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

breath.
    Worse yet is when hecklers turn into the voice of your conscience. You pretend it isn’t happening, until one day you are afraid to reach for a glass of orange juice without reckoning all the political implications. And how dumb this politicking is! You no sooner locate your political absolute than along come the world leaders to season your ideals with executions, slaughters, and betrayals. We are baffled. Should we shout hurrah! and join the happy ranks of loyal recruits, or find ourselves a new political creed?
    I feel aboard this ship as Jonah must have felt in that first moment when he thought he had escaped God’s wrath. I breathe easier, having at last broken free from the whole abracadabra of my existence. Maybe here I will be able to scrape off the scabby crust that had accrued to me as a social animal, a writer-for-hire, a Jew in a bloody world that—
pace
Shakespeare—only demands
my
pound of flesh. Now all is well, and the sun beating down on the deck feels so beneficent that I don’t want to admit any thought that might claim me. For what is thought but clarification, and I want no clarification—only to see and hear for myself, without comparisons or conclusions.
    By now my fellow passengers, in contrast to our first day aboard, treat me with the same nonchalance that I accord them. I feel no need to speak to them. I look at them with half-closed eyes and attend to them with half-closed ears, and if it pleases me, I devote more attention to a speck of dust than to the group gathered beside me. All’s well and good, I’ve divested myself of the little I possess. I am a poor man who has accumulated such a store of poverty that I can afford to jettison the bits of knowledge I’ve acquired, the meager passions, the entire claptrap of my little world. And should faces from my past swim into view, they break apart like reflections on the water’s surface as I toss in pebbles to make them disappear.
    The sea, until now a frozen, immobile surface—“a painted ship on a painted sea”—suddenly came alive with porpoises, leaping and cavorting alongside our vessel. Anyone privileged to have once seen these creatures in motion will never forget the sight. They rise from the water by the tens or even hundreds in graceful arcs, heads plunging into the waves, but always in pairs, like two elegant hands. Arched in the air, they mirror themselves in the sun so that their every leap is a cascade of color. It is a marvelous sight, as if the sea had opened a porthole into its secrets to reveal the wonders just below its surface.
    The thought that had been teasing me all this while finally let me in on the secret that I was lucky to be away at this peak time of Jewish organizational politicking. For the height of summer was when the leaders of the community swung into action, furiously jockeying for place. And here was I, well out of it, on the high seas with not even so much as a newspaper assignment demanding my attention.
    This trip had occasioned my first face-to-face encounter with a boss. Until this last job, I had worked for the kind of organizations or companies that did not require dealing with the man on top. Since the bread I earned, with or without the butter, fell like manna from heaven, I had never seen my exalted provider and thus never felt any great divide between me, the “means of production,” and the boss, the absolute controller of my modest income. When I worked for the American Surety Company, a huge corporation that employed hundreds of people, I could observe the vast hierarchy of subordinates and superiors, the assorted ranks of lower-level toilers overseen by inspectors and superintendents, but I never got to see the shining face of our almighty ruler. Once, an arrogant type with just the right configuration of bald pate and gray fringe came by and looked us over, smacking his lips, as if he were counting his sheep. He seemed so unaccountably important that I was disappointed to