The Glatstein Chronicles (6 page)

Worse yet is when hecklers turn into the voice of your conscience. You pretend it isn’t happening, until one day you are afraid to reach for a glass of orange juice without reckoning all the political implications. And how dumb this politicking is! You no sooner locate your political absolute than along come the world leaders to season your ideals with executions, slaughters, and betrayals. We are baffled. Should we shout hurrah! and join the happy ranks of loyal recruits, or find ourselves a new political creed?

I feel aboard this ship as Jonah must have felt in that first moment when he thought he had escaped God’s wrath. I breathe easier, having at last broken free from the whole abracadabra of my existence. Maybe here I will be able to scrape off the scabby crust that had accrued to me as a social animal, a writer-for-hire, a Jew in a bloody world that—
pace
Shakespeare—only demands
my
pound of flesh. Now all is well, and the sun beating down on the deck feels so beneficent that I don’t want to admit any thought that might claim me. For what is thought but clarification, and I want no clarification—only to see and hear for myself, without comparisons or conclusions.

By now my fellow passengers, in contrast to our first day aboard, treat me with the same nonchalance that I accord them. I feel no need to speak to them. I look at them with half-closed eyes and attend to them with half-closed ears, and if it pleases me, I devote more attention to a speck of dust than to the group gathered beside me. All’s well and good, I’ve divested myself of the little I possess. I am a poor man who has accumulated such a store of poverty that I can afford to jettison the bits of knowledge I’ve acquired, the meager passions, the entire claptrap of my little world. And should faces from my past swim into view, they break apart like reflections on the water’s surface as I toss in pebbles to make them disappear.

The sea, until now a frozen, immobile surface—“a painted ship on a painted sea”—suddenly came alive with porpoises, leaping and cavorting alongside our vessel. Anyone privileged to have once seen these creatures in motion will never forget the sight. They rise from the water by the tens or even hundreds in graceful arcs, heads plunging into the waves, but always in pairs, like two elegant hands. Arched in the air, they mirror themselves in the sun so that their every leap is a cascade of color. It is a marvelous sight, as if the sea had opened a porthole into its secrets to reveal the wonders just below its surface.

The thought that had been teasing me all this while finally let me in on the secret that I was lucky to be away at this peak time of Jewish organizational politicking. For the height of summer was when the leaders of the community swung into action, furiously jockeying for place. And here was I, well out of it, on the high seas with not even so much as a newspaper assignment demanding my attention.

This trip had occasioned my first face-to-face encounter with a boss. Until this last job, I had worked for the kind of organizations or companies that did not require dealing with the man on top. Since the bread I earned, with or without the butter, fell like manna from heaven, I had never seen my exalted provider and thus never felt any great divide between me, the “means of production,” and the boss, the absolute controller of my modest income. When I worked for the American Surety Company, a huge corporation that employed hundreds of people, I could observe the vast hierarchy of subordinates and superiors, the assorted ranks of lower-level toilers overseen by inspectors and superintendents, but I never got to see the shining face of our almighty ruler. Once, an arrogant type with just the right configuration of bald pate and gray fringe came by and looked us over, smacking his lips, as if he were counting his sheep. He seemed so unaccountably important that I was disappointed to learn he was a mere vice president, one of a score.

My fellow toilers were white-collar workers, a collection of meek men and dolled up young women, the latter mostly from poor towns in New Jersey, where bathtubs, it would seem, were in short supply. They took the ferry every morning to metropolitan New York, to the city of golden opportunity, not so much to get to work on time as in the hope of fitting into Cinderella’s glass slipper, or at least winning a fur coat from the boss for favors granted. On hot summer days, for all their good looks, they reeked of sweat. It broke my heart that women with such pretty faces and such tiny, dancing feet should emit these pungent smells, as if nature had bestowed rank odors on beautiful little female animals in order to repel predatory males.

One seductively sunny day, I looked for an excuse to say goodbye forever to the dusty documents accumulating on my desk. The opportunity came with a “fatherly” note from a supervisor, reminding me of all the duties I had neglected. He warned that unless I completed these duties I would be ineligible for promotion to higher positions in the company. I replied with a rude note in kind—for that’s how business was conducted at American Surety, in the grand manner, with an exchange of memoranda between subordinates and supervisors and vice versa. The superintendent lost no time in sending for me and demanding my resignation, in just those words. Given the munificent sum of seventy-five dollars a month that I was pulling down (to say nothing of the vague opportunity to “work my way up,” in the good, old-fashioned American way), the demand that I resign had such an official ring to it that I complied and strode right out of the superintendent’s office with head held high.

My white-collar comrades with their finely tuned antennas promptly got wind of my revolt. These colleagues, purportedly buddies, buried their heads deeper in their documents lest, God forbid, their bidding me farewell be taken as a sign that they identified themselves with my insurgency. The only one with the courage to say goodbye was a Scotsman, whose vocabulary featured an all-purpose word, “horseshit!”—an exclamation he employed, with varying intonations adapted to the occasion, to signify both approval and displeasure, equal verdict on the rotten eggs that were served up at Child’s restaurant and on the pretty, friendly waitress who had brought them. He ran after me, pressed my hand warmly, and uttered his trademark expression, a “horseshit!” so deep-felt, filled with such sorrow and regret, that—loosely translated—it seemed to say: “Don’t take it to heart, my friend, because it’s all vanity of vanities,
vanitas vanitatis.
You’ll certainly find another job.” The one magic word conveyed all that, and more.

It was midsummer. To reach the exit, I had to walk past the desks of a whole row of female workers. The scent of their makeup, simmering in perspiration, followed me out the door.

When I was a university student, I worked for a union local. At that job I never saw the “big boss” either. To be sure, I had a supervisor, but I felt that my true employer was the working class, even though it didn’t exactly keep me in clover. For ten dollars a week, my job was to stand behind a grille, facing a clutch of resentful workers who had just put in a week of hard labor and now had to suffer the further indignity of lining up to pay their union dues. The dues payers would often let their anger out at me and scream across the grille that I was draining their blood, gorging on the fruit of their toil, and sucking the marrow from their bones. The job ended when my supervisor sent me to buy a few bottles of whiskey for a little banquet the labor leaders were throwing in their own honor. Inasmuch I was given no money, only instructions to go to a nearby saloon and charge the purchase to the union’s credit, I persuaded myself en route that, as a university student–turned–whiskey–errand boy, my dignity was being trampled on. It was a good excuse not to return, and so ended my union job, without my ever having laid eyes on the top man.

As teacher in a Jewish school in a remote town in the Catskills, I was apparently working for a commune. I had been hired to provide spiritual nourishment not only for the children, but as well for the mostly tubercular adults, who endured winter days in their little business establishments, with not a cent of revenue coming in, waiting for summer’s redemptive bounty. During the long winter nights, after a day spent instructing their children, the teacher was milked for whatever he could provide in the way of literature, history, Jewish lore, culture, and other edifying fare. Sunday evening was the highlight of their week, the time of the weekly meeting, when they assembled to transact community business, all dressed to the nines, the men freshly shaved, their wives grotesquely fat or grotesquely thin. They made long-winded speeches and proposed various resolutions, quarreling among themselves, insulting one another, and spreading slander. The women took a lively part in the proceedings, violating all parliamentary procedure and forcing me, as if at gunpoint, to declare whose side I was on. They weighed my every smile, trying to guess at whom it was directed, and why. Only a Disraeli could squirm his way diplomatically out of this embarrassing situation.

After I had successfully negotiated the slippery terrain, treading neutrally among the competing factions, I was given my reward. In my presence, the parents of the children would solicit contributions for my weekly salary. They were usually two or three dollars short, and this would lead to a long, oppressive pause. The women would throw me a look of pity and sigh over my plight. But invariably, always in the same heroic fashion, a savior would step forward, a veritable Lohengrin, and, every inch the proud philanthropist, toss down the missing few dollars. The expression on his face, however, warned that such largess would not be repeated and was not to be expected the following week. His generosity would be greeted by thunderous applause. At last the greasy bills—from the butcher, the shoemaker, the plumber, the blacksmith, the gas-station owner, the shopkeeper, the tailor, the grocer, the flour merchant, the hotel owner, the furniture dealer, the bootlegger, as well as a childless widow married to a Gentile, who donated her dollar to the cause of radical Jewish education in the mistaken belief that this would secure her a place in Paradise—would be thrust with a triumphant flourish into the teacher’s hands.

I had many “bosses” in the Catskills, but the chief boss, the one who wielded the whip and threw me crumbs, spent his winters in warmer climes, and him I never had the good fortune to see.

My latest employment was—and remains—that of writer for a Yiddish daily. I had worked there for eight long years without ever seeing my boss, the paper’s owner, who remained a phantom presence until it came time to negotiate a leave for the present trip. He was a shrewd businessman who knew that I hadn’t asked to see him to foment revolution, so he dispensed with me quickly. I sat scrunched down in the chair opposite him and he was obviously as eager to get rid of me as I was to have done with the whole uncomfortable business. I felt awkward and insignificant in the presence of the mighty one, who held my livelihood in his palms and brandished it over my head, as God did the Torah over the Children of Israel at Sinai—accept My Law and live, otherwise perish! I probably looked to him like some miserable child. My rectitude, my talent, my three slim volumes of poetry, my convictions—were all as naught when I imagined I heard outside the office door, clear as a bell, the pleas of my wife and three children not to make a false move or utter a wrong word, God forbid. The sun might be shining as brightly as it did that day when I walked out on my job at American Surety, but there must be no more talk of resignation. I was now a paterfamilias and must bow to the special demands of the role.

“I’ll think it over,” said the supreme authority.

“Thank you. Good day,” I replied.

There was no rejoinder, but I had finally seen the provider of my sustenance, seen, too, that he considered me only a debit in his account book, a mere inkblot in his business ledger. Coming out of his office, my left ear burning and cheeks aflame, I ran smack into my supervisor. He threw me a sympathetic look, well aware of the agony I had just undergone, but he quickly drew himself up so that I, in my helplessness, shouldn’t think him a friend and cry on his shoulder.

So the small joy that I felt at the prospect of my first trip abroad in twenty years was reversed, and I was seized by a strange foreboding. The fear persisted as I prepared to board the ship.

In the morning, informed by the ship’s newspaper that Hitler had done away with his closest associates in the so-called Night of Long Knives—apparently taking to heart Mussolini’s advice never to share your rule with the fellow revolutionaries who aided your rise to power (by the same token, rather than pay back a debt owed to good friends, it might be easier to slaughter them)—I went looking for Jewish faces among the passengers.

The paper, an attractive miniature version of its counterparts on land, conveyed the news simply, without commentary, as if this were no more than a sensational tidbit, the severed heads of a dozen or so Nazi pederasts served up on a silver platter for the delectation of the passengers after their rich breakfast—yet another item on the ship’s program to stave off boredom. The effort was wasted on the Gentile passengers, who got no thrill from the news. They thumbed the scant pages, reading the jokes, the sports items, the announcements of afternoon activities, barely pausing over Hitler’s bloody purge. When I tried to elicit some reaction from them about this report that had traveled from land to us at sea, many admitted that they hadn’t seen the news at all, and those who had said things like “Hitler’s a damn fool!” “Let them knock each other’s brains out!” “Hmm … this is just the beginning!” My Scandinavian friend gave me a sharp lecture on Marxism, exclaiming, “By God, the Danes hate the Germans! It’s high time Roosevelt said something about this.”

None of these responses cheered me, lacking as they were in Jewish understanding and feeling. I realized that to the Gentiles, Hitler meant something altogether different than he did to me. My non-Jewish fellow passengers, whether provoked to anger or not, regarded Hitler as merely Germany’s dictator. To me, to 600,000 German Jews, and indeed to all the 17 million Jews worldwide, Hitler was the embodiment of the dreaded historical hatemonger, latest in a long line of persecutors that stretched from Haman, Torquemada, and Chmielnicki to Krushevan and Jozef Haller, a beast with a murderous paw, wielding a bloody pen that was writing a dreadful new chapter of Jewish history.