The Glatstein Chronicles (59 page)

“All right, all right. I’ll have it brought to you soon.”

The man’s head vanished, and Buchlerner got up and left my room. I began slowly to pack my things.

There was a knock at my door, which opened before I had time to say “Come in.” It was the driver, his eyes red and sleepy. “I’ve come to tell you that you need not worry. You can go to bed and sleep at least four hours.” He drew an enormous watch from a pocket. “You can sleep for exactly four hours,” he said. He opened his worn jacket, unbuttoned his shirt, and began to scratch his hairy chest, like someone who had just gotten up from sleep.

“Ah, Friday I’ll go to the bathhouse,” he said with anticipated pleasure. “Then I’ll go home and during the Sabbath I’ll be a man like others. What’s the purpose of all the turmoil? Vanity of vanities. You can see now.” He pointed with his finger at the door. “The end of all flesh.” He scratched himself with greater gusto. “I’ll take you to the station, then I’ll go to Kazimierz to bring back Neifeld, and I’ll go home for the Sabbath with złotys in my pocket and nothing to complain of, thank God.”

He sat down on the rocking chair. “You won’t mind, will you, if I take a little nap here. Listen to me, take your clothes off and get some sleep.”

From below came the sound of quiet sobbing.

“Hear that? Steinman’s daughter, poor thing. She’s been left all alone, an orphan. No husband, no children, no relatives. Poor, poor thing.”

He loosened the rope around his waist and soon began to snore loudly, with hoarse, throaty noises.

It was only half-past two, but a faint blue tinted the skies, the herald of an impatient Polish summer dawn. A bird, as if stirring uneasily from sleep, uttered a few notes and fell silent again. I switched off the lamp: The pale light filtering through the window settled on the half-opened suitcases near my bed, leaving the rest of the room blurred and insubstantial. They were the starkest and most sharply defined objects in the room.

p. 8
     The Sholem Aleichem story in question is “Home for Passover” (Af peysakh aheym, 1903). See Introduction, note 5.

p. 9
      The Yiddish term for Lithuanian,
Litvak,
is associated with a number of stereotypical qualities. The reference here is to his reputation for learning and ratiocination rather than physical labor.

p. 9
      Steinmetz (1865–1923) was a scientist famous for his research on alternating electric currents. Born in Prussia, he migrated to the United States in 1889 and was employed by General Electric in Schenectady.

p. 11
     Barney Ross (1909–1967), born Dov-Ber Rasofsky, world boxing champion in lightweight, junior welterweight, and welterweight divisions.

p. 11
     Tsitsit are ritual fringes on the undergarment worn by Jewish men in obedience to the biblical injunctions of Numbers 15:38: “Speak to the children of Israel and you shall say to them that they shall make for themselves fringes on the corners of their garments, throughout their generations, and they shall affix a thread of blue on the fringe of each corner.” A similar injunction appears in Deuteronomy 22:12.

p. 14
     Richard Dehmel (1863–1920), German poet, whose lyric “Der Arbeitsmann” (The workingman) contains three stanzas, each of which concludes with the words
Nur Zeit
—the workingman has everything but time.

p. 16
     The British poet John Masefield (1878–1967) was known for his seafaring poems.

p. 17
     Lovestonism was an American offshoot of Communism. Jay Lovestone (b. Jacob Liebstein, 1897–1990), originally a Communist and national secretary of the Workers’ Party of America, was expelled from the Communist Party in 1929 and formed his own oppositional branch of the movement.

p. 21
     Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881), British Conservative statesman, author, and twice prime minister of Britain.

p. 22
     In Germanic legends, Lohengrin comes to the rescue of Princess Elsa of Brabant.

p. 23
     Night of the Long Knives was the term used to describe Hitler’s purge of potential Nazi rivals on the night of June 30–July 1, 1934.

p. 24
     Haman: villain of the Book of Esther, who urges the killing of the Jews of Persia. Tomas de Torquemada (1420–1498), first grand inquisitor of Spain, notorious for his persecution of Jewish communities. Bogdan Chmielnicki (ca. 1595–1657), Cossack leader who instigated pogroms of Polish Jews as part of his struggle for Ukrainian independence. Pavel Krushevan (1860–1909), anti-?Semitic Russian journalist and publisher of the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Jozef Haller (1873–1960), Polish general some of whose units attacked Jewish civilians during World War I.

p. 25
     Rabbinic dictum of Rabbi Tarfon from
Ethics of the Fathers,
chapter 2 (trans. Judah Goldin): “The day is short, the work is plentiful, the laborers are sluggish, the reward is abundant, and the master of the house presses.”

p. 25
     Lao-Tse (b. 604
BCE
), Chinese philosopher, author of
Tao Te Ching
—a foundational work of Taoism centered on the principle of “non-action.”

p. 26
     According to Jewish folk tradition, the unheralded virtue of thirty-six righteous souls in every generation keeps the world in existence. They are referred to as the
lamed-vov
(thirty-six)
tsadikim
.

p. 33
     Diapason: in music, an interval of one octave.

p. 34
     Jeremiah 31:15.

p. 34
     The River Sambatyon, or Sabbath River, in Talmudic literature said to flow with dangerous currents on weekdays and to lie still on Sabbath. The Ten Lost Tribes were believed to have disappeared from history after the destruction of the Kingdom of Israel in the eighth century
BCE
.

p. 34
     Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman (1720–1797), known as the Gaon, or Luminary, of Vilna, was the leading rabbinic scholar and authority of his age. His name is invoked as the epitome of Jewish learnedness.

p. 38
     The Kol Nidre prayer opens the service on the eve of Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year.

p. 42
     The Haggadah (which means “telling”) is the story of the exodus from Egypt, read during the Passover seder.

p. 45
     The ceremony of Tashlikh, in which sins are symbolically thrown into a body of water, is observed on the first day of the Jewish new year, Rosh Hashanah, or on the second day if the first falls on the Sabbath.

p. 50
     Fyodor Ivanovich Chaliapin (1873–1938), famous Russian opera singer.

p. 54
     Berek Joselewicz (1764–1809), Jewish merchant who became a colonel in the Polish army during the Kościuszko uprising against Russia, commanded the first Jewish military unit in modern history, and was hailed by the Poles as a hero in their struggle for independence.

p. 57
     The Maccabees waged a successful guerrilla war against the Syrian king Antiochus Epiphanes in 168
BCE
. The holiday of Hannukah celebrates their victory.

p. 58
     There are three traditional calls for the ram’s horn: a regular blast,
tekiyah;
a long undulating wail,
truah;
and three staccato blasts,
shvorim.

p. 62
     Deuteronomy 19:19.

p. 64
     One of the derogatory terms Jews used for Jesus.

p. 65
     Abraham Goldfaden (1840–1908), founder of the first Yiddish language theater, in Romania in 1876, and composer of popular operettas.

p. 66
     
Family Tsvi
(1904), by the Yiddish dramatist and novelist David Pinski (1872–1959), written following the pogroms in Kishinev and other Russian cities, sympathetically portrays the younger generation’s creation of Jewish self-defense.

p. 66
     Dovid Edelstadt (1866–1892), Yiddish poet whose early death from tuberculosis enshrined him as a literary martyr.

p. 70
     The Russian journal
Niva
was edited by Vladimir Galaktyonovicz Korolenko (1853–1921), Ukrainian-Russian critic of tsarism, who took a public stand against the 1911 trial of the Jew Mendl Beilis, charged with the ritual murder of a Christian child.

p. 72
     
The Swan of Tuonela
is a tone poem by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, based on a legend from the Kalevala epic.

p. 78
     Shereshevsky, etc., families noted for their wealth.

p. 85
     The Hebrew expression the doctor uses is
kema’ayan hamitgaber.

p. 87
     The phrase “and the still, small voice is heard” appears in the High Holidays prayer “Unetaneh Tokef,” attributed to Rabbi Amnon of Mainz. The Liebestod, or “love-death,” is the final scene of Richard Wagner’s opera
Tristan and Isolde.
“Blessed be the true judge,”
Borukh dayan emes,
is shorthand for the prayer that is pronounced at the moment of death, or on learning of someone’s passing.

p. 90
     Here Lawson appears to have erred in his judgment, since Schiff had contributed generously to Jewish causes.

p. 92
     Shikse, the Yiddish term for a Gentile woman, may be neutral or derogatory, depending on the context.

p. 93
     The International Workers of the World (IWW) was founded in 1905 on the premise that all workers should be united as a class within a single union. Members were called Wobblies.

p. 95
     
Red Medicine: Socialized Health in Soviet Russia,
by Sir Arthur Newsholme and John Adams Kingsbury (New York, 1934), presented a glowing account of medical organization and administration in Soviet Russia.

p. 96
     Jacob Gordin (1853–1909), pioneering dramatist of the American Yiddish theater, best known for his introduction of social realism in plays like
God, Man, and Devil, Mirele Efros,
and
The Jewish King Lear.

p. 96
     The dentist recalls prominent figures on the Lower East Side in the early decades of the twentieth century. Morris Rosenfeld (1862–1923) was known as a “sweatshop poet” after the theme of some of his best known verses. Abraham Goldfaden (1840–1908) staged the first known Yiddish public entertainment in Galicia in 1876 and was touted as “father of the Yiddish stage.” “In the Plow Lies the Blessing,” by the popular folk poet and wedding bard Eliakum Zunser (1836–1913), extolled the pioneers who went to till the land of Israel. Goldfaden and Zunser did not fare as well in New York as they had in Europe.

p. 96
     Naftali Herz Imber (1856–1909) composed the song
Hatikvah
(The hope), which later became the national anthem of Israel. He, too, died poor and obscure in New York. Louis Miller (1866–1927), American socialist leader and editor of the Yiddish daily
Warheit,
1905–1916.

p. 96
     Abraham Cahan (1860–1951), founder and longtime editor of the Yiddish daily
Forverts
(Forward). The Russian term
molodyets,
“fine fellow,” is sometimes used ironically.

p. 96
     Dr. Hillel Solotaroff (1865–1921), anarchist theoretician and lecturer.

p. 99
     August Ferdinand Bebel (1840–1913), one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

p. 100
   
Journey’s End,
by R. C. Sheriff, first performed in 1928 and frequently revived, dramatizes the experience of a British Army infantry company in the trenches of France during World War I.

p. 102
   Józef Kazimierz Hofmann (1876–1957) was considered one of the finest virtuoso pianists in the world.

p. 110
   Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev (d. 1810), was one of the most beloved rabbis of the Hasidic movement. In Hasidic folklore, he is said to have interceded directly with God on behalf of the Jews.

p. 110
   Eugeniusz Jagiello, Polish Socialist, was elected to the fourth Rus sian state parliament in 1912 largely thanks to the Jewish vote.

p. 111
   
Growth of the Soil,
by the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, was published in 1917. Glatstein left Poland in 1914, so this image must have been imposed retroactively.

p. 111
   Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893), Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–1869), Vissarion Belinsky (1811–1848), and Georg Morris Cohen Brandes (1842–1927) were prominent literary critics. “Our” Brandes because he was the Jew among them.

p. 112
   Bazarov, hero of Ivan Turgenev’s
Fathers and Sons;
Nekhlyudov, of Leo Tolstoy’s
Resurrection;
Karamozov of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov;
Oblomov and Sanin, eponymous heroes of Ivan Goncharov and Mikhail Artsybashev, respectively.

p. 113
   Poem by the Yiddish poet David Einhorn, “Geshtorbn der letster bal-tfile” (The last prayer leader is dead). Glatstein gets the title slightly wrong.

p. 116
   The ancient custom of ritual flagellation for one’s sins has been observed by some into modern times.

p. 116
   Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan (1838–1933) was known as the Chofetz Chaim (Desirer of life), after the title of his best-known work, which instructs in the morality of permissible and impermissible speech. He was a much-beloved rabbi and teacher and ethicist.

p. 124
   The man cannot speak because he is still in the midst of his prayers, having not yet removed the phylacteries in which he davens, or prays. From what follows, it seems his piety has its limits.

p. 137
   Created by Catherine the Great in 1791, the Pale of Settlement was the Western region of imperial Russia to which Jews were confined. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Pale had a Jewish population of about five million. It was formally abolished by the Russian Revolution in 1917.

p. 138
   In 1934 Abraham Faber, a recent graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was one of three men accused of shooting two men to death as part of a Boston bank robbery. All three were found guilty and executed by the state of Massachusetts on June 7, 1935.