The Glatstein Chronicles

by Jacob Glatstein

  Closer than these cries was the appeal in my ears of the porter, which I still could hear as clearly as when I saw him several weeks before. He was sending me a message for his brother in America. I was to tell him, “May you be choked to death with all your family!”

  The porter’s gruff cry was the voice of a whole class. The sound came from the depths, stained with blood. It was as moving as the bellow of a cow after her calf. He stood with one finger stuck in the rope around his waist which served as belt and cursed: “If you see my brother, who is ashamed of his own flesh and blood, tell him that I hope he falls from the highest cliff.”

  His face was covered with wrinkles. It was the face of a child that had grown old without ever having passed through youth or maturity.

  “He is ashamed of his own brother. It doesn’t matter to him that I have nothing to eat. May he and his family drop dead. May God slap his face as he slapped my face, in front of everyone. Just because he has become respectable, a tailor, does that give him the right to be ashamed of his brother who is just a laborer?”

  His voice grew more agreeable from minute to minute. He seemed to be reciting his invectives from a prayer book. He stood in the middle of the market place, cursing. “It’s all right, don’t be ashamed to tell him. Say that this is what his own brother said to tell him, the brother whose blood he shed, whose sorrows he refused to hear. May he turn deaf and dumb. May he have to chew stale bread like me.”

  I could still hear his singsong chant, so much louder in its grief than the joy along the river, where I could hear the splashing of the bathers. I clung to the accents of the poor snubbed brother, so I could carry them back just as they sounded, to the tailor in a distant land who had made his way up the social ladder. I wanted to memorize the voice, the face, everything about that burly man with the rope around his waist, who stood in the market place, and railed at fate.

  He spoke like a man condemned by generations of forebears to speak the language of the earth. He spoke the way a condemned man was supposed to speak, but his voice took on luminosity and liturgical sweetness. It resembled the moaning of a mother in front of the Holy Ark praying for a child suddenly stricken, but with added male dignity and grit.

  The porter’s lament was the deepest of all the expressions of Jewish misery I heard. For there had been others, too, one after the other, some of them embarrassed, some demanding. I witnessed a parade of beggars. All the community of the poor came to see me, their hands extended—not to me personally, but to me as the messenger holding out the promise of the mythical bread.

  i

  There came a neatly dressed Jew, a tall man with a high forehead, a dignified thatch of gray hair and black beard. He had brought a prepared speech, a complete essay, which he carefully took out of its case like an etrog from its box. He spoke of the poverty that dogs the poor man’s every step, about the commandment that a man should find a husband for his daughter, and about Sabbaths when to produce even an illusion of gaiety you have to pinch your own cheeks.

  The story was like this. His daughter was a beauty. So long as she was young the young men chased her, but later on they were concerned only for making their living, and his daughter had been left high and dry. One by one the suitors had fallen away. Now they were all married men, and his daughter, poor thing, never complained, but the sight of her cut her father’s heart like a knife.

  The story was like this. He had formerly been quite well off, he had dealt in timber, but he had gradually lost everything, and now he was at the bottom. But God had mixed the medicine before He sent the affliction: his wife’s brother had been taken to America while still a little boy. Well, to say that he had been “taken” is only a manner of speaking. What really happened was this. He was a wild boy, and his wife’s parents were respectable people. One day the boy did something that disgraced the parents, so his father decided to teach him a lesson. He spoke to the janitor of his apartment house, and asked him to give the boy a good beating. Would you believe it? The janitor was an infidel and took the request literally, beating the boy so hard that the child could not sit down. “Are there Jews with goyish hearts? May I live as many years as there are!”

  Next day the boy vanished as completely as though he had been swallowed up. There were rumors that he had himself baptized, out of revenge. His parents turned gray before their time. This was their only son. Besides him, there was one daughter, who is herself now the mother of an only daughter; these were the only children.

  The boy’s mother wanted to divorce her husband for his cruel deed, but friends interceded. Many years went by, then the parents heard in a roundabout way that the boy was in America. They were overjoyed and wrote to him, but he had never forgiven them, and he replied that as far as he was concerned, so help him, they were all dead.

  “But now his family is really dead, except for his sister. Several years ago, when we had lost everything we had, she wrote him a letter that would have moved the heart of a Gentile god. And it must have moved him deeply, for within the month we received a whole hundred dollars. From then on the hundred-dollar bills came regularly, and this meant more to us than you can imagine. My wife had kidney trouble, and the money saved her life. We were able to put something aside as a dowry for our daughter. My daughter’s eyes glowed with hope, like burning candles. She is our only one, the apple of our eye.

  “But just as the bills had started to come without any warning, like birds of good omen, they suddenly stopped coming. My wife has worn out her fingers writing, and how many tears went into every letter, alas! And how many of my daughter’s tears went into every line, alas! But it has been like talking to a wall. No answer at all. We began to worry, wondering how we had offended him. But my wife has kept on writing, and I always add blessings in Hebrew to each letter.

  “So this is the story. You see before you a man still living, the father of a daughter, but if you don’t help me find my brother-in-law and ask him why, after filling our hearts with joy, he is now letting us die of hunger—why he kindled our hopes only to snuff them out again, why his heart has become as cold as stone—it will turn out badly. Do ask him this, but hurry, there is not much time. I swear to you, I am going to put a rope around my neck.”

  ii

  There came a Jew with a tittering laugh. “Tee-hee, you don’t remember me,” he said. “Once you had a reputation for cleverness, but on the other hand, you’ve got so much else on your mind, and the passage of time counts for something, too.

  “Tee-hee.” Even as I was trying to visualize what he looked like without gray hair and wrinkles and the other changes of age, he burst into tears and buried his head and beard in his hands on the table. Then I remembered: he had been a well-to-do man, a dealer in flour, and had enjoyed the respect of the community. His seat in the synagogue used to be next to ours. It was when I imagined him in a silver-trimmed prayer shawl with purple threads that I remembered who he was.

  Now, he told me, he was all alone in the world. The Lord had taken his wife, but had refused to take him too, and so he was doomed to a lonely old age. Two of his three children were dead, and the other one gone to America. Although he had had news of him indirectly, the son never wrote to his father.

  “Here is his address. Look him up. And tell him that may God forgive him for letting his father starve. That’s what I want you to tell him—I pray God continually that he will be forgiven for that. Tell him, too, that on the anniversary of his mother’s death, he should sometimes say the Kaddish. Maybe he will be forgiven.”

  iii

  The town cantor came, a man in his late seventies who boasted that he could still roar like a lion. It was true: he could be heard from one end of the synagogue to the other. Formerly he was a well-to-do merchant and served as cantor only for the honor of it. Now, however, he had become a mere synagogue functionary. So long as he performed the office without demanding payment, the town took him for granted. Now they wouldn’t save him if he were drowning in a teaspoonful of
water.

  His trousers were simply patches held together with thread—though with gaping holes between some of the patches, and several important buttons missing. His alpaca coat was in tatters, and his arms were out at the elbows. His earnings had to go to support his daughter: Her husband, poor man, was bedridden. Yes, he was living with his daughter, and—why should he lie about it?—there was not so much as a piece of bread in the house. That, despite all the work he did, the anniversaries of deaths commemorated at the cemetery and funerals as well as the regular services. In the old days he could count on a Sabbath meal at his brother’s; he had always gone by for the Kiddush—a glass of aquavit with a piece of cake; and then he would wash his hands and enjoy a piece of fish. But one day his brother told him bluntly that while he was welcome for the Kiddush, if he was counting on a full meal every time he’d better drop the Sabbath visit altogether. “You don’t give me a chance to miss you,” his brother had told him.

  “So my own brother took away my Kiddush and my piece of fish—I should mention that he has no children. When Cain murdered Abel, he didn’t behave any worse.

  But how can I complain about my brother when my own son—he lives only a few hours away from here, and I spent a fortune on him so he could go to the conservatory and become a composer, which he is today—when my own son pretends he doesn’t know that his father is starving?

  “So what can you do for me? My wife, rest her soul, has a large family in New York; one of them lives like a king there, he is swimming in money. Occasionally he sends me a few dollars, without even enclosing a letter, and saves my life. Here is his address. I don’t have to tell you what to say—you’ll know yourself. Tell him”—he pointed to his neck—“that I am fed up, up to here.”

  iv

  My old teacher of the Talmud. He had not changed a bit. He sidled in, as though carrying something important under his coat, something he was anxious not to lose. It is said about him that he carries a lot of money on him, his life savings. He is said to have gold pieces, old ones, dating back to Nicolas I and several hundred złotys besides. It is all this that he is supposed to be carrying around on him.

  He began by pointing out that he had hammered the Torah into my head, and if people were telling the truth, he hadn’t labored in vain. It seems to have been very useful to me. So he felt he could take the liberty of asking me a favor. After all, a pupil owes his teacher something. Even a teacher who spanks you, let alone one who was never impatient, who made learning a game—such a teacher has earned the right to ask a favor.

  Did I remember his wife? She died. Did I remember his only son, the one with the red beard who used to chop wood in front of the house, the crazy one? Well, with God’s help, he finally acquired some sense and now has become quite respectable. For the past several years he has been in America. At first he wrote regularly—nothing special, but at least his father could be sure that he was alive and in good health. Occasionally a few złotys were enclosed for a holiday. But for some years there had been no word.

  “I have his address, so do me a favor and tell that son of mine that even if he is crazy he ought to have a thought for his old father. You mustn’t believe the gossip about my being a rich man. I just wish the souls of these who speak like that would be gnawed with envy as I am gnawed by hunger. And it wouldn’t do you any harm to give your old teacher a few złotys. The lessons I taught you deserve something in the way of return. But the main thing is, don’t forget to look up my crazy son. If he yells at you, yell back at him, and you have my permission to slap him. I used to hit him even when he was a young man in his twenties. A slap in the face sometimes does no-goods like him a world of good. Don’t waste words on him. Just tell him: Father, bread, eat, eat!”

  v

  A woman had brought her three children along so that I could appreciate the full extent of her predicament. Her husband had played a dirty trick on her. When she said this, her eyes blazed with anger, and she peered around at the ceiling of the room.

  He made a real mess of her life. All in all, there had been no more than two happy years with him. He married her, but all he gave her was poverty. There was enough to eat during the week, but there was never enough for the Sabbath. For the Sabbath she had to toil hard. I shouldn’t ask her how she managed “to make a Sabbath”—she accomplished it by brute force, so to speak, dragging it into her house by the ears.

  She was an unfortunate woman. Already twice divorced, now this last husband of hers, what had he done? He had made her a widow. A dirty trick. And once again she flashed her eyes angrily, looking suspiciously at the upper corners of the room.

  Here she was with three small orphans to support. That had been his legacy to her—these three tiny tots were all she possessed. She was childless herself, the children were his, but what could she do? She pitied the poor little things, it broke her heart to look at them.

  “A brother of his lives in America. He is a heartless man, a real scoundrel. I have his address. Now, do a good deed, not for the sake of a poor widow, but for the children. They are as good as your own children—for if they aren’t yours, they aren’t mine either. Tell him that if I have no news from him, I’ll do him a favor, I’ll put the three children on a ship and send them straight to New York.”

  At that, the children, two boys and a girl, burst into tears.

  “Shush, be quiet, I just say that to scare your uncle. Ah, what a dirty trick your father played on me! Some provider he was!” And she studied the ceiling carefully as she got up to go, as though her dead husband might be hiding there.

  vi

  His breath was foul, with the stench of hunger. Apparently he knew it, for he would quickly cover his mouth with his hand after every few sentences. Then he would look at me in silence for several minutes.

  He was just my age and had gotten exactly nowhere in life. Fortunately he was a bachelor. It’s easier to starve when you have no family.

  Gradually his speech grew more literate—polysyllabic words such as you see only in books began to appear in his conversation.

  Taking into consideration the material conditions of the collectivity as a whole, he said, and the circumstances of social existence as such, the conclusion is unavoidable that the individual is of no importance. It may even be argued that the collectivity, in the last analysis, consists of individuals who embody specific attributes of the mass at the climax of its development. On the other hand, among backward people, at the lowest level of evolution, the social physiognomy is more pronounced—and there was a great deal more like this.

  He rattled off all these complicated sentences with extraordinary facility, making proper transitions, constructing logical pyramids of discourse. He confided to me that for all his uncompromising atheism, he always fasted Mondays and Thursdays, for his sad circumstances left no alternative. His face was longer than broad, with waxen features that recalled a candle gradually being consumed. He was a pitiful sight, but the moment he began to talk he sounded as though he were issuing a petition to the authorities.

  “The intellectual drive that has characterized my tribe from time immemorial has driven me into the arms of education. Lacking the minimal prospects of material security, and despite the insignificance of education in the ghetto, I looked forward to the eventuality of some unforeseen development.”

  His story turned out to be as follows. Twenty-some years ago he had completed six years of his preuniversity training, but when he attempted to obtain Polish credits for it, the Polish educational authorities refused to honor his accomplishment. So he sat down and began his course of study all over again, from the beginning, at home. By this time he had gotten as far as the seventh grade of secondary school, with only one more year to go to obtain his bachelor’s degree. But he is at the end of his tether, he has no strength to finish, for he has had nothing to eat. He has a bit of roof over his head—his married brother gave him a cot in a dark little room. His uncle could be his salvation—that is to say, his mother’s u
ncle who lives in America. But his situation must be put to his uncle solely in terms of education.

  “In spite of the hopeless situation of the Jewish people and that of the educated youth in particular, education is an end in itself, which is transcendental and practical in its very impracticality,” he said as he rose to leave.

  vii

  A middle-aged man with two or three flecks of gray in his not very full black beard walked in.

  From his pocket he carefully drew a paper yellowed with age, which had been mounted very cleverly on a piece of cardboard. It folded in four. “This speaks for itself,” he said extending it to me. He chewed on a strand of his beard, looking at me expectantly.

  “And what does it say?” he asked suddenly, with a very solemn air, as though putting me to some kind of test.

  It was a letter signed by President Hoover, thanking him for having written him and conveying the president’s warm personal regards.

  “You do know English,” he said after a moment, perking up at this. “There are Jews, you know, I think you call them ‘bluffers,’ who have been to America but don’t know a word of English. Several years ago I sent a message of greeting to the president of the United States. It was in Hebrew, a beautiful message, such as I know how to write. Why did I do it all of a sudden? Well, cast thy bread upon the waters… . It’s good to have dealings with a president. It can’t do any harm. And he replied at once with a personal letter of thanks, as you can see for yourself. I can’t read it—how could I? But people have read it to me several times, and each time it gives me great pleasure.

  “When I was earning a living, I sort of forgot about the president. But now that I have lost my rabbinical post and can’t get another one, and am reduced to begging for my bread, I got out the president’s letter and here I am, ready to go. The only question is, who is to pay my fare? Then I recalled that I have a well-to-do brother-in-law over there. I want you to tell him that I’ll pay him back in full, just as soon as I get to America. It shouldn’t be hard to get in there with a letter like that. The gates will open for me, and I’ll be given a generous welcome, don’t you think?”