The Glatstein Chronicles by Jacob Glatstein Read Free Book Online

in small factories. Then came the awful war, and he saw action as a seaman. After the war he was finally able to escape from a life in the miserable shops and became something of an intellectual, with a refined profession, though his bones still ached from all the days and nights of hard physical labor so that he almost lacked the strength to enjoy his new status. Still, going from sweatshop to teaching was like entering the millennium, like paradise on earth. “When you’re a teacher in a middle school instead of a workhorse in a factory, you come home and—the devil take it—there’s time to look into a book and to think about the mysteries of the world. As the poet Dehmel said, ‘
Nur zeit, zeit, zeit
’—let there only be time, time, time.” He confided that with a refined profession also came “a better class of friends.”
    He would never forget his dear friend, now deceased, a priest and “jewel of a man.” He may not have been a Marxist, but he had an ingrained sense of justice. A true American, he interpreted strictly the declaration that all men are created equal. This priest had an odd weakness for globes. He was a geographer and had amassed a wonderful collection, the most beautiful globes of their kind, which he loved to spin while contemplating the variety of lands and peoples and God’s blessing on all.
    One day, our Dane noticed a new acquisition that was exceptionally beautiful, an artistic triumph. “This must be the globe you have been looking for all your life,” he exclaimed. “Why, it’s exquisite! Who made it for you?”
    “Nobody,” the priest said simply. “It created itself.”
    The Dane thought the priest had lost his mind, but the latter stuck to his guns, insisting that the globe was indeed self-created, until, taking pity at last on his atheist friend, he said: “When it comes to this wooden globe, which is merely a mechanical representation of the earth, you cannot believe that it created itself. Yet when it comes to the great, big, beautiful, wonderful universe, with its millions of stars and planets, you are willing to swear by Darwin and Marx that this miraculous world created itself, out of thin air.”
    “Now wasn’t that a superb lesson in religion?” the Dane said with a smile, “Slightly primitive perhaps, but moving in its child’s logic. That’s how he was—a man of faith to the end, until he departed this life.”
    My talkative friend went on with his story, telling me that he was past forty when he married. His wife, a quiet woman almost his age, was content to be a housewife. She cheered his evenings at home, and in due course, twins arrived, a beautiful, blue-eyed boy and girl. Needless to say, he was wild with joy. He had found purpose in life. Life was crazy. You ran around like a hen, pecking for food, peck-peck, knowing that sooner or later someone was going to come along and wring your neck. Still, you kept going, and crazy as life was, you wanted to be a father, a husband, a grandfather, as well as a citizen in good standing, so peck-peck, you kept pecking away like a hen.
    “Tell me, Gladdy, my friend,” he said with sudden intimacy, devising a diminutive of my surname, “is there an afterlife? Or is it all just an empty dream, and the foolish hen lays down to die and sleeps forever? Well,” he sighed, “the twins didn’t live long, only three days, and both died almost at the very same instant. You know the reason—mother and father over forty. But biological facts don’t heal the wound.
    “I stood there looking at the lifeless little faces,” he continued, “grieving over my loss, until the last rays of the setting sun fell on their waxen figures and, all at once, I saw a great light. These infants—this little boy and this little girl—were miniature man and wife, my own father and mother who had abandoned me so early in life. Now they had made themselves visible to me in order to restore my lost faith. The dolls’ faces smiled