The Glatstein Chronicles (15 page)

“
Yevreyskaya golova,
a Jewish head!” I blurted out, paying him an innocent compliment. This is what Russians themselves used to say when marveling at Jewish accomplishment, but the words now fell with a thud. He paled and tried to extract me from the gaffe I had perpetrated, but I sank in deeper and deeper. As the others smiled in discomfort, he apologized for my use of an expression that was a relic from tsarist days. It seemed to me that, in one stroke, I had lost both worlds of my newly formed friendship with the Russian colony—the Russian and the Jewish—but worst of all, I had embarrassed the single Jew among them, as if I had slapped him in the face with my unhappy compliment. It was the faux pas of the evening, and it took some time for the embarrassment to lift.

Only slowly, very slowly, did he pick up the thread and resume his account, telling me how he, a Polish Hebrew-school boy, had managed to escape from that dung heap into the wider world. Had he waited just one more year, he would surely have become his father’s assistant, dragging unwilling, wailing children to the classroom. Instead, look at him, he’d been to America as the representative of a great land, the workers’ motherland, and was returning home to enjoy its blessings. In passing, he let slip that he had traveled to America on a German ship.

“A German ship?” I asked in astonishment.

“Yes,” he replied with perfect equanimity, as if my question was merely routine. It tore my heart to hear about his German passage, but he spoke about it so casually that I almost envied him. Here was a truly emancipated Jew! His father is a melamed in a small Polish town, and the son, in the era of Hitler, travels without qualm on a German ship!

“The food was delicious,” he said, smacking his lips, “and we never talked politics. They were very careful about this, and we, even more so.”

“But how does it feel nowadays to be a Jew on a German ship?” I asked, unable again to restrain myself.

He gave me a pitying smile and said, “That’s a sentimental question and we don’t have time for sentimentality.”

Once more I had occasion to envy my liberated coreligionist and proposed that we drink to the new Jew in Moscow, who doesn’t fall ill when he hears that Jews are being beaten in Algeria.

“A toast to the new Jew!” I cried out in a burst of masochism, as if sticking needles into my flesh.

“More sentimentality,” he rebuked me. “Let’s drink instead to the new man!” He went on to describe life in the Soviet Union, a veritable idyll as he saw it.

“You work hard,” he said, “but for whom? For yourself, of course. If you work real hard and show ability, you are rewarded with vacations, trips, special theater performances, the ballet, reserved seats at the movies, stays in sanitariums, and free medical treatment. And if you want to work extra, you get paid for every bit. Take me, for example. After I put in a day at the factory, I’m a lecturer at the university, for which I get paid again, and on those evenings when I’m not at the university, I often go back to the factory to work on a project. The Soviet Union is built on work—sweet work, because you work for yourself. Some people earn so much that they can’t spend it all and are able to save a good many thousands of rubles. But don’t worry, we’re not breeding millionaires. What do we do with the extra money? We help a friend, we give it away, we give it back to the government by buying government bonds.”

The picture he painted of the good life in the workers’ paradise was like watching a Soviet film—fields heavy with grain, plump cattle with udders bursting to the full, laughing faces, everybody happily at work, singing all the while. Behold the millennium!

Dance music was now drifting in from the ballroom, along with clip-clops from the swaying dance floor, rocking gently on an unseen sea, to which no one was giving a second thought. It seemed as if the music and the dancing were accompaniments to the Soviet idyll as described by my Jewish engineer friend.

“You understand?” I said to him. “I honestly don’t know if I can untangle all the strands of my life story in a way that will make sense to you. I come from Lublin, a small city in Poland, and I remember the revolutionary songs which the workers in my town used to sing, what their hopes were, and the look in their eyes when they spoke of the social revolution. In fact, the revolution was watered with their tears. They, the downtrodden, wanted to stand tall, alongside a Rothschild, a Shereshevsky, a Brodsky, a Wissotsky, and our own local millionaire, Sheinbrun. But life is a lousy midwife and child delivery a hazardous business. In the course of being born, someone’s skull can get crushed, someone else’s hands and feet can get mangled, and the devil knows what else can go wrong. In a happier instance, the midwife delivers a perfect infant, patting it on the head and tying a red ribbon around its wrist. One such healthy baby grows up smooth-tongued, another can’t put words together properly and from birth on is destined to become the slave of those who tell him what he can and cannot do, what he wants and doesn’t want. One grows up with clever hands, another bumbles through, a third grows up dull-headed, while a fourth proves a mathematical genius. Such is the despotism of tens of thousands of blackened years, the genetic heritage of great-great-great-grandmothers and -grandfathers, aunts, uncles, and the devil knows who else, going back all the way to our Cro-Magnon or Neanderthal ancestors.”

I was now wound up. “You Bolsheviks,” I continued, “play right into the hands of that miserable midwife. You accept her decrees. You reward talent, while the helpless among you, the damned, the incompetent, are left to fend for themselves. Those with ability get to drink wine from the Caucasus, those without are lucky if they see a piece of bread. All those begrimed tailors and shoemakers, with their tear-stained cheeks, have achieved nothing. Where are the luxury liners for them? When do they get to celebrate? And yet, they are in the tens of millions, and you, the talented ones, members of the Party, are in the minority. Where is their recompense? Their downtrodden lives, their tearful stammer won the revolution for you clever, intelligent types. Believe me when I say, in all sincerity, that you are terrific engineers. Yet here you sit, enjoying the best, while all those unfortunate millions remain sunk in their misery. Their revolution, my friend, has yet to come.

“Take your comrade here. He had to get lucky and win a lottery in order to be equal to you and earn himself a break. He had no other alternative. Neither capitalism nor Communism wants to pay for his lack of ability; he must always be dreaming of winning the sweepstakes. Yet that unfortunate creature is your true millionaire, the salt of the earth. He isn’t cunning, he doesn’t know how to play politics, he can’t make speeches, he’s no brilliant mathematician, but the truth is that he helped build the new society, which isn’t merely for the blessed, talented, lucky few who’ve jumped onto the bandwagon and now hold the reins.”

We all went up and walked round and round on deck. The night was so bright you could make out every feature on every face. An invigorating breeze rose up from the sea to lift our spirits and gladden our hearts.

“You are a sentimental bourgeois and an enemy of the Soviet Union,” said the Jewish engineer, placing a friendly hand on my shoulder, “and I have no idea what you’ve been babbling about.”

A ship outlined in lights came out of nowhere and began to accompany us, like an orbiting moon. For the first time, we had the feeling that we were not alone on the vast sea but one part of a greater whole, of a grand, oceanic scheme. Sonya Yakovlyevna was so moved by the ship’s appearance that she danced for joy, like Robinson Crusoe at the sight of his rescuers. Khazhev and the tall Wisconsin teacher stood leaning against the railing and stared at the lights of the vessel, now moving alongside ours. The Finnish-American nurse sang a Finnish folk song. The lady from Riga kept reciting verses of sea ballads in five or six languages. The middle-aged Englishwoman, walking arm in arm with the blond young Russian, disappeared with him every so often into a dark corner. Each time that she emerged from hiding, she would say to me, in a breathy whisper, “Aren’t these Russians perfectly exquisite!”

Should you want to conjure up the aroma of our British ship, you must begin with the salty breakfasts that permeated the large dining room with disagreeable smells of frying bacon, kippers—grilled, baked, or fried—and herring.

At my table, inhaling the pungent odors, sat a deaf professor, munching on a piece of dry toast. Next to him was a student, of middling height, with broad, athletic shoulders, big hands, and full cheeks. The professor held up an ear trumpet pointed toward the student, listened to what he was asking as if he were on the phone with him, and answered with a mouthful of food and in a high, squeaky voice that was in sharp discord with his commanding head and steel-gray hair. The student was also something of a surprise. His appearance suggested some sort of athlete, but he turned out to be an economics student, indeed, a whiz on the subject, and he bombarded the professor with questions about supply and demand, tariffs, international agreements, farm production, all bolstered by tens of citations that were as dry as the toast the professor was attacking with his false teeth.

The professor, who was on his way to do research at the British Museum, was visibly impatient with the student’s importuning. He would have preferred to engage in lighter conversation with others at the table, but the student was intent on monopolizing his attention and moved on from economics to pestering him with details about student life at American universities as compared with the European, all of this replete with statistics. The student ate quickly, never looking around him or down at his plate. He kept his gaze fixed on the professor, giving the poor man no chance to turn elsewhere. Like some giant, omnivorous whale, looking to scoop up its fill of knowledge, the student must have belonged to the school that holds one mustn’t forgo any opportunity for instruction. Even later on deck, when the professor had finally managed to get out from under his clutches, the young man sat off in a corner, head buried in a book, taking notes. Here, too, he didn’t glance up or return the smiles directed his way. He seemed to have decided exactly how he wanted to live and how to make every moment count, for a career doesn’t just stand there waiting, it must be cultivated, otherwise somebody else will snatch it.

At table, whenever the professor, wanting to be polite, threw some good-natured remarks my way, the student made a face, showing signs of impatience, only waiting for the strategic moment when he might reclaim the professor for himself, reattach himself like a leech, and resume spouting. Only after the two had left did things lighten up. The thirteen-year-old girl at our table didn’t lose a moment and immediately started imitating the professor’s high, squeaky voice and the student’s bass drone. She strung together meaningless sentences with ten-dollar words, mocking the elevated discourse of the learned duo. Her father, a hardworking American, with a red neck and an even redder face marked by an outbreak of eczema that divided his countenance into peaks and valleys, ordered her to stop, but couldn’t help himself and laughed so hard that he spit his tea back into his saucer. He coughed and choked, but his daughter persisted in her comic performance and answered him in the professor’s falsetto voice.

This American workingman, with his calloused hands and scarred face, who seemed lost among all the big-city sophisticates in the dining room, also began to loosen up and became rather animated, as if he had just bidden farewell to two gravediggers. Between sips of tea, he told me that he was a widower, raising on his own the little girl his late wife had left on his hands. He explained that his daughter, now thirteen, had emerged from childhood with a rare combination of boyish and girlish traits—mischievous as a boy and flirtatious as a girl. Since she was the only female in the household, she felt she could act the coquette with her own father. Her split nature was reflected in the contrast between her sturdy body and her plump, round girlish face, with its laughing, mischievous blue eyes. The girl was dark-complexioned and healthy looking; she looked as if she had been cast out of tasty rye bread. She behaved toward her father like one pal to another, speaking to him as an equal, and also chewed him out like a little wife, as well as watching over him to make sure that he wasn’t eating too fast or too much.

For his part, the father kept his strong sentiments for his daughter under layer upon layer of protective armor, afraid that he might cry at the mere sight of his playful kitten, babbling away at the table, and self-assured enough to interrupt the deaf professor when she felt like it. So to mask his feelings he acted toward her as buddy-buddy as she did toward him. He was on his way to England, he told me, for a yearlong stay with his parents. He wanted to give his child a holiday that would also get her acquainted with her grandparents. He, too, needed a good, long rest. Other than the joy his daughter brought him, he confided that he hadn’t had a single carefree moment in his entire life. He worked like a horse and worried about raising his little girl, which was the toughest job of all, since he was father, mother, and cook, as well as breadwinner.

He was employed in a gold mine. “You don’t get much sympathy from ordinary blokes when you tell them that you work in a gold mine,” he said, in his broad British accent. “They hear ‘gold’ and right away think that you must be rich, because how can it be that some of that stuff doesn’t stick to you, and besides, gold is such a nice, refined metal, mining for it can’t be all that hard. None of that, of course, is true. Gold is as hard to mine as coal. The gold goes to the mine owners, and we get the copper, that is, the few lousy coppers they pay us, for which we work like slaves.”

He had certainly earned his rest, he said, and all he wanted to do on this Atlantic crossing was to lie in the sun, warming himself, like a hound. He complained bitterly about the aloofness of the passengers, so different from those on the ship that had brought him from California to New York. Now there was a lively voyage, because everyone aboard was an American—friendly people, not like the teachers, doctors, and professors of the present company, who began to stink of Europe the moment they came aboard, second-class people the lot of them, trying to pass for first-class. “I’m not an educated man,” he said, “but I know all about people like that, and I don’t like them.”