November 28, 2007
Jacob Glatstein's Summoned Home
As I rooted around the Web for something to post today, I came across this book excerpt in the most recent issue of Pakn Treger, the magazine of the National Yiddish Book Center.
The excerpt comes from a new translation of two books by Jacob Glatstein (pictured right), a Polish-born poet, journalist and novelist who wrote in Yiddish. Yale University Press will publish both of those books together as “Summoned Home: Two Novels
Glatstein, also known as Yankev Glatshteyn, was born in Lublin, Poland in 1896. He moved to the United States as a teenager and eventually established a reputation as one of the foremost Yiddish poets of his day.
In 1934, he travelled back to Poland to visit his dying mother. This journey became the basis for two ‘autobiographical’ novels, in which the Yiddish poet narrator, “Yash,” mixes his observations of growing anti-Semitism in Europe along with memories of his early childhood in Poland. While the work is fiction, Wisse notes in the introduction that everything “Yash” says and does corresponds to what we know about Glatstein.
In the Pakn Treger excerpt, Yash is still sailing to Europe when news of Hitler’s “Night of the Long Knives,” reaches the ship. He searches for fellow Jews to discuss the news and he comes across a man who appeared to be davening in a quiet corner of the ship’s deck. The man is unconcerned by the violence among the Nazis but he notes that “The whole world is our enemy.”
Something about the man’s appearance reminds Yash of his early childhood years:
This slipper-clad Jew emitted the same aura of Sabbath calm that hung over our house like a secret, when Mother and Father would shut their bedroom door for a nap following the Sabbath-afternoon meal, a stillness that would prevail until darkness fell and it came time for Father to take down the iron bolts and bars from his shop. The smell of the rusted metal, the clanking of the frozen keys, and the appearance of the first customer of the new week – these were the signals that the God of Abraham had relit all the lamps, marking the end of the holy Sabbath and the start of another week of care. All of a sudden, the gentle Jew studying his holy texts on the ship’s deck, appeared to me as a bridge, linking my first seventeen-eighteen years at home with the present journey back – a voyage of return, to see my dying mother. “Her ears are as yellow as wax,” my aunt had written. “Pack your things and come immediately, and may God help us all and bring you here in time to find her still alive.”
It’s this type of writing that has me eager to read the rest of “Summoned Home.” Wisse’s introduction says that Glatstein meant to write a trilogy but he stopped after two Yash novels because “[t]he destruction of European Jewry and the entire world of his youth changed the scheme of his project beyond recovery.”
Indeed, his life and work changed after the Holocaust as he embraced more of an activist role on behalf of world Jewry. Glatstein died in 1971 in New York City. For more about his life and work, you can check out Janet R. Hadda’s 1980 book, “Yankev Glatshteyn
Thanks for drawing attention to this forthcoming book–whose title has been changed to The Glatstein Chronicles. We think it is a modern American as well as Jewish classic.