moment, perking up at this. “There are Jews, you know, I think you call them ‘bluffers,’ who have been to America but don’t know a word of English. Several years ago I sent a message of greeting to the president of the United States. It was in Hebrew, a beautiful message, such as I know how to write. Why did I do it all of a sudden? Well, cast thy bread upon the waters… . It’s good to have dealings with a president. It can’t do any harm. And he replied at once with a personal letter of thanks, as you can see for yourself. I can’t read it—how could I? But people have read it to me several times, and each time it gives me great pleasure.

“When I was earning a living, I sort of forgot about the president. But now that I have lost my rabbinical post and can’t get another one, and am reduced to begging for my bread, I got out the president’s letter and here I am, ready to go. The only question is, who is to pay my fare? Then I recalled that I have a well-to-do brother-in-law over there. I want you to tell him that I’ll pay him back in full, just as soon as I get to America. It shouldn’t be hard to get in there with a letter like that. The gates will open for me, and I’ll be given a generous welcome, don’t you think?”

There was a triumphant gleam in his eyes as he gave a confident little laugh: it had been clever of him to provide himself with so valuable a document.

“I wouldn’t trade this piece of paper for a hundred passports! Once I’ve gotten to America, I’ll show them that I’m a real rabbi, not—what do you call it over there?—not a ‘bluffer’! That’s a real document, isn’t it? It was nothing less than divine inspiration on my part to send that beautiful message of greeting!”

Her heels were so high that she teetered on them, and I got up and ran to help her when she came in the door, for I was afraid she would slip and fall.

The only question that bothered her was whether I’d recognize her; if not, it was all to the good, for she was embarrassed to come. In fact, she said, she only took the risk of coming to see me because she had decided that I would not recognize her. Years ago, when she had known me, it never occurred to her that she would not be married already, by this time, but that was the way it had turned out. And now here she was singing the well-known song—a widower or an elderly man.

I must not suppose that she was eager to get married at any cost. Not at all. She simply couldn’t bear the social stigma of being an old maid. And anyway she couldn’t go on like this, being a burden to her old father. She was well read, familiar with Yiddish literature and with the classics. She would be willing to marry the very worst sort of man: She’d suffer in silence.

In the town where she lived she was what was known as “a literary supplement.” She knew that people talked about her behind her back. She hadn’t minded it, when she was younger, that people had it in for her. She had felt compensated by friendships with writers and the more educated sort of theater people. But now younger “literary supplements” were coming along—a whole new generation of them—and she found herself left high and dry with her memories. And such silly memories! She wondered if they would not choke her in the end.

Now she has the choice between two men—one is fifty-five or so, and the other is a hunchback, but it is an intelligent hump, not too conspicuous. Neither man, however, will marry her without a dowry.

“I can assure you I have enough reason to be willing to pay my dues. I didn’t spend my youth saying prayers. Here is my brother’s address.”

He took a chair and rested his head on the silver knob of his stick. He looked up at me with one eye, smiling.

God be praised, he owned a stocking factory, and there were several thousand złotys in the bank. All his children had been to college. One became an oculist, the other a dentist. Both were making good livings and had married well. His wife is able to visit watering places to enjoy the hot springs. He himself had become a Zionist—in more general terms, an enlightened man, a rationalist. He kept up with all that goes on in the world.

He was aware that I had been here for several days, but he hadn’t wanted to bother me until now. Finally he just couldn’t stand it any more and so here he was. What he wanted to tell me—here he suddenly raised his head from the silver-headed cane—was that he looks down his nose at America.

He looked quite fierce when this came out. He had long wanted to advertise his scorn to the world. And now, what he wanted me to do was to pass the word along to the important people, that he, a Jew, a rationalist, had been able to get through life without American help. He had brought up his children, and brought them up well—would that all Jewish children might be so lucky! Would I do him the favor of telling those concerned that he, a Polish Jew, didn’t give a tinker’s damn about America—no matter what America may think of that? It would be doing him a great favor, for by nature he detested boasters, and the trouble with America was its conceit. Why, it was a great thing, something for the whole Jewish nation to be proud of, that he had worked his way up to wealth without any assistance whatever from big, rich, arrogant America!

A man of dour features came in and sat down without a word. His lips seemed sealed. For a long while he just sat there, shaking his head, as though accusing someone. Then suddenly he took a deep breath and began to speak.

He couldn’t understand, he said, what things were coming to. Whatever he tried his hand at turns out to be against the law. There was a jinx on him: the moment he earned a little money he was in trouble with the law. What he had done might be perfectly legal—the most legal occupation imaginable—but the moment he got involved in it, it never failed: He got in trouble with the authorities. On the surface everything always seemed fine. Thanks to his work others were able to make their living. He had a wife and children, and he too was obliged to earn a living, but in his case something always went wrong. Take bankruptcy, for example. Hundreds of people do very well for themselves going bankrupt, but the moment he tried it he wound up in prison. The simplest thing had a way of becoming complicated the moment he touched it. Whether it had to do with him, or with the fact that Polish law was too complex for him, every enterprise he engaged in simply turned out to be illegal. And yet it would be sheer slander to say that he involved himself in risky enterprises. Something simply went wrong in the process, and he found himself again in the hands of the law.

How long would this go on, and how would it end? Now it was down to a question of bread and salt—no longer of furnishing a luxurious apartment. Things had reached the point where he was ashamed in front of his wife of being such a
schlimazl,
such a sucker as always to be the one that gets caught.

“In short, what I want is an affidavit. Here is my brother’s address. You must tell him to take pity on me. I’m speaking to you as I would to my own brother, I have no more strength left to struggle against the law. Let him send for me, and if he really wants to, he can do it. After all, America is different, the laws there aren’t the same as here. I mean, it can’t go on like this. Or even, do you know what, I’m ready to make an agreement with you. Let my brother send me enough money to live on, and I won’t insist on going to America. Nor will I ask for much—all I want is enough for bread, for my wife, my children, and myself. Bread! bread! bread!” By this time, he was pacing back and forth across the room. He chanted the word
bread
as if tinkling a gold coin, and he would stop as if to listen to the precious sound.

Hunger had often paraded in front of me in that room, and spoken without reserve. And yet after each hungry man I always thought back to the first of them, haunted with the memory of the porter who so roundly cursed his brother in America: “May he and his family drop dead!”

Once upon a time there had been two little brothers. They had played games together, free of care, stared up at the sky together, and caught flies. Together they had put the flies in a little hole in the ground, and covered the hole with a piece of glass through which they could watch the little creatures struggling to get free. Later one of the little boys went away to America, and the other stayed behind, a sorrowing brother, lying in a ditch he had dug for himself.

“Do you know what a brother is?” I was asked by a man who had been regarded as unusually bright when he was a child. Though he was only a few years older than I, he had occasionally taught me some Talmud.

“A wife is cut from a rib, but a brother is part of your mother’s heart. When we were boys we both clutched at her apron asking for bread, and now one of these brothers is asking the other for bread. And the other does not even answer his letters. How can such a thing be? I don’t care about much any more, but this problem torments me. You lie with your little brother under the same torn blanket, and you tell each other stories. You share father’s attention, mother’s smiles, you have such a marvelous, divine partnership. Then one goes away, and the two begin to live separate lives. I get the shivers. You know, I could never understand it even in the case of cats and dogs, but when I see two human brothers living for themselves, I begin to question many things.”

Even more pathetic than the hunger was the hope. In all this despair there was an obstinate faith that salvation would certainly come from across the ocean. And I, who had seen the other side of the certainty, I found my mind turning from the sad faces of Lublin in front of me, to those other faces far away across the sea: the clean-shaven faces of the Lubliners who had escaped to become cigar makers, shirtmakers, buttonhole makers, pocketbook makers, one and all of them rich American Jews.