The Glatstein Chronicles (8 page)

“What keeps them connected to the Jewish people?” I asked.

“Nothing!” he exclaimed, delighted by this opportunity to expound on the special nature of the Dutch Jews. “They are an entity unto themselves, a sort of thirteenth tribe of Israel, without a history or traditions. Maybe somewhere there’s buried archeological evidence of their origins.”

He was an intelligent man, who obviously preferred innocent banter to confronting unpleasant truths. Ultimately, however, it all came out. No less than their Christian neighbors, Dutch Jews detested the Polish Jews in their midst. With their long, scraggly beards, the Polish Jews who shuffled about the streets of Amsterdam in their ridiculous garb were an embarrassment to the Dutch Jews, to say nothing of the Christians, generally patient and tolerant souls. The Polish Jews were doing great harm to their Dutch coreligionists, and their presence was a slap in the face, because no matter how hard the Dutch Jews tried to keep their distance from the Poles, the Christians felt that the Dutch Jews bore some responsibility for the behavior of their eastern brethren.

“Why have they come to disturb our longtime peace and order?” he said. “I swear, I turn red in the face whenever I see a Polish Jew. Why must they always attract attention to themselves, with their stubborn insistence on being different?”

“But why should this disturb you?” I asked with feigned innocence. “Are you bothered by a Chinaman? A Hindu? A black man? You can’t be the free and tolerant Dutchman you think you are if you’re ashamed of a Polish Jew on the street with whom you don’t even claim kinship, who’s neither your uncle nor your nephew.”

He ignored my barb and began to describe how safe and secure the Jews of Holland had always felt, how deeply rooted, until “this Hitler” began to act up. “So far, there hasn’t been any anti-Semitism in Holland,” he said. “Everyone is equal. There are Jewish cabinet ministers, judges, and prominent businessmen. Everything would be fine, but with Hitler so close by … The Dutch don’t even like the Germans, but who knows what will happen? Until Hitler came along, everything was fine.”

“So you’re afraid of Hitler?”

He admitted that Hitler gave him pause.

“Then doesn’t that make you want to rejoin the Jewish people, to become a brother to the other twelve tribes of Israel?” I said, with a thrust of my imaginary foil.

“No! Not at all! As I’ve already told you, above all, we’re good Dutchmen.”

I was growing weary of this parrying. No doubt my young, two hundred percent Dutchman was sure that his were original thoughts, but to me his words gave off the same rusty, familiar clang sounded so often by other deluded Jews in other lands, with the same misplaced faith. I couldn’t resist a sarcastic retort.

“But no matter how Dutch you think you are, my good friend,” I said, throwing him a big smile, “according to the latest research on race being conducted by German scientists, you aren’t an Aryan. The Nazi racial doctrine, a ‘proven scientific’ fact, will reach out to get you no matter how Dutch you may imagine yourself to be. It has condemned not just the 600,000 Jews of Germany but all 17 million of the Jews in the world. When we look at ourselves in the new Teutonic mirror, you, the Dutch Jew, and I, the Polish-American Jew, are equally non-Aryan.”

I made a move to leave but he wouldn’t let me go. He wanted to talk some more about Jews and Jewishness, like someone picking at a scab. Again, I restricted myself to questions and posed the following puzzler: “When you hear about Chinese being persecuted in China, or Jews in Germany—which concerns you more?”

“I struggle with myself,” he replied. “As a civilized person I want to care, or not care, about them equally, but I must confess that the news about the Jews hits closer to home.”

“Why?”

“Why?”

We had spoken simultaneously.

“Well,” he said, “this may be a personal fear, but I worry that Jewish calamities elsewhere might find their way to us in Holland, and that wouldn’t be fair, because we Dutch Jews are different, as I’ve already explained. We’re Dutchmen first, Jews second.”

As he pounded away on his single theme, he grew more talkative, but his voice remained a steady drone. On and on he went, marshaling his meager learning, bandying about the names of philosophers, writers, musicians. I became deaf to his monotone and all I could think of were the hackneyed reproductions that hang in kitchens—a Dutch windmill, heavy wooden clogs with upturned toes, impossible flaxen hair, and clenched fingers busily milking a cow. Needless to say, this was not the sum of Dutch culture, which has a long and rich tradition. That culture also has Jewish resonances—Rembrandt’s substantial Jewish patriarchs, for instance, and even the sour Judeo-Christian taste of Spinoza’s
Tractatus Theologico-Politicum
—but if my Dutch friend was in any way representative, these seemed to be lost on the “thirteenth tribe” that he imagined Dutch Jewry to be.

Lately, he droned on, Dutch Jews had begun to suffer from the affliction of Zionism, which was spreading among the youth like an epidemic. “Imagine,” he said, “sitting in Holland and dreaming of Palestine!” A cousin of his, a well-educated young man from a wealthy family, had thrown everything away to become an ordinary worker in the Land of Israel. “His parents want nothing more to do with him,” my Dutchman continued, “but he sends them letter after letter, telling them how happy he is to have found solid ground under his feet. Now why would someone like that, who was on the point of converting to Christianity, suddenly become a Zionist? The devil only knows!” Actually, he noted, a number of Jews, who were more Gentile than Jew, had begun to identify actively with Zionism, which seemed to attract the most assimilated elements of the community. “It’s probably the panic about Hitler,” he said, more to soothe his disquiet than in agreement with me. “The good Dutch Jews look askance at this Zionist flirtation. It’s hurting us. It can undo the respect of our Christian neighbors, which we’ve worked so long and hard to cultivate. If the Dutch were to find out that our hearts lie elsewhere, beyond the borders of Holland … ”

“Why then don’t you convert?” I interrupted.

He wasn’t in the least insulted. For the first time his mismatched eyes showed a glimmer of longing. He confessed that he was strongly attracted by the romanticism of the Catholic Church. A number of times he had consulted his father on the matter, who had advised him against conversion, though he couldn’t give any good reason. “One of these days I’ll take it up with him again,” he said. “I just love the incense and the theatricality of Catholicism. Then again, maybe I’ll go check out the Land of Israel, to see what all the excitement is about. Maybe,” he laughed cheerlessly, “my heart will begin to throb with a biblical beat if I get to crush rocks on native soil. Ha, ha, I might just become the Columbus of the Jewish homeland. Yes, I might just hear a diapason in a Jewish mode, summoning Jews home from the far-flung Diaspora.”

Diaspora
!
Diapason
! Lovely musical words. But wouldn’t the words of Jeremiah, if only he had known them, better have expressed his sentiment? “A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping; Rachel is weeping for her children.”

Finally, as our conversation wound down, he cautioned me against visiting Holland, should the notion ever occur to me. “There’s nothing to see,” he said, swiveling his afflicted eye as if to emphasize the point. I suspect he didn’t want yet another Polish Jew setting foot in Holland, lest he tip the balance and ruin everything for the Dutch Jews.

“To tell you the truth, I envy the way you can sit there so calmly, talking to such a jerk. If I ever caught a Jew like that in my city, I’d give him the thrashing of his life, and I’d add two slaps in the face for good measure.”

The speaker was a tall, broad-shouldered man, with a powerful set of teeth that could easily grind a whole loaf of bread to bits, long, sturdy arms, and mocking cat’s eyes, whom I had nonetheless failed to notice all the time I was talking to the Dutchman. “I know some English,” he said, “enough to make out what that weasel was talking about. What can I tell you? He’s just the sort of Jew who needs our boys to teach him a lesson. They’d knock some sense into his head, either that or finish him off altogether.”

What was he talking about? What city? What boys?

He apologized for beginning in the middle, without first taking the time to inform me that he was from Colombia, from its capital city, Bogotá, with the accent on the
a.

“You see,” he said, launching into his tale, “I’m from across the River Sambatyon, where the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel ended up, and my blood boils whenever I hear the name Hitler. Along comes this nincompoop who has no use for Judaism. Yet this Dutch noodlehead is no less a Jew than the Gaon of Vilna. Go figure it out!

“Have you any idea where I hail from? When you hear the words
Colombia
and
Bogotá
—accent on the
a
—even if you were a mapmaker you wouldn’t know what these places are like. Only
Sambatyon
can begin to give you some inkling. Do you think you’d understand it better if I said ‘South America’? One man’s South America is not another’s. You’re from New York—isn’t that right?—so I’ll try to explain where I live in relation to where you live. Let’s say you suddenly go mad, poor man, and decide that you want to go to Bogotá. You’d board a ship in New York and sail seven days till you reach the small port of Cartagena. That would put you in Colombia, but don’t lick your chops just yet, your troubles would just be beginning. Next, you’d take the train to the Magdalena River—your true Sambatyon—and those nasty, little Red Jews on the far bank, those are us, the chimps, or what you in the States call peddlers, the guys who have to wheel and deal to earn a meal.

“So, here we are at the Magdalena. You navigate it by boat, or what passes for a boat but is actually a wreck, a piece of floating lumber that idles down the river for a day, two days, three, four, five—and suddenly you’re on another train. How come? Because the Magdalena has a slight obstruction, it runs smack into a waterfall, and waterfalls, as you realize, don’t welcome either boats or passengers. Only a train can get you past this obstacle. Then it’s back to the Magdalena till you reach a small village where—can you believe this?—you get on another train, but finally one that takes you all the way to Bogotá (accent on the
a
).

“The train crawls uphill, until you’re four thousand feet above sea level. You pass coffee plantations, some barely cultivated, others lush, with heaps of coffee beans drying in the sun. The coffee bush likes the cold mountain air. No taller than a man, it loves to enslave the human species. The energy it takes to put even a spoonful of coffee on your table is like what it took the Hebrew slaves to build the cities of Pithom and Ramses in Egypt. The coffee bush needs pampering, nursing, and feeding before it makes the grade. Its berries look like red cherries. You have to pick them by hand and throw away the soft, fleshy part, leaving the hard kernel—the bean. Well, what do you know? You’re off to Bogotá so you’ve gotten a free lecture—bully for you! The train keeps going for hours and hours, passing one pretty little village after another, until, finally, you arrive at your destination.

“Now, try telling me that I don’t live across the River Sambatyon! Better yet, here’s my cheek, go ahead and smack it. Don’t be afraid, smack it real hard. I can take it, and I bloody well deserve it, because across the Sambatyon is where I buried the best years of my life. Don’t go thinking that I went bust there. I’ve actually managed to put away a tidy little sum, but that’s worth no more to me than a pinch of snuff. What matters to me more than the $80,000—maybe $100,000—that I’ve scraped together is my mother’s longing for me, back in Bessarabia, and my longing for her and for my old home. What is a man, anyway? Just a money-grubbing pig—or shouldn’t he be doing something worthwhile with his life besides making money?”

Having opened the spigot, the burly Bessarabian went on to recount how he had come to Ecuador in 1922 as a bachelor of twenty, and gone on from there to Peru, where straight off, in his very first year, he made $10,000 as a peddler. Why Ecuador and Peru? Better not ask questions of life. A friend had dragged him out there, and thanks to that same friend he had made his fortune, but right now the fortune sticks like a bone in his throat.

In Peru he found a thousand others like him, young Jewish men working as peddlers, and since he had always been something of an entrepreneur, a real hustler, he became their manager, selling them supplies, lending them money, and making his thirty percent profit. It all went belly up in 1925, when the climate in Peru toward Jews suddenly changed, and the peddlers scattered, naturally forgetting to pay their debts. He was ruined. But Chile was another prospect, so he went there next and ended up in the fur business, netting a $25,000 profit. “As you can see,” he said, “God is a Father and He takes care of a tough guy like me.” In 1929 he picked up again, took his money to Bogotá, and opened a new chapter in his life called “Colombia”—damn it to hell!

There he found some Russian Jews who had worked their way up to becoming coffee magnates, as well as several hundred young Jewish men, or “boys,” as they were called. Why “boys”? Because they were all unmarried, which was the root of the problem.

“Imagine,” he said, “some four hundred young male peddlers on the prowl, all making a decent living, but should they wish to set up a ‘house in Israel,’ as it says in the Bible, and start leading a proper family life, there’s no one to do it with. Put yourself in our shoes—a whole country without Jewish brides—no
shadkhen,
no
badkhen,
neither matchmaker nor wedding entertainer. The four poles of the wedding canopy stand orphaned. For these miserable young men, it’s all pain and sorrow, because there’s no Jewish wife with gentle Jewish hands to grab them by the forelock and say to them: ‘Time to start living like grown-ups.’ Without a wife, life is humdrum, rootless. Jewish homes stand forlorn, and so do the trees around them. With no Sarah, no Rivke, Rokhl, or Leah, no Dvoyre, no Braindl or Zlote, you just rattle around like an empty shell. There are only half-men wandering about in Bogotá, with their missing half nowhere to be found.