The Glatstein Chronicles

by Jacob Glatstein

  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.

  3

  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.

  “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. “E
veryone 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.

  4

  “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?”