The Glatstein Chronicles

by Jacob Glatstein

  “He left me, and three weeks later he was married. I was as happy as if I had married off my own son. He married a Jewish woman of good family, who brought him a handsome dowry. I am glad that a man like him will not be obliged to work for his daily bread.

  “Later I took to going to the woods all by myself and sat in the same place. I scrawled hieroglyphs on the moist ground, and I dreamed that I was getting smaller and smaller, that I was shrinking, so that I took up hardly any space, like when I was a child. I often dreamed this way, too, that I was taking up less and less space in God’s world. I liked to stare at small closed newspaper kiosks and imagine that I lived inside them, or in a tiny cell, all alone. My friend the poet once told me that such thoughts reflect a longing for the mother’s womb. This may be true. Very often I pull the blinds on sunny days and lie in my little boy’s crib. It is small, but I am alone and so close to myself that I can dream the most wonderful dreams.

  “In this way I both lose myself and pursue myself, entirely detached from the ordinary daily round. I perform my duties to my husband and child with the little bit of life remaining, like a sleepwalker. My only real contact with myself is my friend the pianist, who used to be as restless as I have become. But today she is very respectable, poised, reserved, and a good housewife. She married money too. She often comes to see me and sits wrapped in a shawl printed with flowers, as though shielding her body from some barbarian assault. She sits with her head on one side, as though she were afraid of something. Her limbs are sharp and bony, like a child’s. She has an open face; I don’t know how it strikes others, but to me it is a map on which I can read all the sinful pleasures of her youth. She sometimes falls asleep in the shawl, and then she looks like a young grandmother, and she smiles in her sleep.

  “When I ask her whether she loves her husband and whether she is happy, she becomes impatient with me and says that people don’t speak about such things. She has calmed down, she says, and she tries to convert me to her point of view. You too, she says, should be happy. To have a husband, a child of one’s own—if I only knew how much that means, she keeps telling me, how perfectly sufficient that is to make a life.

  “But when she gets up and takes off her shawl of resignation, when she walks about the room, I recognize her old self. As she walks, her elegant legs dance in front of her in the old provocative way, proclaiming with quivers of joy that here is a woman, ready to take and be taken. That is the art of walking—a prelude to the art of lying back.

  “Occasionally she speaks of the harmonious life. She has got a brand new idea—the Jewish female, she says, must control herself. Once we perform the rite and take the oath, we must be true wives. Whatever we may have done before, once our husbands accept us, it’s all over and done with. Once we’re married, we must remember that the Jewish home has a firm foundation—one God and one man. Of all people, it’s she who talks that way, she who had so many lovers. ‘I should put you across my knee and give you a good spanking,’ she says, or ‘I should scratch your face,’ and then she becomes as affectionate as a kitten. She takes me in her arms and strokes my hair. I like to tell her at such moments that I am a sick woman. All women are sick, she replies, but when they lead a healthy life they become healthy. The wifely estate is a new source of strength, a new reservoir of youth. ‘You pay attention to what I’m telling you, you little bitch,’ she chides me, ‘If I could settle down, so can you!’”

  Finally Saba left me, asking me not to walk her back to the village. I watched her walk down the hill; it had occurred to me to see her home. When she had left I thought about Joseph’s observation that her words were “hungry.”

  I had forgotten to ask her who Joseph was. Was he real or had she invented him while lying on her little child’s bed? A starved woman can invent hundreds of things and poison her life with her own imaginings.

  And the smaller she grew as she walked down the hill, she seemed also to move more and more clumsily, as though she were walking backward in time, pulling me along with her into some miniature childish world, a frozen wax world prior to speech, a world where yellowed memories were painted bright red.

  Then I recalled my first love, Yochevet, or Yochtche, as she was called. She must have been all of six years old when I fell in love with her, and I was much younger. She had pigtails and big black eyes, and always sat on the doorstep of her house, daydreaming. For a long time she refused to take notice of me. I prayed God to make me an acrobat so that I could perform some trick that would force her to look at me, but at that time I found it hard even to stand on my head with the help of a wall to lean on.

  I finally conquered her. It was during the Passover holidays: I bribed her with half a chremzel, that succulent matzo pastry. After that we would sit together on the stone steps in front of her house, and she told me stories. The things she told me were so implausible that even at that time I realized she was making them up as she went along, although she always swore the most solemn oaths that everything she told me had happened to her personally.

  Her stories were of lions, tigers, and bears, about gypsies who steal Jewish children, about devils who play the violin and pull out your soul through a little hole, just like you suck an egg by making a hole in the shell with a pin.

  Yochtche also liked to hide with me in a dark cellar where she would always choose the darkest, farthest corner, and tell me the scariest tales. She asked me to put my hand on her heart so I could feel it pounding while she was telling me these stories. It was very agreeable to be scared in the dark with Yochtche beside me. We would emerge from the cellar sleepy-eyed, and we would see many little specks swaying on tiny threads suspended in the air.

  2

  Specks were beginning to swarm before my eyes, and I saw that a man was standing next to me on the hill. His face was composed of several recognizable traits. When he turned his glassy eyes on me, he looked like Buchlerner, but in a moment when he stood still his features were those of the girl who fed the chickens and the ducks every morning, speaking Yiddish to them. This composite figure was wearing a caftan, which did not surprise me. I even found it natural that he should be stamping his feet and crying, “ai-ai,”—those particular sounds and no others: “ai-ai!”

  I knew why he was wailing like that, poor man, He was assaulting high heaven for the great wrong he had suffered. Weisgelt had starved his youth away, studying the violin. No sacrifice was too much for his father, a military tailor, who spent everything he possessed to get his son the best teachers. And finally the day came when he began to play in public, started the long climb to musical eminence. God was good to him, and his name, Abrasha Weisgelt, began to be seen in the announcements of musical events. Abrasha is to play at the Craftsmen’s Hall, for the Office Workers’ Union, and the Professional Men’s Club—finally, Abrasha is to play with the Philharmonic. He actually made it that far, our own Jewish fiddler, Abrasha the violinist, our Jewish virtuoso. Then, suddenly, just when he had reached the top of the heap, his hands and feet were stricken with paralysis. For ten years he had been lying like that, neither dead nor alive, an affliction to his parents.

  Was this not a monstrous injustice, if there ever was one, a case for smashing the windows of Heaven? What mockery, to have climbed onward and upward, while all the time paralysis was following him like his own shadow. And then, at just the right moment, at the very moment the world was within his grasp, it was the shadow that took over, and rendered him a martyr.

  After such misfortune, what is there to say? The poor man just stood there, nothing but “Ai-ai, ai-ai” escaping from between his tight-closed lips. It is a great wrong, and you should be ashamed of yourself, Lord God. What kind of a way to act is that? Don’t raise me up just to hurl me down!

  “Ai-ai,” he kept muttering there on the hilltop, and none of it surprised me. But then I noticed his feet. I suppose I expected a pair of strongly built, mud-spattered feet, perfectly white under the mud. But what I saw was a pair of calves’ feet, the kind m
other used to give us on Friday nights—pickled calves’ feet. This man was standing there, jiggling, on feet which had been cooked and pickled. I began to feel quite uneasy.

  I made up my mind I must get up. I pulled on my socks, but I could not find my shoes. I was wearing my dark blue suit, but how could I go around dressed like that in my stocking feet? But no matter how hard I looked for my shoes, I couldn’t find them. There was only one thing to do: I set out in my stocking feet. A number of couples were strolling around, paying no attention to me, but I knew that their indifference was a pretense, and this made me dash about wildly. Somehow I was sure that right around here in the dark I had left one of my shoes. Yes, it was the left one—I grabbed it and put it on, but as I did so my right sock fell off the other foot. Now as I dashed and hopped about, one of my feet was bare and the other shod.

  Then it flashed through my mind that I might just well resign myself to the ridiculousness of the situation, because all that was happening was just a dream.

  It was about time I realized this—for the same dream had come to me many times before. Never in my life had I ever run around barefoot, nor been obliged to do so for lack of shoes, and yet this dream recurrently disturbed my sleep. The moment I realized I was dreaming, I began to walk more slowly. It was still embarrassing to be wearing my good suit with one foot bare, but I was no longer so upset about it.

  Suddenly I came into a dark place. There were many doors, and all of them, but one, were closed. Through the one open door a column of light streamed in. There was a mighty wind blowing through, but though the light wavered, it stayed bright. I concentrated on that light with every ounce of my strength, as my salvation from terror. All at once, to my enormous relief, I heard voices coming through the open door.

  I stared, fascinated. A stage had been set up diagonally across one corner of the room, rather than in the usual place. I could tell that the play being performed was not the Purim play which I had written at the age of eight, and which I, dressed in mother’s best clothes, performed for my friends who paid a penny each to see me. Nor was it The Manhunters, a play our local amateur theater group had presented in the “Rusalka,” a real theater, before a real public. I had been the prompter for that production, and from the prompter’s box I shouted the cues so loudly that I could be heard in the gallery. I had been given a baton, and it was with that I was supposed to signal the orchestra to begin playing, at the point where a friend of mine, in the part of an unhappy lover, victim of the manhunters, breaks quavering into song,

  The sun goes down in flames,

  The sun we can scarcely see.

  Nor were they performing The Vow, another play we had put on at the “Rusalka,” with Esther Rachel Kaminska in the leading role. We had had red posters made to inform the public that Esther Rachel Kaminska was giving a guest performance, and all of Lublin flocked to see it, even though it wasn’t a comedy, and had no songs or dances.

  I ruined that great occasion. Once again I was the designated prompter—devil knows why, but my friends in the theater group would never give me so much as a walk-on—and this time I became so engrossed in Kaminska’s heartrending performance that I forgot to give the cues. Poor Kaminska—she was playing the part of Ronia the postmistress—kept inching down to the prompter’s box and kicking it, to remind me of my duties. She would hiss at me, “Give me the lines, you fool!” and when she walked past the prompter’s box, she would aim a kick at my head or at least manage to step on my hand. The other actors, too, kept banging against the prompter’s box to make me give them their lines, but I was in a trance. I forgot completely that I was prompter and simply turned into one more enraptured member of the audience. Gradually the whole performance slowed down and stopped like a clock that has not been wound. There wasn’t a single tick more out of the actors, and the stage fell shockingly still. On his deathbed, Ronia’s husband forgot to ask for her solemn vow, and she forgot to give it. They had to bring the curtain down to break the spell and wake me up.

  No, it was not The Vow that was being performed on the oddly placed stage just visible through the open door. I could make out some of my own words in the play, but I had never seen the actors before. As each actor spoke in turn, he would glare at me savagely.

  We were all sitting on long wooden benches; behind me sat my father with my mother next to him, but they were seated in armchairs, as though in a private box. Mother was all dressed up and radiant with joy at being off her feet and away from the kitchen and the dining room for once. Father was taking it all in critically, as from a great distance. He might have been saying, “Well, it’ll be pretty bad, I expect, like so much of this fuzzy new Yiddish writing. Why can’t he write so that his own father can understand it, at least?”

  I was annoyed—I felt that to please my mother they should have given a performance of Goldfaden’s adored operetta The Witch, with a rendition of the song “Hot Cakes.” Suddenly a cat ran across the stage, the sure sign that this must be Goldfaden’s other classic, Shulamith. Would its hero, Absalom, appear, too, I wondered hopefully, would Mother after all have an opportunity to hear its lullaby that mothers have been singing ever since, “In beys hamikdesh, in a vinkl-kheyder …? ”

  Saba was sitting next to me, chattering steadily, keeping up a continual stream of critical remarks. “You call this a drama? Where is the conflict?” A drama, she said, must have a plot, complications, counterplots; only Chekhov was a good enough writer to do without all that. She had me on the ropes, and she quoted great critics from memory. One said this and the other said that, and when you put them all together they spelled out the fact that I wasn’t a playwright. Her every well-turned aphorism was a warning to me to give it up. I was holding her hands in the dark, and they were hot. She talked so much that the people around us began to shout, “Shuddup! Shuddup! Shut your trap!” The vulgarity of the expression shocked me. How would anyone call so pretty, so eloquent a little mouth, a trap? I was ready to take them all on, but she went right on chattering. “I pay no attention to them,” she said, “their yellow press and their shuddup! This is Europe!”

  After this things seemed to go better. The actors, God knows why, kept looking at me angrily. Often they vanished completely and the performance seemed to go on without them, following my script exactly, not missing a single stage direction, a single line or emphasis.

  BASIA: After all, I’m just a poor Jewish woman, heavy-hearted, but if it’s no sin to say so, God works in mysterious ways. To one he gives too much, to another a pain in the belly. As my grandmother, rest her soul, used to say—it doesn’t add up.

  GNENDL: You didn’t go to the synagogue?

  BASIA: No, I stayed away on purpose. When I’m at odds with God I can’t go to His house and wish Him a merry Sabbath. Right now, if I may say so, I’m good and angry with Him.

  GNENDL (her mind elsewhere): With whom?

  BASIA: With whom? With God in person.

  GNENDL (taken aback): May the punishment fall on my enemies! Honestly, Basia, it’s a sin a talk like that. You don’t sound like a Jew.

  BASIA: I’ve kept quiet long enough. Itche Scab and his saintly wife, the whore who sleeps with every soldier, wriggling her fat you-know-what—they get the places of honor at the east wall of the synagogue, and I have to go scrounging for a bit of food for the Sabbath. (wiping her eyes) Why should I keep quiet? Because God might strike me with a thunderbolt? For all the pleasure I get out of life, I should care!

  “You know, for an amateur she plays very well, that Basia,” Saba said pressing closer to me.

  GNENDL (with animation): I bought a pike today, you’ve never seen anything like it. Maybe you’ll take a few pieces of fish? My word, it’s too big for me. Who is going to eat it at my house anyway? The children I don’t have? And as for my Nahman, he nibbles like a bird.

  BASIA: My husband has stopped eating altogether. He sits all day with his red-rimmed eyes, digging away at the Talmud—he’ll end up putting a hole through it. He
sits like that day and night, studying and thinking, and between one thought and another he makes me children. A big help!

  (Sound of bells from a Catholic church, echoed shortly afterward by the heavy Orthodox bells. Through the open door the chants of the worshipers mingle with the chiming bells.)

  BASIA: They’re ringing in honor of the Christian God. They even begrudge us our Sabbath. Just listen to the awful noise they’re making.

  GNENDL: As for me, whenever I hear church bells, a shudder runs through me.

  BASIA: The young priests bleat. They sit by their stained-glass windows and stick out their tongues, like little devils, when Jews go by on their way to the synagogue. They’re having a good time with the Yoshke we gave them.

  GNENDL (sadly): May God forgive me for saying so, but on Saturdays and holidays my heart tightens with anxiety. It’s all right the rest of the time. The Sundays and the Mondays pass quickly, but the Saturdays and the holidays drag on and on, and the candles throw shadows on the walls.

  (The church bells grow louder, drowning out the chanting in the synagogue.)

  BASIA: Jewish life is sad. It scrapes on and on like a fiddle at a poor man’s wedding.

  GNENDL: Sometimes when I’m all by myself at home I dance and sing like the untouched girl I once was. My dress feels ablaze and my blood is on fire—and then my Nahman shows up on the doorstep unexpectedly, and makes me feel ashamed of myself.