The Glatstein Chronicles (7 page)

The casual reaction of my Gentile fellow passengers to the Hitler-news was the first slap in the face I had received as a Jew on this floating international paradise. I felt isolated, even offended that news of such importance to me should fall on such indifferent ears. I longed for a “warm Jewish heart” to share my emotion. The boxer had complained about the “bastards” trying to pass for
goyim,
but I began to discern a few Jewish faces. Perhaps under the impact of the Hitler-news, they were coming out of hiding and also looking for company.

My first such discovery was a dignified gentleman in house slippers, a prosperous-looking man with a trimmed beard, sitting on a bench, poring over a sacred text, soundlessly mouthing the words. He was altogether an exemplar of Jewish aristocratic bearing. His beautiful, delicate hands hesitated before turning the page he had just studied, as though he were sorry to leave a passage still so full of immeasurable wisdom. He had sought out the quietest corner of the deck, apparently unwilling to let even his whispers reach the ears of an alien, hostile world, not, God forbid, because he feared that world but because of its undying hatred of Jews. “The whole world is our enemy,” he declared, when I buttonholed him for his reaction to the Hitler-news. The Nazi bloodbath was no special concern of his. With fine Jewish humor he explained that such events were family squabbles, as at a wedding to which we Jews were not invited either by the groom’s side or the bride’s. The moral of the Hitler purge was that they all hated us. How this followed from the massacre of Nazis slaying one another he didn’t say, but he assured me that all the enemies of Israel could be made to disappear by studying a sacred Jewish text.

The man looked to be about seventy, on the cusp of the Bible’s allotted span of years. He radiated a serenity that could not be bought for a king’s treasure. The rabbinic dictum “The day is short and the task great” didn’t seem to concern him. In leisurely fashion he studied the sacred texts for the sheer intellectual pleasure this gave him, engaging in the holy activity for its own sake. He considered the reward of the world to come beside the point, and besides, the world to come was still far off. It was refreshing to find an American Jew who fit Lao Tse’s aphoristic descriptions of wisdom, in sharp contrast to the more general type of American Jew, who didn’t question the average life span cited in actuarial tables positing that one would drop dead like an exhausted horse in one’s fifties, and who consequently thought it necessary to speed things up, discharge one’s responsibilities with dispatch, and gulp down the bit of pleasure that life affords. This type did not believe in getting too wrapped up in children, either: What was the point of forming close relationships with them, if you would be a father for only—twenty years?

This slipper-clad Jew emitted the same aura of Sabbath calm that descended over our house like a secret when Mother and Father would shut their bedroom door for a nap following the Sabbath-afternoon meal, a stillness that would prevail until darkness fell and the time came for Father to take down the iron bolts and bars from his shop. The smell of the rusted metal, the clanking of the frozen keys, and the appearance of the first customer of the new week—these were the signals that the God of Abraham had rekindled all the lamps, marking the end of the holy Sabbath and the start of another care-filled week. Suddenly, this gentle Jew studying his holy texts on the ship’s deck seemed a bridge linking my first seventeen, eighteen years at home with the present journey back to it—a return voyage to see my dying mother. “Her ears are as yellow as wax,” my aunt had written. “Pack your things and come immediately, and may God help us all and bring you here in time to find her still alive.”

The ship seemed to be carrying me back to childhood, as though it were sailing backward in time. The two decades I had passed in America crumbled to dust between my fingers. Suddenly, all that mattered were the first years of my life, now straining to link up with the home that was awaiting me, like the two parts of a toy that need to be joined. I was awash in memories. Hitherto I had strongly resisted the temptation to submit my early years to the scalpel. I thought I should wait another twenty years and postpone any autobiographical exercise until I was sixty, by which time the fortunes of Yiddish letters would probably have sunk so low as to preclude any interest in serious literature and left nothing for a writer but to become a purveyor of old gossip, satisfying people’s curiosity about other people’s lives. Now here I was, making some concession to the evil impulse and beginning to root around in my memories in a way that I hadn’t done since I had left home.

Imagine a place with no dragons, no scorpions, no buffalo or bison, no lions or leopards, not even a ram or deer. Who can fathom the misery of a child in a town devoid of such fauna? Elsewhere the wide world holds many such blessings, but not Lublin, which contains nothing but a town clock and a fire warden who, every quarter-hour, sounds the hours until midnight, when everything slumbers but the flitting shadows around the synagogue. My Lublin didn’t appear on small maps, and on the larger ones was only a faint, barely legible marking. Really big maps, however, showed not only Lublin but also a tiny squiggle indicating the Bystrzyc rivulet (known to us by its Yiddish equivalent, the Bistshitse), a minor tributary of the Vistula River that flowed through Warsaw, home of the big-city branch of our family.

Long before I was conceived, there was a paternal great-grandfather with the German-sounding name of Enzl, and a grandfather called Yosl Enzls, neither of whom I knew. Enzl was just a name to me, and it sounded more like a nickname. The family archivists—that is to say, my older uncles and aunts—described him as a soft-spoken, sweet-tempered man, who earned his meager living as a sexton and who was reputed to be one of the thirty-six secret saints by whose grace the world is sustained. Grandfather Yosl Enzls was a more fleshed-out figure in my consciousness. He ran a workshop that sewed ladies’ garments for well-to-do customers—the high-born daughters of the gentry and of the governor, as well as wealthy women in general. A softhearted exploiter of the working class, he employed thirty or so girls, who ate and slept on tables in the shop, where they also warbled their love songs and collected their dowries, courtesy of the employer, when they left to get married.

This grandfather was no great scholar, but he scrupulously observed all the Jewish laws and attended daily prayer services. He prayed with even greater fervor when he knew that there were carriages pulled up outside the shop with customers waiting for him to return and personally fit them for wedding dresses—and wait they would, he was sure. Those who knew about such matters claimed that he wasn’t much of a craftsman, just an ordinary tailor, who got by on personal charm and his winning ways with people. He left behind seven sons, sturdy as oaks, and no inheritance, unless you count poverty a bequest. When he died of a stroke—brought on by the grief of seeing my father, his sixth son, go off to serve in the tsar’s army—all that remained was an empty, decrepit workshop.

My mother’s side boasted a line of small-town Polish rabbis, and a great-grandmother Drezl, also the wife of a rabbi, who was widowed young. Drezl was six weeks pregnant when her husband died. Since this might have led to ugly gossip, she announced her condition before the open grave, to forestall any dirty rumors that might be spread about her—God forbid! For added insurance, she named the daughter born to her, Bine, after her late husband, Binyomin.

As a respected rabbi’s widow, my great-grandmother was given an important community appointment, attendant at the
mikve,
the women’s ritual bath. I have clear memories of the meticulous way she would go about fulfilling her duties. My mother must have regarded my prepubescent masculinity as of no moment when she took me along to the mikve and sat me down on a wet bench while the women, young and old, splashed in the water, performing their ritual ablutions under my great-grandmother’s stern and competent supervision. During a break from her duties, she would press a coin into my hand, with the wish that my little heart be as open to Torah as was God’s Holy Temple.

When she died at the age of one hundred, her son, my grandfather, poor soul, was left an orphan at seventy. Grandfather Avrom was a widower, who lived with us for as long as I can remember, as much a fixture of the household as my father, mother, and brothers. He had a beautiful white beard that had become slightly stained from all the snuff he had pushed up his nose, and he owned a number of snuff boxes, all of them plain, proletarian ones, made of wood or bone, not silver, let alone gold. It took Grandfather longer than a prima donna to perform his toilette. Before going out, he would polish his boots, comb out his beard, and look himself over in the mirror. When he was already standing in the doorway, he would call me over for a final inspection, to make sure that no bit of feather still clung to him. Every Friday afternoon he went to the bathhouse, returning home with time to spare for a nap, before going to usher in the Sabbath at his Hasidic rebbe’s synagogue. It was our custom never to touch the braided Sabbath loaf, the
hallah,
until Grandfather had come home to recite the
kiddush
blessing over the wine.

Grandfather was a goldsmith. He had all sorts of strange tools, the strangest being a bellows used in the melting of gold that left a coating of soot over the whole house. He made his services available, gratis, to all in the family, repairing and cleaning their rings, earrings, and brooches—the only exception being Mother, who had to hound him for weeks before he would attend to her jewelry. Sometimes, he would set out with his tools to nearby villages, returning with a deficit that took several glasses of brandy and a hearty meal to overcome. After such indulgence, his cheeks turned red as beets, his blue, carefree eyes started to blink, and soon he would be stretched out on his bed, snoring rhythmically into his lower lip, his beard rising and falling on his chest. The children of the house were ordered to walk on tiptoe, because, as Mother loudly declared, as much to provoke him as to command our attention, “Grandfather, the great breadwinner, has returned from afar and is taking a nap.”

The ship was barely rocking. The slipper-clad Jew had dozed off. The air grew sharper and a wondrously cool fragrance rose from the sea, of saltwater long warmed by the sun.

The second Jew caught in my net proved less complaisant. I found him strolling arm in arm with a Haitian diplomat who spoke a heartrendingly beautiful French. In his polite yet proud demeanor, the diplomat, a light-skinned mulatto, might have been the great-grandson of Toussaint-Louverture, the black slave who, in 1801, rebelled against Haiti’s white masters and gained independence for his country, so electrifying the world with his military genius that in Europe he was dubbed the Black Napoleon. The diplomat spoke in a loud, flirtatious voice so that all could hear how beautiful the pearly vowels of French could sound. He drew on all his powers to convey the subtleties of the language. Absorbing every word, his companion was in seventh heaven when he was able to interject a French sentence of his own, which in turn elicited from the Haitian a fresh torrent of elegant phrases. He pursed his lips like a fish, and every word he uttered was a kiss, sent into the air like a bird freed from confinement.

The diplomat was slender, with polished features and a long, bumpy, almost Jewish-looking nose. He had shrewd eyes and theatrical gestures. If he had to beg someone’s pardon for the slightest inadvertent contact that might be mistaken for a shove, he would gallantly bow his head in apology. In sum, though he represented a small, poor land, he was the very model of a diplomat, with all the requisite savoir faire.

Since his companion was much shorter than he (and nondescript looking, to boot), the tall diplomat was constantly bending down to reduce the distance between them, in yet another gesture of tact and courtesy. When, in my quest, I interrupted the pair to solicit the shorter one’s reaction to the news about Hitler, he stopped in his tracks like a stunned rooster. For a moment he froze, then suddenly let go of the diplomat’s arm. Whereupon the latter, without missing a beat, caught the arm of a passing woman in a motion better suited to the dance floor, and, graciously, with his new companion in tow, continued his stroll around the sundeck, while his erstwhile companion gazed after his departing hero like an orphaned child.

“How did you know I was Jewish?” he asked, as if some misfortune had befallen him. “Well I am, but not one of those common Polish Jews. I’m Dutch.”

One of his eyes had a tendency to wander, and kept going into and out of hiding. He was a phlegmatic sort, who spoke English well enough, choosing his words with a slow, deliberate care that complemented his stiffness. His hands hung lifelessly by his side. His step was heavy, and his thoughts, translated from Dutch into his distinctive English, heavier still. He treated our conversation as a fencing match, expecting me to take the offensive.

“As it happens, I’m a Polish Jew,” I said, rising to the challenge.

He responded with that great Gentile compliment, “You don’t look it.” When I asked him to tell me something about his ancestry, he was unwilling to discuss even so recent a forebear as his great-grandfather. Not for him, it would seem, the grand heritage of Dutch Jewry—no Spanish Jews finding refuge in Holland after the Expulsion of 1492, no Polish Jews with their own illustrious history, who, in more recent days, had immigrated to Holland, and certainly no Baruch Spinoza. He was a Dutch Jew, pure and simple, a descendant of generations of Dutch Jews—end of story.

I then tried to steer him to another subject, and asked whether he had ever heard anyone in his own family, or possibly in the Amsterdam Jewish ghetto, speaking the old Judeo-Spanish dialect, Ladino. But he shook off this question too, as if afraid I might suspect him of association with matters that weren’t properly Dutch. He merely allowed that he came from a family of rich merchants and that he was returning home from a three-week visit to the United States, to rejoin his father in the family business. As for the Jews of Holland, he would preface any remarks with the standard lecture that they were Dutch citizens first and foremost, Jews only secondarily. They took a deep interest in politics and were fervent patriots, and only after they had carried out their civic duty to the full, so that no one could accuse them of disloyalty, were they also Jews. But their Jewishness was only a minor part of their identity, the merest tip of the iceberg.