The Glatstein Chronicles (9 page)
“Oh sure, there are about thirty established Jewish families in Bogotá, but they haven’t been in the country long enough to produce grown daughters. The few girls that were old enough for marriage were snapped up, and now we’re waiting for the young ones to grow up, the way you wait for the Messiah. What else can we do? There aren’t any other Jewish girls in the whole country. Some of the boys who ventured into mixed marriages with Spanish or Indian or Negro girls found no great blessings there, and hardly set an example for the others.
“Why don’t we import Jewish girls? Well, if they were willing to come, even if they were as dark as night and ugly as sin, cross-eyed and pockmarked, they’d all be beauties in our eyes. We’d fight over them, serenade them, and give them the moon. But what Jewish girl would be crazy enough to let herself be lured to Bogotá? (As you now know—all the way to the Magdalena and across the Sambatyon.) It’s a real pity about those boys, pining away their lives. One could write a whole book about their loneliness.”
But apart from that, I asked him, how was Jewish life in general in Bogotá, accent on the
a
? The Bessarabian took his time answering. Then, slowly and deliberately, but with an onrush of words that seemed to have been stored up deep inside him and were just now being released, he tried to stir my sympathies for this far-flung Jewish tribe of his and to lay on my shoulders the heavy burden of responsibility for these newfound relatives, whose obscure habitation could be located on the map of Jewish sorrows somewhere between Warsaw, Jassy, Berlin, Vienna, Istanbul, and Salonika. I could feel my shoulders sagging under the weight of Jewish brotherhood, kinship, solidarity, as if I were carrying the entire Jewish world on my back. Saying “Jews” now meant not just my coreligionists in Romania and Poland, America and Russia, Holland and France, but also Indian Jews in Calcutta, yellow-skinned, almond-eyed Jews of China, Yemenites, Falashas in Ethiopia, Arabian Jews in Algiers, Sephardic Jews in Greece, and, as if this wasn’t burden enough, the Bessarabian was adding to my load the exotic touch of Jewish travails in Colombia.
“Jews,” he continued, “aren’t much liked in Colombia. We’re considered Russians, and Colombians hate the Russians. They like the Germans. Those backward Colombians go wild over German technology and German machinery. When this Hitler business started and the local Germans began spreading Nazi propaganda, they found a ready audience. We’re afraid to do anything about it. If you even think of suing a German in court, forget it. You know in advance what the verdict will be.
“Even the climate is against us. It may suit the natives, but not us—cold, rainy, dreary weather that gets under your skin and drives you nuts. In Peru it doesn’t rain very much, but in Colombia it pours, and when it does, life and limb get swallowed up in the deluge.
“What keeps the Jewish young men together? Loneliness, mainly, and maybe the fact that the Colombians consider us Russians. Let’s see, what else? We’ve founded a mutual-aid society called Ezra, to set a man back on his feet in case of need. Also, Yom Kippur warms us a little—though we gather mostly out of the fear of
not
getting together on that day. The occasion lacks any real Jewish flavor, but since we still remember how to recite the Kol Nidre and some other Yom Kippur prayers, we rent a room and mumble a bit of the liturgy. The rest of the year we’re far removed from religion. We observe no Sabbaths, no festivals, we just work like mules.
“You think we have a
shokhet
to slaughter our meat in the proper, kosher way? There’s no ritual slaughterer for the thirty or so families and for us boys, so gradually we got used to eating nonkosher meat, hoping that it wouldn’t go any further and bring our Jewishness to an end. As a matter of fact, we’ve just taken steps to provide for our eternal Jewish souls and bought some land for a Jewish cemetery. This we learned the hard way. When some of our boys bit the dust, young as they were, and we had to bury them in the Christian cemetery, we decided to do whatever it takes to get our own little plot for when we hit our own hundred and twenty.
“So we’re squared away with death, but life is still bitter. Which doesn’t mean that I’m pining away for a shokhet or a synagogue. I just wish we had other ‘ideals,’ to use a highfalutin word. If not prayer books, let there at least be other Jewish books, or a Jewish newspaper. But without anything Jewish to latch onto, we’re becoming boorish. If not observant, let’s at least be educated Jews, but we’re neither one nor the other.
“Now we’re back to where we started—healthy young bachelors, who can’t set up households, but don’t want to go hungry either. So dangling from the arm of each boy is a Colombian mistress. These dusky women are lovely as sin—tall, willowy, and so graceful that you think you’re going to be the luckiest man in the world if you get to the bottom line, but the truth is that these gorgeous women are useless in bed, cold as icebergs. They just lie there, like royalty, turning those glorious moist eyes on you, and not moving a muscle. Still, as they say, you take what you can get, and since these are the only available women, you make do. Everyone knows that Yankl is living with his mistress, and Shmuel too, and Haim likewise. They furnish a house for these women and live as man and wife, but there’s no public acknowledgment of the fact.
“Are the women faithful to these boys? The devil only knows. It seems so on the surface, but it’s unreasonable to think they don’t have other men on the side. The minute there’s a grievance with the Jewish lover, up pops a Colombian guy. So where did he come from? Did he drop from heaven? The boys live with their women for a few years till they get bored with them and then go on to others. But the Colombian women are expensive treats and don’t allow themselves to be toyed with.
“I lived with a dark-skinned woman for a couple of years and it ended up costing me five, six thousand American dollars. All of a sudden, things cooled between us. Actually, what happened was that I’d hooked up with somebody else and thought I could play a double game. But when the first woman realized that I was fooling around, she chewed me out like a regular wife. So I let her go. Right away I realized that I was deeply in love with her—I’m ashamed to admit it, not only in love, but I had gotten so used to her I couldn’t live without her. That temptress even warned me that this would happen, she knew her own worth. To be honest, I went crawling back to her on my hands and knees, begging for forgiveness, but she burst into tears, sobbing that I had stabbed her in the heart. When she cried herself out, she showed me the door.”
He took from his breast pocket the snapshot of a mulatto beauty, tall and full-bosomed, with a regal bearing. “This piece of tail ripped me apart,” he said. “I handed my business over to strangers and traveled around the world to get her out of my system. That’s how a Colombian whore can ruin your life. When I try to figure out why I felt the way I did, I think it’s because all the other women I knew were such cold fish, and she was such a perfect fit. All I know is, I’ll never find anyone like her again—it’s over and done with.”
He sighed heavily and hitched up his pants, looking less the burly Bessarabian than a picture of defeat. He took out his handkerchief and blew into it noisily, as if trying to hold back the tears. For a moment he had forgotten the Jewish woes of his wretched Bogotá, and he spoke with such feeling about his loss that I began casting about for some words of comfort, man to man. Since he himself had called his Colombian lover a whore, I tried casting a shadow on her character, but apparently only he was allowed that privilege. A beaten and helpless steed, he leaned on the ship’s railing and looked mournfully out at the sea. He kept fingering the Colombian’s photo until he finally returned it to its place near his heart. Reliving the tragedy of this romance had almost brought him to the point of breaking down completely. Suddenly, though, he caught hold of himself and realized that his personal story had undermined his responsibility as chronicler of the small Jewish settlement of Bogotá, with its four hundred lonesome boys.
“So that’s how the boys live, with lovers instead of real wives,” he resumed his tale. “You don’t bring these women into society, but though you try to hide your secret behind seven locks, their existence is an open secret. The non-Jewish residents of Bogotá know all about it too, who belongs to whom, and when you break up with your woman, you have to be—what do you Americans call it?—a ‘gentleman,’ and do it nice and quietly, leaving her a tidy sum; otherwise she might hire someone to bump you off, or if she’s not too lazy, do the job herself, because these Colombian women are very handy with a knife.
“As you can see, this whole sex business is a mess, but what can you do? A healthy young guy can’t be expected to sleep in an empty bed night after night. You can’t thumb your nose at your baser instincts because they don’t let themselves be fooled. Some boys are so desperate to find a wife they will keep an eye out for a little Colombian schoolgirl, declare their intentions, and raise her to womanhood. For the child’s poverty-stricken parents, this is a stroke of luck. The Jewish guy pays all her expenses and gains himself a wife. We have several such couples. In some cases, the girls even converted to Judaism, and so far, so good. One of these girls, a delicate child, fainted twice last year, fasting on Yom Kippur, but she held out to the end. The girls get used to their Jewish husbands from childhood on. Disregarding the fact that they’re much younger, they become attached to these men who, literally, raised them, like nursemaids. But these are the lucky exceptions. How many people have the patience to take in a little girl and wait for her to grow up?
“So you see, it’s anything but a good life. And you Americans talk about settling Jews in our part of the world—in Ecuador, of all places. Forget it. Ecuador’s a poor country and there’s no future there for Jews. As for Colombia, now you know the score. A curse on any Jew who goes there, even if he does make a pile of money. To sum it all up, a young Jew in Bogotá can’t expect a decent family life. Come holy Sunday, he makes his rounds all morning long to collect the week’s payments due him. The afternoon is devoted to cards, and he’s not just playing for amusement. It costs him dearly, sometimes to the tune of two, three hundred dollars. He takes a break to wash off the week’s accumulated dirt, then sits down again at the card table. At night he hangs out in the dance hall, where you can rent a girl for six cents a dance. If you don’t have a woman of your own, you take home some poor Colombian girl, who comes around the next morning to collect her payment in goods. That’s Monday morning, when you wake up with a bitter taste in your mouth and start working again like a mule.
“Passover, we get a bit of a break. Forty or so of the boys gather in someone’s house and we stuff ourselves and get drunk. Eating and drinking is our holiday, without resorting to the Haggadah. There you have it—our entire spiritual life. It’s lucky that our Jewish cemetery is blooming, waiting to gather us in.
“Nevertheless, we’re still a cut above that Dutch jerk you were talking to. Our Jews may be crude, but at least we’ve got a spark of Jewish spirit. But that guy is some kind of Jewish freak. Oh, would I love to see him fall into our hands!
“Lest you think all these matches with the Colombian lovers have come to nothing, let me inform you that in Bogotá alone there are about two thousand young boys running around—our little bastards. We can’t take credit for all of them, but we can claim a hefty share. These kids run wild in the city, with nothing to do, nowhere to sleep, nothing to eat. Naturally, they end up doing the only thing they can—shining shoes. You never know, that snotty-nosed kid you just tossed a coin to for shining your shoes might very well be your own son. The female bastards are luckier, the Red Cross finds homes for them. But the boys are left to God’s mercy, maybe because they’re too rebellious to be taken in hand by the pious wardens of the Red Cross.
“Many years ago, there were still a few Jewish brothel keepers around, plying their sleazy trade, but we shut them down. We thought then that we could make something decent of ourselves, but nothing doing. Nowadays, we even have among us a few preachers of Communism, who somehow drifted to our remote corner of the world. Believe me, their propaganda doesn’t bring us much good. That’s all we needed! It was bad enough to be blamed as Russians without being charged for ruining the country with Bolshevism! I’m sure that Stalin doesn’t give a damn about us and Karl Marx would have turned up his nose at Bogotá, but our handful of Reds think they can turn Colombians into Stalinists—a job that would take several army regiments.
“I may be a citizen of Colombia, but I’m still drawn to Bessarabia, where my mother writes tearful letters to her dear Yosele. Look at me now, some Yosele, huh? But to my mother I’m still a little boy, scrawny and frail, who used to get fearful lickings from his father. My father, may he rest in peace, had a hand broad as a board, and whenever he laid that paw on me, Mother would cry out that he was killing her Yosele.”
A gong summoned us to supper. It had grown cooler on deck, but the Bessarabian wasn’t yet done with his tale about life across the River Sambatyon. “I must get away from there,” he cried. “Tell me, what can a Jew like me, with my capital, do in New York? Let’s say I came for six months, met a nice girl, married her, and, thanks to her, settled down. What would I do in New York? I’m not going to become a scribe who sits there writing out mezuzahs. What could I do with my money?”
“You could publish a Yiddish newspaper, maybe a quality weekly,” I blurted out. This crazy notion popped into my head at the embarrassed thought that I was being entrusted with someone else’s $100,000 fortune.
“Me? A Jewish newspaper? You must be joking. With all due respect, I’m just a simple boor.”
I tried to reassure him that in the newspaper business education didn’t matter. You could get along just fine without it, without any formal schooling at all. Indeed, the newspaper business, as I explained, was a business like any other—and the word
business
he certainly understood.