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.
2
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.
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’ garmen
ts 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.
The Glatstein Chronicles Page 5