The Glatstein Chronicles (45 page)

I recalled the big white loaves of bread, and the more fragrant dark loaves. When I was little, the white bread had always stood for silver to me, and the dark bread for gold. But who at that time could have grasped what was true in my childish insight, when mother sent me out into the Jewish street to buy bread?

The Jewish people is merely being pauperized, not proletarianized, Glaichbaum explained to me with a sour smile. We constitute a very special stratum of the population. Among all other peoples, lice and starvation go hand in hand with stunted minds, but not so with our people. Their minds work just as hard as the rest of them. They keep a lamp burning to verify that they are indeed in darkness.

Glaichbaum, who had taught me Polish years before, had turned many an intellectual somersault in his life. He came from an assimilated family, and his father’s heart melted with joy when he saw him in his green college uniform. He had many Gentile friends. He was blond, and had a shrunken yellow face. But his manners were truly Polish: his skinny figure made all the proper bows and inclinations. He was a good dancer, and he was very popular with the Gentile girls for his elegance—or perhaps for the very reason that he was not handsome. He had no trace of those specifically Jewish good looks that our Gentile neighbors find so unattractive.

Then one day Glaichbaum almost gave his father a heart attack: he purchased phylacteries and announced that he was henceforward a pious Jew. His father, when he recovered from the shock, laughed at him; his mother fainted; his younger brother and his sisters said he should be thrown out of the house. But nothing deterred him. Glaichbaum—he was then eighteen—got himself a private tutor who taught him the Hebrew language and Jewish ritual. Every morning he would get up early and hurry to the synagogue before going to his class at the commercial college he attended. He even went back for evening service and took every possible occasion to linger in the synagogue and pick up crumbs of sacred learning. There he would sit in his uniform with its gold buttons, wearing the cap with its shiny visor. He got special permission from the school authorities that he would not be obliged to write on the Sabbath. Then, all of a sudden, with less than a year to go before graduation, he dropped out of college entirely. He became estranged from his former friends, and his supple dancer’s body now was kept bending gracefully at the various prayers in the synagogue.

There followed in time a number of other intellectual enthusiasms: Zionism, Socialism, the Polish Socialist Party, and the Labor Bund. He became a leader and was elected municipal councilor. Jews were proud of his ability to defend Jewish honor with the ardor of a true Jewish preacher, in excellent and eloquent Polish.

Still later he became something which in Poland no one even dared to call by name: he became a Communist or, as is more euphemistically referred to, a Marxist. Then he abandoned that, too—just why, he did not have the inner strength to analyze, he told me. It had happened only a short while ago, and he wanted to keep quiet about it for a few years, to be alone with himself.

“I know,” he said, “that all this will end up with my going back to the synagogue. Inside me sits the soul of an ancestor who summons me back. There is no other explanation for it. My brother and my sisters have all been baptized. I am the black sheep.” He had a sour little laugh. “But before I go back to the synagogue, I have to conquer my cynicism. When you jump from one cause to another, you become a bit of a cynic. I can’t go to the synagogue with that hump on my back.”

He gazed at me with his yellow eyes, which had over the years become so Jewish that no Gentile could possibly have mistaken them.

“Please, take a look at the address. It’s some sort of cousin, I think, just an idea. If you see him, you may tell him, if he remembers me, that I’m not doing too well. But I must tell you at once not to take too much trouble about it. It’s just an idea of mine, and probably nothing will come of it at all.”

The sound of footsteps roused me from my half-slumber. By my side stood a young man whom I recognized by his clothes as a member of the rabbi’s retinue I had seen in the park during my walk with Steinman. He had walked alone, behind the others. He was now wearing the same slippers and white stockings; he had had a hard time getting up the hill in this footwear. He was about to go past me when he changed his mind and stopped.

“I know you’re an American,” he said, sitting down near me. “I’ve seen you with Steinman, that man who writes stories of no great consequence. How are the Jews getting along in America? But to tell the truth I don’t have to ask you, I know the answer myself. I can see everything with my imagination. There are things about America I know better than you do, because you merely saw them while I imagine them. Not a bad thought, don’t you agree?

“Well, I can tell you how the country is ruled, who is the boss, how the Jews behave there. Once I accompanied my father on a visit to a small town, and before we got there I imagined what the town and the first Jew we met there would look like. You won’t believe it—but everything was exactly as I had imagined it in advance. Do you suppose that’s a miracle? Not at all, I can supply perfectly natural causes for it.

“This is how I can prove it to you. Man lives threescore and ten years. But what does that amount to? Not even a drop in the bucket. It is a millionth of a millionth of a millionth part of the time it takes God to bat His eyelashes. Man, the crown of the creation, felt embarrassed that his life span was so insignificant, and he devised a kind of apparatus that stretches it like a rubber band, to make it seem a considerable length of time.

“See what I mean? It’s not easy to get it. When a man is born, his grave is open, ready to receive him, but between birth and death many things occur in rapid succession. You can’t imagine how swiftly they flash by. But the apparatus man invented works well and stretches out each event. Even the most trivial events are assigned a place. Occasionally you run ahead of your apparatus, and you arrive at an event that is scheduled to happen only several years later. You think something will happen to you in five years, but actually it is happening right now, or perhaps has already happened. You get the idea? You outsmart your apparatus and you discover what time really is, measured against the brevity of human life.

“It’s rather hard to grasp all this. If you want me to, I’ll go over it again for you from the beginning. I’ve been thinking about this for four or five years, and when I finally understood the whole thing, it was like a flash of light inside my head.”

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Sixteen. But this isn’t the only idea I’ve had. You must understand that every rabbinical family is distinguished by a special talent. We are the philosophers and the rhetoricians among the rabbis. We like to speculate. It’s a marvelous game, but it’s also an ordeal. It’s like walking on a narrow bridge. One false step, and you fall into heresy. But if the Lord is with you, if you don’t stumble and can keep your Jewishness intact, you cherish your idea doubly, because it achieves union with the Creator who sent it into the world.

“An idea that does not lead back to God but wanders at random is a bastard idea, it has no father. I wrote an essay in which I developed my theory. It’s a wonderful piece of writing.

“I like to take walks by myself and think about Hasidism. Faithful to my theory, I try to grasp ideas that will occur to me years later. That’s why my eyes look so much older than I really am. I want to discover things. I don’t like my grandfather’s way and I don’t like my father’s. I don’t like the way of my older brothers. I told Father that I was not too satisfied with his way. Yes, I told him that, for all my respect for him I had the courage to tell him. Then he confided in me that he was even less satisfied than I.

“I have read all of Jewish literature, I know everybody and everything. But what is there except rhetoric? Peretz’s Hasidic stories are anecdotes with a moral. He looks at things through a keyhole and then blows them up. I want to see things from within. I want to renew Jewish thought. To begin with, you understand, we must do away with Gentile forms. A Jewish creation must be everything—poetry, prose, philosophy, drama, psychology, astronomy, epigrams—everything. We have no use for neat little compartments. We must be a creative encyclopedia—do you hear me?—an encyclopedia, but a creative one. Do you grasp what this means? It’s tremendous. Have you ever read a story by the rabbi of Bratzlav? There is my hero among the Hasidim. I am in love with him, I think about him all day long. He was an innovator and he loved Yiddish. Do you know what Yiddish is? What a marvelous language it is?”

He went on to say that he was troubled by one thing: he couldn’t understand why the Bratzlaver was so proud. Believe it or not, he said, it took him two years before he finally understood. Now he could explain the rabbi’s pride perfectly.

“He was always a sickly man, a broken vessel. If he had been more modest, no one would have taken him seriously. He knew he would die young and he wanted to accomplish something during the few short years he was granted.

“That is why he praised his own wares so much. He didn’t do this for his own sake. Everybody knew that he loved poverty and privation. He swam in misery like a fish in water. But he had things to sell, and he advertised them so that people would buy them. He praised himself because he wanted people to listen to God’s word. I am sure that he laughed at himself when no outsider could hear him, but his scribe, Rabbi Nathan, kept his secret faithfully.

“That is one possibility, but I have another idea, namely, that a rabbi must never be modest. A modest rabbi diminishes the majesty of God. It’s his duty to give the people some notion of God’s greatness. Since his task is to relate God’s great miracles, he must also play the role of a great man in his own life. There is a vast difference between greatness and pride. The Bratzlaver was a great man, but he associated with the great and the small alike, with both the rich and the poor. Now, just think: if such a great man was willing to make friends with the humblest people, how could a plain ordinary Hasid strut about like a peacock?

“Some day I’ll read you some of my new ideas, and you’ll see for yourself that they are simply extraordinary. But don’t think I get them from my own little brain. After I fast on a Monday, a Thursday, and then the following Monday, I begin to shed all my unworthy husk of materiality. I walk in the woods, all by myself. When night falls, and my hunger expects to be stilled, I keep on walking and thumb my nose at the flesh. So you think, I say to my hunger, it’s all right to break the fast now? Not at all. I won’t be rushed.

“Then something happens to me, I become faint, a sweet weakness spreads over all my body. My limbs want to shout, but all they do is to peep like little birds, the poor things haven’t got the strength. They sing softly. At such moments I hear a voice.

“Here I must stop for a bit. I must tell you that I could describe this voice to you, but I am forbidden to do so because the voice speaks to me in a sacred solitude. It would be uncouth of me to reveal something so intimate. But he who has never heard such a voice gropes like a blind man when he speaks of God.

“Usually I feel weak and drowsy just before I hear the voice. Everything around me fills me with awe. I fall on my face and I call out: Speak to me, Father in Heaven! I am ready!

“When I get up again from the ground, I am never without having gained something—a thought, an idea, a metaphor—and I feel that these are not my own but have dropped on me like ripe pears from a tree. Sometimes I get up with a whole poem. Listen to this, for instance:

“I have a tune for that one, sweet as sugar.

“And here it goes with greater brio, more passionately:

“Sometimes I trick Satan and stick out my tongue at him. For instance:

“See how I trick Satan? Just when he thinks he has me in his net, he gets a punch in the jaw.

“It’s time for me to go. But I must warn you: you haven’t gotten rid of me yet. When I begin to talk there is something to hear. There are so many things to say. So I want to make an appointment with you, and next time I see you I’ll give you a hint how faith and heresy can be reconciled, how heresy can be made to burn with such fire that it will soar and weep before the Throne of Glory. It will weep there with all its figures and formulas and questions and doubts. Never fear—God, blessed be He, can bear up with it. I’ll also tell you a secret—how the modern Hasid can find his way to Jewish life.”

He began to go back down the hill. Little pebbles rolled after him. I remained sitting where I was, completely baffled. His last words had been “Jewish life,” and these words were suddenly so vivid to me that I saw meaning in them as never before. They even seemed to express something corporeal.

I felt a will to life stirring around me. The hungry mouth that had just been clamoring to me in various voices also had a head, a fiery head. That hunger had a will to live and to think.

It was now getting cool up on the hill, and I got up and started back. Halfway down the hill I found the sixteen-year-old thinker waiting for me.

“I couldn’t stop myself,” he said, “I thought I must tell you about a curious encounter I had recently.” He smiled, as if reexperiencing the event.

“I had just recited evening prayers,” he went on. “I enjoyed every breath of air I took in. Usually I walk with my head down to facilitate meditation. Suddenly I felt that instead of air I was breathing an inconceivable fragrance. It made me think of the sweet smell of a baby’s hands or feet, it was both earthy and not earthy, it was as though earth had not yet had time to become completely earthy.