There was a triumphant gleam in his eyes as he gave a confident little laugh: it had been clever of him to provide himself with so valuable a document.
“I wouldn’t trade this piece of paper for a hundred passports! Once I’ve gotten to America, I’ll show them that I’m a real rabbi, not—what do you call it over there?—not a ‘bluffer’! That’s a real document, isn’t it? It was nothing less than divine inspiration on my part to send that beautiful message of greeting!”
viii
Her heels were so high that she teetered on them, and I got up and ran to help her when she came in the door, for I was afraid she would slip and fall.
The only question that bothered her was whether I’d recognize her; if not, it was all to the good, for she was embarrassed to come. In fact, she said, she only took the risk of coming to see me because she had decided that I would not recognize her. Years ago, when she had known me, it never occurred to her that she would not be married already, by this time, but that was the way it had turned out. And now here she was singing the well-known song—a widower or an elderly man.
I must not suppose that she was eager to get married at any cost. Not at all. She simply couldn’t bear the social stigma of being an old maid. And anyway she couldn’t go on like this, being a burden to her old father. She was well read, familiar with Yiddish literature and with the classics. She would be willing to marry the very worst sort of man: She’d suffer in silence.
In the town where she lived she was what was known as “a literary supplement.” She knew that people talked about her behind her back. She hadn’t minded it, when she was younger, that people had it in for her. She had felt compensated by friendships with writers and the more educated sort of theater people. But now younger “literary supplements” were coming along—a whole new generation of them—and she found herself left high and dry with her memories. And such silly memories! She wondered if they would not choke her in the end.
Now she has the choice between two men—one is fifty-five or so, and the other is a hunchback, but it is an intelligent hump, not too conspicuous. Neither man, however, will marry her without a dowry.
“I can assure you I have enough reason to be willing to pay my dues. I didn’t spend my youth saying prayers. Here is my brother’s address.”
ix
He took a chair and rested his head on the silver knob of his stick. He looked up at me with one eye, smiling.
God be praised, he owned a stocking factory, and there were several thousand złotys in the bank. All his children had been to college. One became an oculist, the other a dentist. Both were making good livings and had married well. His wife is able to visit watering places to enjoy the hot springs. He himself had become a Zionist—in more general terms, an enlightened man, a rationalist. He kept up with all that goes on in the world.
He was aware that I had been here for several days, but he hadn’t wanted to bother me until now. Finally he just couldn’t stand it any more and so here he was. What he wanted to tell me—here he suddenly raised his head from the silver-headed cane—was that he looks down his nose at America.
He looked quite fierce when this came out. He had long wanted to advertise his scorn to the world. And now, what he wanted me to do was to pass the word along to the important people, that he, a Jew, a rationalist, had been able to get through life without American help. He had brought up his children, and brought them up well—would that all Jewish children might be so lucky! Would I do him the favor of telling those concerned that he, a Polish Jew, didn’t give a tinker’s damn about America—no matter what America may think of that? It would be doing him a great favor, for by nature he detested boasters, and the trouble with America was its conceit. Why, it was a great thing, something for the whole Jewish nation to be proud of, that he had worked his way up to wealth without any assistance whatever from big, rich, arrogant America!
x
A man of dour features came in and sat down without a word. His lips seemed sealed. For a long while he just sat there, shaking his head, as though accusing someone. Then suddenly he took a deep breath and began to speak.
He couldn’t understand, he said, what things were coming to. Whatever he tried his hand at turns out to be against the law. There was a jinx on him: the moment he earned a little money he was in trouble with the law. What he had done might be perfectly legal—the most legal occupation imaginable—but the moment he got involved in it, it never failed: He got in trouble with the authorities. On the surface everything always seemed fine. Thanks to his work others were able to make their living. He had a wife and children, and he too was obliged to earn a living, but in his case something always went wrong. Take bankruptcy, for example. Hundreds of people do very well for themselves going bankrupt, but the moment he tried it he wound up in prison. The simplest thing had a way of becoming complicated the moment he touched it. Whether it had to do with him, or with the fact that Polish law was too complex for him, every enterprise he engaged in simply turned out to be illegal. And yet it would be sheer slander to say that he involved himself in risky enterprises. Something simply went wrong in the process, and he found himself again in the hands of the law.
How long would this go on, and how would it end? Now it was down to a question of bread and salt—no longer of furnishing a luxurious apartment. Things had reached the point where he was ashamed in front of his wife of being such a schlimazl, such a sucker as always to be the one that gets caught.
“In short, what I want is an affidavit. Here is my brother’s address. You must tell him to take pity on me. I’m speaking to you as I would to my own brother, I have no more strength left to struggle against the law. Let him send for me, and if he really wants to, he can do it. After all, America is different, the laws there aren’t the same as here. I mean, it can’t go on like this. Or even, do you know what, I’m ready to make an agreement with you. Let my brother send me enough money to live on, and I won’t insist on going to America. Nor will I ask for much—all I want is enough for bread, for my wife, my children, and myself. Bread! bread! bread!” By this time, he was pacing back and forth across the room. He chanted the word bread as if tinkling a gold coin, and he would stop as if to listen to the precious sound.
Hunger had often paraded in front of me in that room, and spoken without reserve. And yet after each hungry man I always thought back to the first of them, haunted with the memory of the porter who so roundly cursed his brother in America: “May he and his family drop dead!”
Once upon a time there had been two little brothers. They had played games together, free of care, stared up at the sky together, and caught flies. Together they had put the flies in a little hole in the ground, and covered the hole with a piece of glass through which they could watch the little creatures struggling to get free. Later one of the little boys went away to America, and the other stayed behind, a sorrowing brother, lying in a ditch he had dug for himself.
xi
“Do you know what a brother is?” I was asked by a man who had been regarded as unusually bright when he was a child. Though he was only a few years older than I, he had occasionally taught me some Talmud.
“A wife is cut from a rib, but a brother is part of your mother’s heart. When we were boys we both clutched at her apron asking for bread, and now one of these brothers is asking the other for bread. And the other does not even answer his letters. How can such a thing be? I don’t care about much any more, but this problem torments me. You lie with your little brother under the same torn blanket, and you tell each other stories. You share father’s attention, mother’s smiles, you have such a marvelous, divine partnership. Then one goes away, and the two begin to live separate lives. I get the shivers. You know, I could never understand it even in the case of cats and dogs, but when I see two human brothers living for themselves, I begin to question many things.”
Even more pathetic than the hunger was the hope. In all this despair there was an obstinate faith that salvation wou
ld certainly come from across the ocean. And I, who had seen the other side of the certainty, I found my mind turning from the sad faces of Lublin in front of me, to those other faces far away across the sea: the clean-shaven faces of the Lubliners who had escaped to become cigar makers, shirtmakers, buttonhole makers, pocketbook makers, one and all of them rich American Jews.
I recalled the big white loaves of bread, and the more fragrant dark loaves. When I was little, the white bread had always stood for silver to me, and the dark bread for gold. But who at that time could have grasped what was true in my childish insight, when mother sent me out into the Jewish street to buy bread?
xii
The Jewish people is merely being pauperized, not proletarianized, Glaichbaum explained to me with a sour smile. We constitute a very special stratum of the population. Among all other peoples, lice and starvation go hand in hand with stunted minds, but not so with our people. Their minds work just as hard as the rest of them. They keep a lamp burning to verify that they are indeed in darkness.
Glaichbaum, who had taught me Polish years before, had turned many an intellectual somersault in his life. He came from an assimilated family, and his father’s heart melted with joy when he saw him in his green college uniform. He had many Gentile friends. He was blond, and had a shrunken yellow face. But his manners were truly Polish: his skinny figure made all the proper bows and inclinations. He was a good dancer, and he was very popular with the Gentile girls for his elegance—or perhaps for the very reason that he was not handsome. He had no trace of those specifically Jewish good looks that our Gentile neighbors find so unattractive.
Then one day Glaichbaum almost gave his father a heart attack: he purchased phylacteries and announced that he was henceforward a pious Jew. His father, when he recovered from the shock, laughed at him; his mother fainted; his younger brother and his sisters said he should be thrown out of the house. But nothing deterred him. Glaichbaum—he was then eighteen—got himself a private tutor who taught him the Hebrew language and Jewish ritual. Every morning he would get up early and hurry to the synagogue before going to his class at the commercial college he attended. He even went back for evening service and took every possible occasion to linger in the synagogue and pick up crumbs of sacred learning. There he would sit in his uniform with its gold buttons, wearing the cap with its shiny visor. He got special permission from the school authorities that he would not be obliged to write on the Sabbath. Then, all of a sudden, with less than a year to go before graduation, he dropped out of college entirely. He became estranged from his former friends, and his supple dancer’s body now was kept bending gracefully at the various prayers in the synagogue.
There followed in time a number of other intellectual enthusiasms: Zionism, Socialism, the Polish Socialist Party, and the Labor Bund. He became a leader and was elected municipal councilor. Jews were proud of his ability to defend Jewish honor with the ardor of a true Jewish preacher, in excellent and eloquent Polish.
Still later he became something which in Poland no one even dared to call by name: he became a Communist or, as is more euphemistically referred to, a Marxist. Then he abandoned that, too—just why, he did not have the inner strength to analyze, he told me. It had happened only a short while ago, and he wanted to keep quiet about it for a few years, to be alone with himself.
“I know,” he said, “that all this will end up with my going back to the synagogue. Inside me sits the soul of an ancestor who summons me back. There is no other explanation for it. My brother and my sisters have all been baptized. I am the black sheep.” He had a sour little laugh. “But before I go back to the synagogue, I have to conquer my cynicism. When you jump from one cause to another, you become a bit of a cynic. I can’t go to the synagogue with that hump on my back.”
He gazed at me with his yellow eyes, which had over the years become so Jewish that no Gentile could possibly have mistaken them.
“Please, take a look at the address. It’s some sort of cousin, I think, just an idea. If you see him, you may tell him, if he remembers me, that I’m not doing too well. But I must tell you at once not to take too much trouble about it. It’s just an idea of mine, and probably nothing will come of it at all.”
4
The sound of footsteps roused me from my half-slumber. By my side stood a young man whom I recognized by his clothes as a member of the rabbi’s retinue I had seen in the park during my walk with Steinman. He had walked alone, behind the others. He was now wearing the same slippers and white stockings; he had had a hard time getting up the hill in this footwear. He was about to go past me when he changed his mind and stopped.
“I know you’re an American,” he said, sitting down near me. “I’ve seen you with Steinman, that man who writes stories of no great consequence. How are the Jews getting along in America? But to tell the truth I don’t have to ask you, I know the answer myself. I can see everything with my imagination. There are things about America I know better than you do, because you merely saw them while I imagine them. Not a bad thought, don’t you agree?
“Well, I can tell you how the country is ruled, who is the boss, how the Jews behave there. Once I accompanied my father on a visit to a small town, and before we got there I imagined what the town and the first Jew we met there would look like. You won’t believe it—but everything was exactly as I had imagined it in advance. Do you suppose that’s a miracle? Not at all, I can supply perfectly natural causes for it.
“This is how I can prove it to you. Man lives threescore and ten years. But what does that amount to? Not even a drop in the bucket. It is a millionth of a millionth of a millionth part of the time it takes God to bat His eyelashes. Man, the crown of the creation, felt embarrassed that his life span was so insignificant, and he devised a kind of apparatus that stretches it like a rubber band, to make it seem a considerable length of time.
“See what I mean? It’s not easy to get it. When a man is born, his grave is open, ready to receive him, but between birth and death many things occur in rapid succession. You can’t imagine how swiftly they flash by. But the apparatus man invented works well and stretches out each event. Even the most trivial events are assigned a place. Occasionally you run ahead of your apparatus, and you arrive at an event that is scheduled to happen only several years later. You think something will happen to you in five years, but actually it is happening right now, or perhaps has already happened. You get the idea? You outsmart your apparatus and you discover what time really is, measured against the brevity of human life.
“It’s rather hard to grasp all this. If you want me to, I’ll go over it again for you from the beginning. I’ve been thinking about this for four or five years, and when I finally understood the whole thing, it was like a flash of light inside my head.”
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Sixteen. But this isn’t the only idea I’ve had. You must understand that every rabbinical family is distinguished by a special talent. We are the philosophers and the rhetoricians among the rabbis. We like to speculate. It’s a marvelous game, but it’s also an ordeal. It’s like walking on a narrow bridge. One false step, and you fall into heresy. But if the Lord is with you, if you don’t stumble and can keep your Jewishness intact, you cherish your idea doubly, because it achieves union with the Creator who sent it into the world.
“An idea that does not lead back to God but wanders at random is a bastard idea, it has no father. I wrote an essay in which I developed my theory. It’s a wonderful piece of writing.
“I like to take walks by myself and think about Hasidism. Faithful to my theory, I try to grasp ideas that will occur to me years later. That’s why my eyes look so much older than I really am. I want to discover things. I don’t like my grandfather’s way and I don’t like my father’s. I don’t like the way of my older brothers. I told Father that I was not too satisfied with his way. Yes, I told him that, for all my respect for him I had the courage to tell him. Then he confided in me that he was even l
ess satisfied than I.
“I have read all of Jewish literature, I know everybody and everything. But what is there except rhetoric? Peretz’s Hasidic stories are anecdotes with a moral. He looks at things through a keyhole and then blows them up. I want to see things from within. I want to renew Jewish thought. To begin with, you understand, we must do away with Gentile forms. A Jewish creation must be everything—poetry, prose, philosophy, drama, psychology, astronomy, epigrams—everything. We have no use for neat little compartments. We must be a creative encyclopedia—do you hear me?—an encyclopedia, but a creative one. Do you grasp what this means? It’s tremendous. Have you ever read a story by the rabbi of Bratzlav? There is my hero among the Hasidim. I am in love with him, I think about him all day long. He was an innovator and he loved Yiddish. Do you know what Yiddish is? What a marvelous language it is?”
He went on to say that he was troubled by one thing: he couldn’t understand why the Bratzlaver was so proud. Believe it or not, he said, it took him two years before he finally understood. Now he could explain the rabbi’s pride perfectly.
“He was always a sickly man, a broken vessel. If he had been more modest, no one would have taken him seriously. He knew he would die young and he wanted to accomplish something during the few short years he was granted.
“That is why he praised his own wares so much. He didn’t do this for his own sake. Everybody knew that he loved poverty and privation. He swam in misery like a fish in water. But he had things to sell, and he advertised them so that people would buy them. He praised himself because he wanted people to listen to God’s word. I am sure that he laughed at himself when no outsider could hear him, but his scribe, Rabbi Nathan, kept his secret faithfully.
The Glatstein Chronicles Page 35