The Glatstein Chronicles by Jacob Glatstein Read Free Book Online Page A

serenely and I bowed my head at the revelation. When I told this to my wife, she made no response. She was in a state of shock, and her melancholy silence lasted several months. But my suffering was peaceful because I had my faith back with renewed clarity.
    “Well, to make a long story short, we had another child that, mercifully, lived, but my wife became seriously ill. Doctors advised her to return to her native town in Denmark, and she’s been there with the child ever since. Every summer now, for the past six years, I’ve been going over there to be with them.”
    His was no easy life, to be sure. His wife was an invalid, albeit gentle and devoted. In the course of his summer visits, they slept together only five or six times, and that was it for the year. He was no longer a young man and couldn’t change his ways, even in the face of the temptation that came his way in the shape of the fluttery middle-school girls, who thrust their young breasts right up to his nose, making his head spin. He was aware of what went on in schools between male teachers and female students, all those stories about orgies. But he was self-?disciplined, not for nothing was he Scandinavian. One had to be very careful not to slip. So each day he went home to his room, to his old maidservant, who cooked him his meals, to his dog, his radio, and his books on cooperatives.
    I asked him to join me for a drink. “No, thank you,” he said. “I don’t drink, just the occasional beer, and I only smoke four or five cigarettes a day.” And, he added, whenever sinful thoughts invaded his mind, teasing him and disturbing his equanimity, he thought, who knows, perhaps if he were younger he might act on the impulse and write to his wife, explaining everything clearly and explicitly. She would understand and forgive him.
    “But, Gladdy my friend,” he said, winding up his tale, “I’m losing my hair and teeth, and something else doesn’t work as well as it did in my younger days. I’ll just have to get used to it. The only question is: Are we making fools of ourselves? Is there an afterlife, or is the joke on us?”
    All that night I thought about the twins and the reborn father and mother who had sentenced themselves to nine months of anxious gestation and to a second death so that they might bring a measure of hope and encouragement to their orphaned son. It was like some Hasidic tale, but with a Scandinavian twist and a whiff of salt air, joined to a death-fugue, rising and falling with the waves of the sea. I even attempted to write a poem about this, but it came out sounding more like John Masefield than a proper Yiddish poem.

Chapter 2
1
    Only one and a half days out to sea, and already I feel released from obligations to family, society, even from the gamut of political credos with which, for professional reasons, I had found it necessary to stock my brain, merely to sustain myself, earning me my livelihood—a modest share of oxygen to fill my lungs and drink sufficient to water my gut. It was for just such “luxuries” (though perhaps also for the roof over my head, a garment to cover myself, a bit of warmth, and a wife) that I immersed myself in all those poisonous ideologies.
    There was a time, years back, when for me introspection meant philosophizing about the meaning of existence, a private pleasure, like the cud chewing of a self-absorbed and sated cow in a sunny meadow. But these past few years my mind is mired in the bloodstained world of politics. “I think, therefore I am” is no longer enough. Am what? One must legitimate oneself by announcing a political creed: I am a liberal, a Fascist, a Social-Fascist, or a Communist, a Trotskyite, a Lovestonite, a Zionist. Hecklers shout down from the gallery, demanding to know, “Are you with us, or with our enemies?” Events move so quickly that
we
and
the enemy
shift kaleidoscopically, and yesterday’s friends change into today’s foes too swiftly to let you catch your