Jacob Glatstein may be the only major writer of the twentieth century better known (at least until now) by another writer’s fictional representation of himself than in his own person and words. Widely respected, especially among Yiddish readers, for a powerful body of Holocaust poetry like the passage quoted above, he appears in Cynthia Ozick’s satirical but affectionate story “Envy; or, Yiddish in America” (first published in Commentary in November 1969) as a Yiddish poet named Edelshtein. Unlike his rival Ostrover, modeled on Isaac Bashevis Singer, who only writes in Yiddish (and, in Glatstein’s view, writes mainly unpleasant stories of horror and eroticism), Edelshtein believes in it. In the wake of the Holocaust, Yiddish, the mameloshen or everyday language of a majority of Hitler’s victims, had, in Glatstein’s view, replaced Hebrew as the Jews’ loshen koydesh (holy tongue). By 1948 Hebrew was an everyday language in Israel, used by peddlers of unkosher meat in Tel-Aviv, while Yiddish had become the holy tongue of martyrdom, demanding perpetuation: “In Talmud,” says Edelshtein, “if you save a single life, it’s as if you saved the world. And if you save a language? Worlds maybe. Galaxies. The whole universe.” [1]
Glatstein was no less eloquent about the crucial place of Yiddish in the aftermath of the Holocaust. In an interview of 1955, he told Abraham Tabachnik that “the obligation of a Yiddish poet today is to seek a place in that circle of … Jewishly responsible human beings, who, through art, want to express, to become a voice, a tongue for our generation. The Yiddish poet must become the aesthetic chronicler of what happened, and he must fix it for all time. In comparison with what we have hitherto regarded as poetry, the responsibility of a Yiddish poet today…is a fearsome responsibility.” [2] This made Glatstein all the more bitter about the fact that he, one of the last defenders of the Yiddish word and the major post-Holocaust Yiddish literary figure in America, was obliged to know the poetry of W. H. Auden, but Auden was under no obligation to read his writings, or even to know of his existence.
The Glatstein Chronicles [3] (edited with a superb introduction by Ruth Wisse), a hybrid of autobiography and fiction first published in Yiddish, comprises two novellas describing Glatstein’s return to Lublin, Poland in 1934, after twenty years’ absence, to visit his dying mother. The first volume, entitled Ven Yash iz geforn, appeared in Yiddish in 1937, the second, Ven Yash iz gekumen, in 1940. Book One, now entitled Homeward Bound, has been finely translated by Maier Deshell, former editor of the Jewish Publication Society (and winner of the Leviant Prize in Yiddish Studies for his translations); Book Two, now called Homecoming at Twilight, was translated by the late Norbert Guterman in 1962. A projected third volume, which would have described a post-war return to Lublin, never appeared because post-war Lublin had become for Jews what it is in “Dead Men Don’t Praise God”: the nearby killing center called Majdanek.
In 1934, one year into Hitler’s rule and what Lucy Dawidowicz named “The War Against the Jews,” Glatstein (fictionalized as “Yash”) and his fellow-travellers were sailing to Europe on a British ship. Katherine Anne Porter’s famous novel Ship of Fools (1962) was set in 1931 aboard a ship headed to Germany; and there are some striking similarities between the two books.
Although filial duty is the motive for Glatstein’s trip, he does not hold back from conversations with his fellow-passengers. From them we learn that the narrator writes for a Yiddish newspaper, that his poetry shows tendencies both erotic and nationalistic, that he sides with religious Jews in their skirmishes with Bundists, Bolsheviks and other socialists who threaten Jewish unity more than Christian proselytizers do (and are as prone to violence as Gentile soldiers). Unlike those who now think that “loving Yiddish” requires hating Israel, Glatstein admired Zionism. [4] Yash’s own heroes are literary figures such as Sholom Aleichem and Haim Nachman Bialik, “the greatest Jewish poet since Yehuda Halevi” (141).
The ship is well-supplied with fools, especially the Jewish sort. Prominent among them is “a Dutch Jew, pure and simple, a descendant of generations of Dutch Jews.” He is little concerned with the rise of Hitler, which he blames on the ostjuden, who “always attract attention to themselves”; he imputes Jewish problems in Holland to “the affliction of Zionism, which [is] spreading among the youth like an epidemic” (30). Several passengers sing the praises of “the brave new world of the USSR” (137), where Jew-hatred has (so they believe) vanished, a great experiment is in process, and humanity is being reborn in collectivist test-tubes. Others worry not so much about the rise of Hitler or other political menaces but about Glatstein himself, ”a writer over there who’s eavesdropping on every word you say [in order to] write about you” (93). That writer is obsessed by an eerie foreboding about things to come: “In twenty-five years such travelers returning to pay respects to the graves of forefathers will have disappeared….The familiar Poland will have died, and with it the longing or the hatred for that Poland. There will be tourists, but no one going home to see a dying mother or father, or to mourn dead parents” (137).
Volume Two leaps over the details of Glatstein’s mother’s funeral to his last days in Europe prior to returning to New York. In the manner of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924), which had recently been published in a Yiddish translation by Singer, Glatstein gathers his Jews into a resort-sanatorium, located near Lublin. (Later, in 1980, Aharon Appelfeld would use the same device in Badenheim 1939.) As one character says: “Nearly all the guests in this resort are sick. I’d say nine out of ten…” Many seek a cure for “arteriosclerosis,” which is elusive because “in this resort…the word is used in a different sense, to signify a hardening of the brain” (195). Several are consumed by resentment of their brethren who have abandoned their families for the promised land of America. They entrust Yash (Glatstein) with such charming messages as: “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” (270).
Yet many of these sick Jews, unlike Mann’s doomed Europeans, have rich blood, powerful personalities, and prophetic potentiality for intellectual heroism. Prominent among them is a sixteen-year old Chassid who gives vivid reports of his discussions with Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank. Brazenly immodest, he lays claim to an imperial intellect that has mastered “all of Jewish literature” and aspires to a science of the sciences that integrates all branches of knowledge: “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” (286).
Even more striking among the sanatorium’s residents is Steinman, an elderly German-trained historian who survived a pogrom and whose personal impressions of the diverse vitality of Jewish intellectual life at the turn of the century would be the high point of this book, were they not overshadowed by his premonitions of the looming “extermination”. Anyone who doubts that at least some Jews were fully aware of the genocidal intentions of Germans and their sympathizers when World War II began should attend closely to this passage published in 1940. “Yes,” says Steinman, “they want to destroy us, nothing less. Yes, to destroy us. For instance, take me-I am a patriotic Pole. And yet they’d destroy me too. They want to exterminate us, purely and simply. “But why?” asks his interlocutor, one Finkel. Surely there must be a reason. “Why?” replies an exasperated Steinman, and (in a classic utterance) answers as follows:
“For the Sabbath …. They hate us for observing the Sabbath, and they hate us for violating the Sabbath. They hate pious Jews, and they hate freethinkers who eat lobster. They hate our capitalists and they hate our beggars, they hate our reactionaries and they hate our radicals, those who earn their bread and those who die three times a day from starvation. …Sometimes the ringleader is called Pharaoh, sometimes Torquemada, and sometimes Hitler…” (226).
Steinman tells the guests of the (quixotic) efforts by Israel Hildesheimer and Heinrich Graetz to “reform” the spiritual life of Polish Jewry on the German model. He gives a withering critique of the assimilationist ideas of Jacob Gordin, whose “bloodless new Judaism” encapsulated in the slogan “Be a Jew at home, and a man in the street” flourished-until Jewish blood flowed in pogroms. He calls Jewish life in the 1880s “a sorry spectacle” until “suddenly a new light dawned in our exile” (238). Theodor Herzl. Steinman’s impassioned account of the first Zionist congress in 1897 and being inspired by Herzl and Nordau to preach Zionism in crowded tailors’ and shoemakers’ synagogues moves one of the guests to say that “It’s to Paradise you have just taken us.” His story reminds us that Israel was created not because of the Holocaust, which destroyed the most Zionist-inclined Jews in the world, but in spite of it.
The book’s crucial autobiographical segment is Glatstein’s account of his education, which pursued the ideals of Haskalah, the Hebrew Enlightenment. Whereas I. B. Singer recalled that his father accused all secular writers, especially Yiddish and Hebrew ones, of leading Jews to heresy via “sweetened poison,” [5] Glatstein’s secular teacher Goldblat “never tried to diminish what I learned at cheder, [but] added to it.” Moreover, Glatstein loved Goldblat’s lessons because they “had no relation whatever to plans for a career, they had no purpose at all” (305). Thus did Glatstein absorb, in a profoundly Jewish setting, the meaning of Aristotle’s distinction between liberal and servile knowledge, that of the free man seeking escape from ignorance, and that of the slave, pursuing utility.
But these Enlightenment ideals, like Polish Jewry itself, would be turned to dust and ashes in the Holocaust. Glatstein repudiated them all in a bitter poem of 1938: “Good night, wide world,/big stinking world,/Not you but I slam shut the gate./With a long gabardine,/with a fiery yellow patch,/…I’m going back to the ghetto…to my crooked streets, humped lanterns,/my sacred pages, my Bible, /my Gemorra.”*
*Translations by Ruth Whitman.
[1] Ozick has often denied that the character Edelshtein was based on Glatstein, insisting that she really had the internecine squabbles of the American Hebrew poets in mind; but nobody, least of all Glatstein, has believed her.
[2] A. Tabachnik, “A Conversation with Jacob Glatstein,” Yiddish (Summer 1973), 41
[3] Jacob Glatstein, The Glatstein Chronicles (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010). Subsequent references to the book will be given in parentheses in the text.
[4] See, for example, his statement of 1955: “We stand before a divine revelation, a revelation with so much divine destruction and so much divine redemption, and we see it happening before our eyes, the miracle of our times. And we see a Jewish people that has more right on its side than any other people in the world today. Nor was there ever a people at any time in the history of the world that was more sinned against. Every living Jew had a father burned or a mother killed. Such a people has great responsibilities. It has an unforeseen new mission. “-Ibid., 40. Volume Two of The Glatstein Chronicles was not the writer’s only book of 1940 about the predicament of European Jewry facing the Holocaust. He also published in that year Emil un Karl, a novel set in Vienna during the early days of the destruction process. It has been translated into English by Jeffrey Shandler as Emil and Karl (New Milford, CT: Roaring Book Press, 2006.
[5] Joel Blocker and Richard Elman, “An Interview with Isaac Bashevis Singer,” Commentary 36 (November 1963), 368.
