The Glatstein Chronicles

by Jacob Glatstein

  “My dear friend,” Neifeld said in a voice full of tenderness. “We are now in Kazimierz.”

  4

  Neifeld was smiling as though his most beautiful dream had come true when the carriage turned off the road and stopped near a water pump. Neifeld’s smile communicated itself to me and to the driver as he climbed down and gave a hitch to his trousers.

  Through this trio of smiles I looked at the old houses lining a very ordinary main street, a street that could have been somewhere in the Catskills. Our smiles, I hoped, would provide the necessary light to illuminate the odd shape of each house separately. They all looked as though they were holding each other up, the centripetal stresses all converging toward the pump which stood in the middle of them like some old weathered sundial—though whether it was recording twelve forty-five, or thirteen hundred years, who could say or possibly care?

  Had it not been for the water pump, the old houses would surely have collapsed and fallen to pieces. The pump looked like the fundamental force that held the street together. Neifeld had a little suggestion: since it was so early, why not go somewhere for a bite to eat. Afterward, he would not bother me, I would go my way and he would go his.

  The driver liked the suggestion very much. He was starving, he said, and was much too weak to go on without having something to eat. Of course, he added, we should get something light, and what can be lighter than a drink of vodka on an empty stomach?

  He led us up a twisted staircase, to a dark door situated halfway up. We entered a room full of children, boys and girls, who scattered like chickens at our entrance. A man with a narrow, longish, black and gray beard and a serious rabbinical face welcomed us and at once set the table. He put a bottle on it, and the driver said a blessing with a pious face and quickly drank two glasses, one after the other.

  He cleared his throat and suggested that two glasses are a well-tested recipe used by experienced drinkers, because the second helps get the first one down.

  “If you’ll let me advise you, gentlemen,” the man with the rabbinical manners said, “you couldn’t do better than to have a piece of roast duck with your vodka.”

  “How about a bit of herring with onion?” the driver asked.

  “Now, really,” the man said with a frown. “If I had herring here, don’t you think I’d have it in front of you by now? I’ll tell you the truth, last night I was raided by a dozen heavy eaters who cleaned me out of everything like a swarm of locusts. Please don’t say you don’t want roast duck, gentlemen, because that’s all I have left.”

  “But bread?” the driver asked fearfully.

  “Skolko ugodno, as much as you want,” the other answered with a smile. “We’re never short of bread. It’s our light eternal.”

  The driver took up a pitcher of water from the table, opened the door, and washed himself on the stairs. A woman came out, protesting: “What do you mean flooding the staircase like this? Somebody will break his neck on these puddles!”

  “Don’t worry,” the driver said to her. “Pretend you mopped the stairs for once.”

  When the time came to pay, the rabbinical-looking man vanished, and his wife appeared to take our money. Neifeld insisted that we were his guests. When the woman told us how much we owed, the driver cried out: “You’re almost giving me a heart attack! What are these, wartime prices? How dare you gouge us for a duck that was nothing but skin and bones?”

  “Now, now,” the woman said, restraining her irritation with a pretense of surprise. “What do you care? Is the money coming out of your pocket? It isn’t your treat, is it?”

  “You’re no honest woman, you’re a highway robber! Where’s your husband? I won’t let anybody pay that much. It’s because of you that little children starve to death. I want to speak to your husband.”

  “My husband has nothing to do with money matters.”

  “He wouldn’t know the difference between one coin and another,” the driver said, mocking her. Neifeld had his money out, but was in no hurry to pay: he was enjoying the scene and wanted it to last as long as possible. “Call in the poor thing, I bet he knows the value of money.”

  “He’ll pour swill on you,” the woman screamed, “if you don’t shut your mouth. I hope it twists into a knot! You’re not worth my husband’s piss. Just imagine, this one here thinks he can tell me how much I am to charge for my duck!”

  “Breindele Cossack, I’ll teach you a lesson. Next time I’ll bring you a plague, not customers. I can find my way to the place across the street, you know.”

  The woman softened and at once reduced her price by half a złoty. “When you speak like a human being, that’s different,” she said with a face suddenly transformed from anger to smiles.

  The driver took the bottle and poured himself another glass. Then he said: “This is my tip. And what you are wishing me now, please God, may at least half of it happen to you. Here’s to you, gentlemen. To life! L’chaim.”

  When we walked out, I arranged with the driver that he should take us back before sunset. I told Neifeld that if he had no special plans I’d be glad if he accompanied me. He was very touched by my invitation.

  I realized suddenly that the low houses and the whole huddling street drew the glance downward. For the first time I raised my eyes and saw a hill, and on the hill what looked to be the ruins of a large house whose entire interior had been burned out. A little higher on the hill stood two other tall structures, but these were more like the unfinished foundations of a castle. The hill was much more cheerful than the houses below. With its green woods and ruins it looked as though it represented some younger civilization than the little houses among which we were standing.

  “In my opinion, before climbing up to see Esther’s castle, we should make a tour of the lower town. We’ll go up the hill later.”

  He said the words “Esther’s castle” with such indifference that I suspected him of trying to test its effect on me. And the fact is that my heart was struck as though by a golden arrow. The legend atop that hill had captivated me through the folk song of the golden peacock that flew to faraway lands.

  King Casimir wore the paper crown of Purim and had a silken beard. He looked a bit obtuse and in some ways resembled King Ahasuerus in the biblical story. But he was a fiery lover and he carried the Jewish girl up the hill in his own arms, higher and higher, up to where the Spanish castles had just been completed. Below stood Mordecai scratching his head in his helplessness. What an idea to carry her so high! Why, one could get all out of breath climbing like that. Esther herself said nothing but lay swooning in the king’s arms as fragrant with perfumes as a casket with spices. It seems that she was naked, or rather, three-quarters naked, for King Casimir had wanted to remove the last of her clothes with his own trembling hands. And during the long days when the king reigned somewhere far away, Esther looked down longingly at the pump, at the grimy houses where her brothers lived. At night she would let down her tresses and sing, “Were I to go out on the porch and look at the town.” During one such sad moment, while she waited for the king with the silken beard, she tied a letter to the tail of a golden peacock. The letter was addressed to the Jewish people for whom she yearned from afar. But the king’s magician conjured up a terrible storm with thunder and lightning to blanket the whole country roundabout. In the bad weather the golden peacock could not find its way to the Jewish people, and the letter got detached from its tail and was lost.

  Later that day we stood in a dark apartment and looked at what purported to be the letter which Esther had addressed to her people. An old Jew carefully opened a cabinet and took out of it several Torah-scroll adornments—embroidered mantles, crowns, and silver pointers—which the Jewish maiden who had either left home or been abducted had sent back home. The old man told us that he had inherited the concession from his father, and his father had gotten it from his grandfather. The precious objects belonged to the community, but the community recognized his right to house the historical relics. He showed
me lettering on the mantles embroidered in gold and silver, and told me that a famous Jewish writer used to stay in his house for days at a time, unable to tear himself away from the relics. The writer loved them so much—to be honest about it—he had to watch his hands lest he make off with something. He wasn’t a thief, it was just that he was possessed of a kind of passion—what do you call it, “sticky fingers”—and, indeed, how could anyone not feel tempted when he held in his own hands a mantle that Esther herself had touched with her royal fingers?

  When I gave him a few złotys, he said that he was not yet through with us. He led us across several courtyards and took us into a synagogue that was older even than Esther. King Casimir had gone to this synagogue countless times—might we have as many thousands of złotys! Our guide apparently wanted us to be rich. He took us into the special room where the rites of circumcision used to be performed and showed us the oversized chair reserved for the man who had the privilege of holding the baby during the ceremony.

  The main thing I mustn’t forget, our guide said, is that his father, who had also been the shames of the synagogue, was a famous man. The Jewish writer who had stayed here knew him well, often called on him and got him to tell him many stories, which he later published in newspapers, to the delectation of all. Had our guide read the stories? we asked. God forbid, he replied—he had a head full of worries, “and this is one of my greatest worries,” he added, as a girl with modest black eyes and short hair joined us.

  “Father, may I have the key?” she said. “There are a few visitors who want to see the antiques.”

  The shames stopped and slapped his trouser pocket melodramatically, as if he wanted the important key to be lost and create a commotion. But he found it at once and handed it to his daughter. “Open the cabinet, I’ll be back in a moment,” he said. “You can start showing them in the meantime.”

  She left quietly. The father stood motionless a while then gave a sigh that came from the depths where are stored all the unrealized prayers of the Days of Awe.

  “You have seen her—she is just as beautiful as Esther was,” he said. “And she has golden hands. I should show you her work—it’s as good as all the embroidered mantles. Occasionally, just to get another judgment, I throw in a piece she has embroidered among the relics, and it is admired more than the rest of the treasure. But it’s the other girls who get husbands, and why? Because she is too choosey. She has a bee in her bonnet. You would swear she was waiting for some king to come along and make her his concubine.”

  Neifeld drew me away then and unexpectedly led me into a cobbler’s shop. The cobbler’s bench stood empty, and the shop was permeated with the smell of leather. From the back room emerged a man with a little brown beard and deep-set eyes. He had a proud bearing and replied to Neifeld’s greeting like an equal.

  “Do you have any work at the moment?” Neifeld asked him.

  “No, thank God,” the man answered with a smile.

  Five children—three girls and two boys, roughly between the ages of three and ten—came over and stood around him. To an astonishing degree they looked like the man who stood there in the midst of them, the largest tree in the orchard.

  “These children are all I’ve got to show for my work,” the shoemaker said, holding out his work-worn hands, with their stained fingers and black nails. “May they be preserved from the evil eye.”

  “And what’s new in the art department, Reb Shmuel?”

  “I can’t complain, thank God,” he replied, holding his noble head still higher.

  He glanced at the silent Neifeld and without a word turned around and went into the back room. We followed him, I with curiosity greatly stirred. He dusted off several neatly stacked paintings, and the dim room lit up with misty sunrises and red-blue sunsets, curving streets and old brick facades, painted the colors that are only to be seen on very old houses in Europe—subdued yellows, watery pinks, and a gray that is the color of cobweb—houses that look to have been buried and dug up again many times. The quiet colors always seem darker just before it is going to rain.

  He unrolled other pictures for us, painted on poor paper, of Jews with faces like old bricks. I had the impression of looking at some film documenting a bygone past. Where had I seen all this before? Had I really seen it? Yes and no. All the houses and all the people looked familiar, but they were not the houses I had been walking among and seeing with my ordinary eyes—they were the people and houses I had long ago looked at with the eyes of childhood. These were the same muddy walls seen in the waking sleep of a child who could hear songs even in the alleys perpetually damp and smelling of urine, only God knows for how many generations before.

  The cobbler had seen and painted all this, but he had not lost the wonder of childhood vision. My mind began to run off into reflections on art and childhood, on the value of preserving one’s childhood vision as long as possible, and on art as the essence of the living present—anchored in memory, to be sure, a realistic art, clear and obvious but permeated by the melancholy longing for an eternally youthful past. It is this longing which can make of reality a miracle. Happy the man who sees reality as sad, not as a boring sadness, but as a childish sadness; it is the child who knows this optimistic sadness, capable for all its terror of death of moving forward proudly into the years of life ahead.

  That was what Reb Shmuel’s paintings were saying to me. He himself now told us how he had become something like the second wonder of Kazimierz. The Polish newspapers had written dozens of articles about him, Shmuel the cobbler, painter of the ghetto. People had flocked to see the curiosity, judging him to be a very good artist for a cobbler, but buying very little from him. Mostly they left him their shoes to repair. On one occasion a Gentile became interested in him and supported him for a year, but God called the Gentile to Himself, and now his only hope was Palestine. There, he thought, a Jewish artist would not be abandoned, and might even be raised up from the mire and exalted.

  The cobbler went back into the shop with us. He put on his apron, sat down on his bench, and began to drive nails into a sole. He did this with the air of someone trying to show us how low an artist can fall.

  “God, may His name be blessed, will help me,” he said with a sigh. “Isn’t that so, Yankel?” he asked one of his children.

  This one seemed to be the oldest, about ten. He closed his eyes and, sighing like an old man, spoke: “We have a God in heaven.” The sigh and the words had all the virtuosity of a child prodigy playing a Stradivarius.

  “That’s what I say, too,” the cobbler said approvingly. “This is my eldest, may he live and prosper. I trust in the Lord.”

  He put a few nails between his lips and kept them there for a while. Then, taking them out one by one, he drove each of them into the sole with two neat taps of the hammer.

  “I must confess that I am a pious Jew,” he said. He pondered a while and then went on: “I shall also confess that I am pious out of fear. Not out of fear of the Lord but—I hope what I say is not sinful—but out of fear that I may cease being an artist. I feel that piety and art are one and the same thing. Were I to lose my piety, I should lose my art. The fact that I wield a brush has a great deal to do with my piety. Had I been an unbeliever, I’d never have been anything but a cobbler. My ability to paint is nourished by my faith in a Creator of the World, in a Providence, in the fact that the world is not chaos and accident. If I ever thought that the world is not ruled by its Maker, I shouldn’t be able to paint, should I, Yankel?”

  “My father is right,” the son said, with a virtuoso frown.

  When we left the shop, Neifeld said that we had already seen a good deal of Kazimierz. “Whenever I feel I must come back to this interesting little town,” he went on, “I don’t know whether it is that I am longing to see the town itself again or the few people here who are themselves legendary, who have absorbed in themselves the great miracle. This grimy street, with its little shops and its few just men, embodies the longing for the top o
f the hill where the legend itself stands naked, as though shivering from the cold. I’ll try to say it differently: up there it is always Sabbath, while down here it is a perpetual Friday evening, and the dark holiness is always just about to fall across the shutters of the shops, the lighted windows, the eyes of frightened little boys. Here one is always waiting for the blessing of the candles, here it is always Sabbath eve. There are many who have spent their whole lives here without ever climbing the hill. Let me suggest a banal allegory: up there stand the ruins of the Realized Ideal, while down here a dark yearning wanders about. Up there is the completed five- or seven-year plan, while down here the people are still whispering the mysterious word, ‘Revolution.’

  “Take the cobbler, Reb Shmuel,” Neifeld went on. Is he not the embodiment of his yearning for the heights? A cobbler, saddled with a wife, children, and a talent for painting—absurd contrasts. And he does his duty as only a Jew can. No Bohemianism makes him desert his family for his art. He cobbles and paints and trusts in the Lord, like the anonymous just men who bear the weekdays on their shoulders with all their cares, yet go on longing for a miracle to save the people of Israel.

  “For what has really gone on here in Kazimierz? I think I can help you to understand. The Jew had his own poor world, and the Gentile led his own separate life. We always walked as far as the city gates, beyond which death lies—a great cemetery full of ancestors. In other words, walk no farther than the gates and turn right back, for you can see only too clearly what lies in store. The grave. But the people created a legend in defiance of the limitations of this life, according to which one of our own daughters gets together with one of the others, a king, no less. There is not so much as a mention of marriage. Did Esther, the Jewish girl, marry the king, or did he possess her without the sacred vows? No Jew will touch upon the moral aspect directly. It is enough that we Jews have created the sense of its being possible somehow to become related to them, to the others—yet not with some ordinary Pole merely, but with the king, who, needless to say, thereby becomes a lover of Jews. We have given up a daughter, sent her out into the world like an ambassador, and we ask no questions. Really pious Jews are not at all eager to look into these matters thoroughly. It is enough for them that here in the valley is to be found the legend of a Jewish girl and a Polish king.”