The book may be better described in musical terms than in categories of plot, characters, and dramatic action. No sooner does the ship leave the dock than the narrator feels himself subject to “marine law,” whose function he had failed to appreciate when he was studying it in law school. The special qualities he attributes to life at sea are those of his prose: “Footsteps lighten, manners soften, voices lilt.” People suspended at sea move gently, allowing for slower-paced narration. Whereas many a novelist uses a travel conveyance to heighten dramatic tension among strangers forcibly held together over a limited time, Glatstein relaxes the tempo and loosens the tension to allow for more genuine and prolonged encounter and reflection. The book’s many allusions to music invite us to consider it in symphonic terms. Young and old, Jew and Gentile, European and American, male and female, coarse and genteel—the narrator arranges inharmonious voices so as to ensure that they do not drown one another out. The pulsating memories of the homebound Jew in troubled waters are like the solo instrument in this rich symphonic composition.
In boarding the ship, Yash has hoped to leave the newsroom and everyday life behind. “Maybe here I might succeed in ridding myself of the miasmas that had accrued to my being as a social animal, as a writer-for-hire, as Jew in a bloody world that—pace Shakespeare—demands only my pound of flesh.” It is not to be. On the second day at sea, the ship’s bulletin carries the news that Hitler has conducted a massive purge of the Nazi storm troopers (Sturmabteilung, or SA) and their leader Ernst Rohm. This would make it June 30, 1934. The news report suddenly sets Yash apart from the other Americans and Europeans he has been hobnobbing with and sends him in search of fellow Jews who will understand the menace to their tribe. Several days later, during his stopover in Paris, he learns of the death of the Hebrew poet Haim Nahman Bialik (July 4, 1934), who has provided the strongest spur and challenge to his career as a Yiddish poet. Thus, along with the travel encounters and the recovered memories, the third rail of the book is history-in-the-making—conveying the high voltage of the here and now.
Reviewing the first Yash volume shortly after its appearance, the not yet famous Isaac Bashevis Singer was dismayed by the absence of incident (“Jules Verne would not have wasted ten lines on a journey so bereft of adventure or romance”) and by the book’s apparently random organization (“At one point he lets his characters speak, and then, on a whim, he tells his own autobiography”).6 Adept at racy storytelling, Bashevis Singer failed to appreciate Glatstein’s thematic approach to composition. The third chapter, for example, introduces a collection of Russians returning to the Soviet Union who try to impress Yash with the advanced state of their society. Expansive in the Slavic manner yet carefully toeing the Soviet line, they provide a truer composite picture of the USSR than the New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty was then offering the American public. These encounters in turn remind Yash of how the “revolution” first penetrated his consciousness when his father held him up to watch a workers’ demonstration in 1905 and instructed him, “Yankele, never forget this.” Juxtaposing the naïve beginnings of the Revolution as recalled by a Jewish child with the boasts of its newly minted Soviet citizens, including a Jew who veils his Jewishness, spares the author any need for disparaging commentary. The Communist boast crumbles under the forced optimism of its celebrants.
There is nothing random, either, in the contrast between the two parts of the Yash chronicles, the first moving out into the wide world, the second sealed almost hermetically inside Polish-Jewish society. Book Two is situated in a small Jewish sanatorium-hotel in a resort town between Lublin and Kazimierz Dolny recognizable as the real-life Naleczow, and as a literary knock-off of Thomas Mann’s retreat in The Magic Mountain. Mann’s imposing novel had not long before been published in Yiddish translation (by Isaac Bashevis Singer), and Glatstein must have derived bittersweet pleasure from transposing its Alpine loftiness into a miniaturized Jewish version. The sanatorium functions in both works as the symbolic setting for a civilization in crisis, and in each case the outsider falls under the spell of the hospice he has come to visit. But Thomas Mann shows the incurable infection lurking inside Europe’s grandeur, while Glatstein uses a parallel scheme to disclose the irrepressible vitality of the condemned community of Europe’s Jews. The opening sentence, pronounced before we know by whom, echoes the Bible’s “De profundis”: “Even from the muck will I sing praises unto Thee, my Lord.” Blote, or muck, is the Yiddish self-deprecating substitute for the “depths” from which the psalmist reaches for redemption. The whole book negotiates between the heights to which Jewry aspires and the misery into which it has been forced.
The stationary setting of this second book allows for greater historical penetration than horizontal coverage. Already in the concluding chapter of Book One, Yash had met aunts and cousins who were trapped in a spiral of bigotry and poverty and unable to leave Poland as he had done two decades earlier. The gates to America were almost sealed by then, and though the “land of opportunity” was then also temporarily mired in the Great Depression, an American in Poland was like biblical Joseph from Egypt, minus the salvific granaries or political influence. The image of Yash as an impotent Joseph first appears when he is appealed to by a seductive, unhappily married female relative, and it is memorably reinforced when a dozen petitioners approach him to carry messages to their American relatives. As compared with Glatstein’s actual voyage to Poland, which included arrangements for the publication of a volume of his poems, Yash meets with no fellow Yiddish writers but instead joins an assortment of Jews in a voluntary “ghetto” not strictly of their own making.7 His sense of impotence grows with every demand on him that he cannot satisfy.
Framing Yash in the Polish chronicle are two powerful personalities, like older and younger prophets of modern Jewry. Steinman, whose “Even from the muck” sets the tone for the book, is a German-trained historian and custodian of Hasidic lore who serves the sanatorium guests as something of a modern Hasidic Master. He enthralls his listeners with stories of his life that are like a composite history of the East European Jewish intellectual, raised traditionally, exposed to the influence of the secular enlightenment, and drawn back to his endangered people. Steinman’s magnetic personality and his ideas about the holistic Jewish people are reminiscent of the Yiddish luminary Y. L. Peretz, whom Glatstein had met as a boy, and traces of that encounter may be found in Steinman’s paternal interest in this potential successor. Steinman excels at everything but succession: his devoted daughter is in no sense his spiritual heir, and there is no one remotely like him in the wings as he lies dying. Both the older man and the young writer realize that their personal affinity for each other cannot span the widening breach between the Jewish past in Poland and the Jewish future in America. The death of this public figure toward the end of the book signals the fading glory of Polish Jewry and allows Yash to experience the mourning for his mother that he had until then kept in check.
No less impressive than Steinman is a sixteen-year-old boy from one of the Hasidic dynasties that Steinman studies, a latter-day Nahman of Bratzlav (one of the early geniuses of the Hasidic movement), who wonders whether he might not be in the running for the assignment of Messiah. The boy invites the narrator home to visit his family—a rabbinic brother and rabbinic brother-in-law and their two wives—and to show off the literary fruits of his runaway imagination. The most dazzling of all the characters Yash encounters on this journey, the boy transcends the workaday world in his yearning to encompass all knowledge and to complete the work that God has left undone. “You’re a stranger here, you’ll go away soon, across the ocean,” he tells the narrator. “You will think that a confused young boy has been talking to you. But don’t be too sure.” We readers can’t be too sure either, for the boy’s poems and ideas impress us with their precocity and verve. Yet his brilliance, like a firecracker’s, threatens to explode in the process of shedding its light.
In the closing chapters, we meet a third represent
ative of Polish Jewry, a well-to-do lawyer closer to Yash’s age, who becomes his companion on an excursion to the nearby resort town of Kazimierz. A fully acculturated product of the big city, Neifeld becomes Yash’s informant on Polish-Jewish relations just as Steinman was his guide to internal Jewish history and affairs. “Take deep breaths,” Neifeld says, “Polish woods can cure the sickest heart.” Both men would like to credit their native land with as much commendation as truth permits. But they cannot ignore the contrary evidence of Polish hostility, and the daylong excursion of Neifeld and Yash to Kazimierz, where King Casimir according to legend once cohabited with the lovely Jewess Esther, becomes yet another of the several leave-takings from Poland that culminate in Yash’s final farewell.
Among this book’s several interwoven themes, let me highlight two. Neglect of the Jewish woman is implicit in Yash’s inability to save his dying mother. At the hotel where he rests after the bereavement, a female relative comes seeking his help. He disappoints her, and then in a dreamlike dramatic sequence he feels helpless to rescue women from the predators who seek to harm them. One imagines that Glatstein visiting Poland must have experienced occasional pangs of guilt, yet they surface in the narrator only in relation to women who need his protection. At a later point in the book, Steinman and the narrator attend an evening dance that the hotel proprietor has organized for his guests. The sister-in-law of the young genius, one of the rabbis’ wives, turns up, and explaining somewhat shyly that she loves to dance, invites one of them to take a turn with her around the dance floor. They decline and instead they allow her to be swept away by the most brain-damaged of the guests. When she leaves in dismay, they do not offer to accompany her home in the dark. “Neither of us was very gallant,” Steinman comments, with good reason. Steinman also realizes that his spinster daughter has devoted her life to serving him. Finally, when Neifeld recounts how the Jews of Poland sacrificed Esther to King Casimir to achieve their ideal of Polish-Jewish symbiosis, he extends criticism of Jewish manhood to the national level. The narrator acknowledges his own and his society’s failure to do right by their women, and rather than ascribe their failure of “manliness” to historical conditions, he takes the blame on himself.
In this connection, Yash is reminded of “a Spanish book I once read”—the allusion is to Autumn and Winter Sonatas by Ramon del Vale-Inclán. Like the momentary recollection of Sholem Aleichem’s Fishl-Dovid at the outset of the journey, this evocation of the Sonatas at its conclusion adds a psychological and literary substratum to Glatstein’s story. The Spanish work in question has been described as “decadent in every sense of the word”: It depicts the last adventures of the Marquis of Bradomin, an aging Don Juan, who does not hesitate to seduce yet another young virgin despite the attendant anxieties of an arm lost in combat. As apparently alien to Glatstein’s Yiddish culture as any work could be, this tale nonetheless reflects Yash’s state of heart and mind on the eve of his departure from Poland. Though the narrator gives no hint that he (or his author) had indulged in sexual misadventures, he shares Bradomin’s torment over his waning powers:
It seemed to me now, in the twilight, that I had reached the autumn of my life. The whole day, the encounter with Neifeld, and even my mother’s death seemed to coincide oddly with the downward movement of my own life, and all this was in step with Jewish life as a whole, maybe even with the twilight now settling over the whole world… .
All of us—myself and everything I remembered, and everything I forgot—would very soon find ourselves in winter with a hand shot off. That would be the hand which, I had vowed, I would let wither if I forgot Thee, Thee and everything that had ever been reflected in my eyes and brain.
Yash substitutes the psalmist’s “hand” for the fighting arm that Bradomin lost in combat. His vow evokes the Jews by the waters of Babylon, weeping as they remember Zion, unable to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land. The psalmist says, “If I forget Thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither … if I do not keep Jerusalem in memory even at my happiest hour.” Yash had pledged his writing hand to an unnamed “Thee”—to the “Jerusalem” of Polish Jewry, since Jews were in the habit of re-creating their sacred space wherever they were permitted to sojourn. Familiar as he is with the works of decadence and modernism that insist on the untrammeled freedom of the self, Yash applies their libidinous passion to the Jewish predicament, which more than ever requires the allegiance of its cavalier. He fears that his writing hand will be blasted along with the object of his longing. Bradomin’s need to prove his sexual prowess stirs Yash’s fears of a shrinking talent just when he most needs his powers to do “Thee” justice.
Will the Yiddish writer fail his subject as the Jewish male fails his women? The book includes several auguries of such failure. On his deathbed, Steinman inspirits the Jews with a melody, but once their conductor ceases to animate them, they are like an abandoned choir that stops in mid phrase. The young Messianic genius writes eye-popping stuff, none of which has yet been published, and—we are made to realize—never will be. Neifeld seems to offer a promising artistic strategy when he draws the narrator’s attention to the song of a nightingale they hear on the road. “There was no trace of degrading sweetness in the nightingale’s song, no concession to debased popular taste.” This tribute suggests an “utterly unsentimental” and “intellectual” aesthetic ideal for the book itself, yet shortly after he has described this ideal of song, Neifeld brings himself to tears singing a Rosh Hashanah melody of a cantor named Slowik (Polish for “nightingale”) whom he remembers from childhood. What form of art, then, is adequate for the task that Yash knows he must assume?
As Yash contemplates his return to America, the packed suitcases beside his bed seem to him “the only real and solid objects in this world of shadowy forms.” The voyager who had originally hoped to shake off the “miasmas” of responsibility now sees nothing so clearly as the baggage he carries back with him. The poet will have to do his best to deliver all the messages that were entrusted to him by desperate men and women. The hybrid form of autobiographical fiction allowed Glatstein to record the actuality of Polish Jewry through the conduit of his own experience, fusing memory and observation, the private and the communal, as intricately as Lublin and New York are fused in him. In place of the suitcases, Glatstein provided these books, “the only real and solid objects” he could retrieve from a world he was otherwise powerless to rescue.
Editor’s Note: Although a bowdlerized English version of Book One, Ven yash iz geforn, was published in 1969 as Homeward Bound, I did not choose to adapt it for this edition but commissioned a new translation by Maier Deshell, retaining only the earlier title. By contrast, Book Two, Ven yash iz gekumen, had been finely translated by Norbert Guterman as Homecoming at Twilight (1962), requiring only slight emendations. Since Mr. Guterman died before I began this project, I took on the responsibility of editing his translation and of bringing both works together in a single volume.
These translations are as faithful as felicity will allow. One of the finest English translators from Yiddish, Maurice Samuel, believed that translations should never require glossary or footnote, even if this meant inserting explanations—lengthy explanations when necessary—within the text. The present work does not go quite that far. Given that history, geography, and cultural features may create difficulties for different sectors of our readership, we have preferred to provide explanations outside the text, without encroaching on the original. We had in mind the common reader, including students of literature, who want to discover a new American work as much as possible “as its author intended.”
The title gave us the most trouble. When Glatstein called his books by the name of their otherwise unnamed narrator, he doubtless expected readers to make the association between Yash, the implied author, and himself. The English reader is, alas, scarcely any more familiar with the name of the author himself, so that calling the book The Glatstein Chronicles may produce an analogous effect. One of the passenger
s on his ship calls the narrator “Gladdy,” but the nickname’s Scandinavian provenance suits the speaker more than its subject. We use “Glatstein” in the title the way schoolboys might refer to one another, “Hey, Glatstein, how about that book you were writing?”
Translations from the poetry of Jacob Glatstein may be found in Selected Poems of Yankev Glatshteyn, trans., ed., and with an introduction by Richard J. Fein (Philadelphia, 1987); The Selected Poems of Jacob Glatstein, trans. with an introduction by Ruth Whitman (New York, 1972); I Keep Recalling: The Holocaust Poems of Jacob Glatstein, trans. Barnett Zumoff (New York, 1993); Jacob Glatstein, Poems, selected and trans. Etta Blum (Tel Aviv, 1970); American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, ed. and trans. Benjamin and Barbara Harshav (Berkeley, 1986); and in other anthologies of modern Yiddish verse.
In the absence of a full-scale biography of Glatstein, readers may consult Janet Hadda, Yankev Glatshteyn (Boston, 1980); and Avrom Tabachnik, “A Conversation with Jacob Glatstein,” trans. Joseph C. Landis, Yiddish 1 (Summer 1973): 40–53.
NOTES
1. Glatstein’s column, under the pseudonym Itskus, ran in the Morgn Zhurnal between September 14, 1934, and April 29, 1938. This excerpt is from “A Writer’s Day of Rest,” November 27, 1936.
2. The date given in Jewish lexicons is August 20. I am grateful to Pawel Sygowski for his investigations on my behalf and to Monika Garbowska for her help throughout.
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