The Glatstein Chronicles

by Jacob Glatstein

  He was much aggrieved by the prospect of imminent death. He was not afraid, his face betrayed no sign of stock-taking, no hint of sorrow, no grimace of regret, no benevolent smile, no shadow of resignation—the usual marks of a person who knows for certain that his days are numbered. Some people in these dire straights become mild-mannered and gentle and quickly jettison the ballast of meanness that has weighed them down. Not so our dress manufacturer. His flushed face registered only anger at having to die before his time.

  According to his daughter, he had been a regular bon vivant, not letting any morsel of pleasure get away, from the spicy meat rolls and brandy of the Romanian restaurants he frequented to the high-heeled beauties strutting in his factory’s showroom, modeling clothes, whom he snatched away from his workers. Now he must leave all this to others who would go on laughing, singing, dancing, and making love, while he lay rotting in the ground. He looked at death as a personal insult, a lousy, unfair deal. He had always vented his anger on hired underlings, but now he felt like a chained dog. The other passengers tried not to look at him, because if they caught his eye he would stick out his tongue at them. Furious at the sight of happy laughing couples, he called after them, “Sons of bitches, you can kiss my ass.” Luckily for everyone, this condemned madman spent most of his time lying in his cabin and seldom ventured out, for many a young Galahad had wanted to toss him overboard for insulting his frightened damsel.

  Just as some passengers hung back and withdrew into themselves, others were naturally outgoing and gregarious, what Americans call “good mixers.” Such a one was my Danish friend. By the end of the first day, he knew everyone on board, and had learned everyone’s life story, eliciting their comedies and tragedies. He was even something of a matchmaker, bringing together heavy-hearted members of both sexes. He liked to keep things at a merry boil. So successful was his matchmaking that some of his pairings endured for the entire length of the trip.

  One day he proposed to set me up with a real Russian, one of his tablemates. He felt that Jews and Russians were somehow related and that the two of us would get on like a house afire. The Russian, named Khazhev, was actually delighted to meet me since the meddlesome Dane, despite his enthusiasm for Socialism and the great Soviet experiment, was becoming too much of a burden. For his part, the Dane was relieved to divest himself of the Russian, busy as he was with many other social duties that precluded paying too much attention to any one person. Besides, he was already light years removed from his youthful radicalism, and uttered the words “Soviet experiment” mechanically, “to make conversation,” as the Americans put it.

  Khazhev took an immediate shine to me, as if we were indeed related. His tiny, almost Mongolian eyes looked at me warmly, trustingly. As for me, I had never been in either the old Russia or in its newer incarnation, and knew Russians only from the Polish city of my youth, then under Russian rule—a Russified town with onion-domed churches, long-bearded Russian Orthodox priests, Russian high-school teachers, and Russian government functionaries. But one look at Khazhev and I knew that standing before me was a different Russian sort, the new Soviet man. The three years he had just spent studying electrical engineering at Cornell University had done nothing to “Americanize” or refine him. Indeed, very little of America had stuck to him, and he spoke English as if he were rolling pebbles around in his mouth. He often had to rescue himself from his sputtering by falling back on a good, old Russian word.

  He was happy to be going home and especially pleased that he had completed his four-year plan in three, saving the Soviet government a full year’s expenditure on his behalf. He wished that poor students of all other nationalities should have it so good. In addition to his tuition, the Soviet Union had provided him with a monthly stipend of $150, for students a princely sum. On top of that, during his overseas studies, the Soviet government supported his wife and two children. Now the Soviet motherland was expecting him back, and he was proud to be returning, with not just a diploma but a body of knowledge that could be put to immediate use in regular development projects. He looked forward to showing that the money spent on him had not been wasted.

  He had seen a great deal of America—the Ford motor plant, the General Electric Company, and other models of industry and capitalism. He had many good things to say about America, but he wouldn’t settle there for all the money in the world because … Here he chose his words as tactfully as a diplomat. He was grateful for the education he had received in America, but since he was now leaving the country, why badmouth it? He thought of himself as an ambassador whom the Soviet government had sent to a friendly country, and he didn’t want to embarrass his country with an unnecessary remark. Decked out like a tycoon, Khazhev was bringing home cameras, suits, several pairs of shoes, a typewriter, a phonograph … But he wished he were already home.

  “You see,” he explained, “my older son was born mute. He was five when I left, and had never spoken a word. He just sat there, looking up at everyone with his warm eyes, but his silence was heartbreaking. He took after a mute uncle, a sensitive man with an inborn appreciation of beauty. This uncle never made those shrieking sounds you sometimes hear from mutes. He spoke sign language with his fingers, laconic in his way. Our little boy never made such sounds either, he just sat there, silent as a giraffe. But during the time I’ve been away, some important Soviet professors have been working with him, and so far they’ve taught him to say a single word—‘Papa’! Now, when I get home, I’ll be able to hear it with my own ears. I can hardly wait. You can’t imagine what a joy that will be. Up to now, my mute little Misha has been struggling to say ‘Papa’ with his eyes, lips, hands—you should have seen the agonies he went through—but now he will say it out loud, with his mouth.”

  Tears ran down Khazhev’s cheeks as he spoke, in true sentimental Russian fashion. He spoke not only as a loving father but also as a proud son of his motherland, blessed with professors who were making great strides in medicine, performing real miracles.

  Khazhev’s father was a peasant who had always been a revolutionary. Though he scarcely knew how to read or write, he knew full well the meaning of laborer and peasant, and of the tsar’s whip. Thanks to several prison terms, he was now, at age sixty, half paralyzed and a broken shell of a man. The government had granted him a pension, and he sat around all day, crying tears of joy at having lived to witness such a miraculous time. “You should have seen how happy the old man was when I went off to university, studying the whole day,” said the Russian. “After taking a drink, he would often grab a heavy physics or chemistry textbook and order: ‘Read, Vasya! Let’s see how a peasant’s son reads and gets smart.’ I’d have to read whole sections to please him. And, peasant that he is, with a bit of religion still in him, he’d listen to the strange words and sob: ‘Slava tye gospodi! Praised be the Lord!’” As for his mother, she was illiterate and had labored all her life. Her hands were always red and swollen, her heavy legs bloated, and her eyes puffed up from grieving while the father sat in jail and the children were sick, and there was scarcely a piece of stale bread in the house.

  This was his background, and now his country had done him a great favor, opening all doors for him—Khazhev, a peasant’s son. Under the tsar, what could he have been but the filthiest piece of dirt? The Soviet Union had transformed him into a choice student, had sent him abroad, with the confidence that he would learn enough to be able to assist in developing the motherland, so that it could set an example for the world and become a model of a new way of life for future generations. Of course he was grateful. How could he not be? And not for selfish reasons alone. Across the length and breadth of his land, a new life was beginning. To be sure, it was still a hard life for many millions of people, but there were already signs of a better future. As he set about listing all the Soviet benefactions, he made sure—and was very clever about doing so—that the virtues he cited would underscore American shortcomings, which he wouldn’t criticize directly.

  “And no
t only the sons of peasants should be grateful,” he said. “Jews, too, should be dancing in the streets, yes, dancing in the streets! What were they before the Revolution? Nothing! And now they are everything! The same goes for every citizen of the land.” He said this not like a Gentile proving his love of Jews but simply, without apologetics, proud of the fact that his Soviet Union had corrected a grave injustice. He was well informed on details of Soviet-Jewish life. He knew about the Jewish schools, Jewish collective farms, Jewish writers, and he spoke glowingly of the Yiddish theater. These developments were offered not as curiosities, as a Gentile might visit a synagogue to hear Jewish melodies, but as great national achievements.

  He was thirty-four years old, of medium height, with genuine Slavic cheekbones. He looked the typical peasant, peasant face, peasant hands, gray peasant eyes, but every peasant feature had undergone refinement, just as Maxim Gorky’s peasant face had softened over the years. His shrewd, warm eyes were shrouded in a mist of true Russian sorrow. Warmth! That was the word to describe him, he simply exuded warmth. Khazhev spoke to me with the affection of someone who is wholesome and secure. He talked on and on, describing his country, which he had crisscrossed from one end to the other. And if he threw in the occasional, regretful remark about as yet unremedied Soviet shortcomings, he did it so artlessly, and with such brotherly goodwill that I didn’t want to offend him by seeming to notice.

  Only once, in passing, did he mention the “Supreme Leader,” but the reference came unadorned, unaccompanied by the obligatory praise. He sincerely believed in the great Soviet experiment and, in his peasant naïveté, regretted that other countries were not following the Soviet path.

  After treating me to this elegant propaganda, he let me know that, in addition to himself, there was also a sizable Soviet colony aboard ship, all returning home. He pointed to a corner of the deck where a woman lay on a deck chair with legs outstretched, not the delicate, shapely legs of a femme fatale, but legs unquestionably feminine all the same and not badly turned out either, a tribute to their Creator, whose infinite ingenuity could lend a touch of allure to a thickened ankle. The portrait was completed by a group of young men at her feet, looking up at her adoringly, like medieval troubadours.

  She was the only one on board to be stricken by seasickness. The days and nights were so glorious that the rest of us were growing healthier by the minute, but she alone had fallen victim to the malady. Her pitch-black hair, parted in the middle, her dark, Jewish eyes, and her full, almost swollen, lips—all attested to her suffering, or rather, seeing that she was surrounded by a crew of melodramatic Russians, her “agony,” which she gave herself leave to express. The young men looked up at her, vying with one another to ease her discomfort, tossing off flowery phrases and chivalrous compliments. They called in reinforcements, quoting from Lermontov, Pushkin, Nekrasov, Mayakovsky, and Yesenin. The Russian-Jewish woman was in seventh heaven. She wasn’t a beauty, nor was she that young, yet she was the object of all this royal attention, her seasickness gaining her the favors of all these cavaliers. There were prettier women on board ship, but the Russian young men ignored them, preferring instead the enchantments of Russian cadences as they emerged from a Russian woman’s soft lips, on an English boat, amid alien surroundings.

  “Children, take your dream-stricken eyes off the elegant Sonya Yakovlyevna and spare a word for this worthy gentleman,” said Khazhev good-humoredly and with exaggerated formality. “Let me introduce you.”

  Four young men leaped up, as if by military command—a fine young specimen with a straw-blond head of hair and a wide Russian mouth, whose Chaliapin bass voice seemed to be issuing from a cello; another with the face of a dullard, but with remarkably friendly, merry eyes; a third, with a beret atop his head and a pair of fidgety, restless hands; and a fourth, with slightly stooped back and the mien of a serious student. Sonya Yakovlyevna extended a hand that made the quick metamorphosis from housewife to coquette. In less than a minute I was welcomed into the ship’s Soviet colony.

  “Pozhalusta, welcome,” boomed the towhead, the most Russian of the group, in the rich baritone that only a Russian youth can allow himself. His unhurried gestures, his open manner and thundering resonance brought to mind Turgenev’s Bazarov, Artzybashev’s Sanin, and a score of similar literary heroes who reflected not so much the Russian reality as the creativity of their authors in supplying models for a whole generation of the Russian intelligentsia. And yet, this blond young man with the voice of a Russian cathedral bell was a new species of Russian intellectual, the product, nay, the exemplar, of a new way of life. He had a keen grasp of political-economic issues. His comrades clearly respected his mastery of dialectics and his ability to apply Soviet dogma to various contemporary situations. Whenever his colleagues made a doctrinal misstep, stumbling over the Party line, he would correct them good-naturedly—“That’s not exactly how we would handle it, comrades”—and lead them step by step through the ideological maze to the necessary outcome.

  He and two others of the group had spent only six weeks in the United States, where, as electrical technicians, they had been sent to inspect plants and factories. They had seen and learned much in the course of their whirlwind tour. The fourth member of the group, the one who seemed a dullard, had won a factory lottery for a trip around the world and a year’s vacation. He had been everywhere and was now going back to his job. Oddly enough, even this laborer, who worked in a steel mill, with the callused hands to prove it, took a personal interest in economic questions and was knowledgeable about the driest, most complex issues of world economic affairs. Apparently this had become some sort of sport, a version of crossword puzzles for Soviet youth, which afforded them deep satisfaction. They seemed to know their way around, understanding where to be gentle and where to get tough. Each saw himself as a representative of his country, ready to take up the cudgels for the motherland and do battle with any unbeliever.

  The four young Soviet stalwarts, who had spent only a short time in the United States, were far less reticent than Khazhev to openly criticize America, always prefacing their remarks with, “We don’t want to give you”—that is me, the American—“any advice on how to run your country.” There followed a litany of complaints about dirty streets, filthy theaters, and public places littered with cigar and cigarette butts. By contrast, Soviet theaters were spotlessly clean and the workers approached them as reverently as worshipers once did a temple.

  “When you were in the States, did you come across activists, or attend any Communist meetings?” I asked.

  They recoiled at the very idea. Taking their cue from the blond pacesetter, they replied, almost in unison, “No! What does that have to do with us? We are Soviet citizens and we were guests of America. We know nothing about the American Communist movement except what we hear.” Their relief was palpable: they had acquitted themselves well as Soviet emissaries in a foreign, but diplomatically friendly land. Then, relaxing a bit, they suggested that perhaps Sonya Yakovlyevna might be the better person to tell about the American Communist movement. She had spent twelve years in America. Her husband had returned to the Soviet Union two years ago, to take up an important post. Now she, too, was returning and was delighted by the prospect, because all the time she was in America, she had clung to her Russianness—her name, her patronymic, and her rough but succulent Odessan Russian, with its rolling Yiddish r’s.

  I invited them all into my cabin for a drink, explaining that I had more bottles of liquor on hand than I could possibly finish off by myself. They fell silent and looked to their blond leader for instruction, unsure as to whether Soviet citizens should let themselves be talked into drinking by a stranger. He laughed uncomfortably and blinked several times, narrowing his eyes at the thought of the drink. After wrestling with the dilemma, he arrived at a compromise between the urgings of the evil impulse and Soviet dialectic, and handed down his ruling: “Nyemnozhetchko!”—indicating just how tiny a drop by the minuscule shape between thumb and fo
refinger. We all trooped into my cabin, even the ailing Sonya. After the blond young man had downed several hefty nyemnozhetchkos, the cabin began to ring out with the exuberance of Soviet song.

  2

  The singing grew louder. The blond young Russian danced around my narrow cabin with the stout Sonya Yakovlyevna. Someone brought in a portable gramophone and a pile of records of Russian popular songs, each ending on a high shriek, like the bark of a sergeant-major shouting out orders, indicating that the song was over, that life itself had come to a halt, and one might as well stretch out, close one’s eyes, and go to one’s eternal rest. Staid, curious American passengers poked in their heads to stare at our merrymaking, as if at an orgy of friendly cannibals. The drunken whoops, the gramophone’s shrieks, Sonya Yakovlyevna’s tipsy laughter amid all these men, the raucous shouts of masculine camaraderie that had an almost homoerotic charge—all this cacophony spilled out into the corridor, seeking more room for itself. I, meanwhile, none too sober myself, was saying in my mind, not questioningly, not assertively, but with a drunken insouciance: “This is it”—this is the new, happy breed of romantic materialists, the products of victory, of waving flags, captured barricades, endless struggle, of revolutions and communes. This is the glorious song of fulfillment.

  That I happened to find myself here among the victors was no mere happenstance. I had arrived at this revolutionary point, having experienced all the revolutions on the books, with the names of the revolutionary martyrs, the working-class slogans, all engraved on my child’s brain, as my native city, suffering under the harsh rule of Tsar Nicholas, had contributed to the overthrow of the tyrant.