The Crossed-Out Swastika by Cyrus Cassells

(Cyrus Cassells)

Introduction by Charles Adès Fishman:

There are poets who change the emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic landscape for us, whose words seem to fly even as they stagger with the weight of what they’ve imagined and what they’ve seen. They are our brothers and sisters in this life, yet they leap ahead of us at each stage of the journey because their hearts ache to write it all down, to say what has wounded and exalted them, and they say it with all the blood and flesh still clinging to the bone.

Cyrus Cassells is one of these poets, and the wonder of it is that The Crossed-Out Swastika, this most recent gathering of his poems, has an antecedent: Soul Make a Path Through Shouting (Copper Canyon, 1994), the first part of a projected three-book sequence that will deal with human rights and spiritual endurance. John Guzlowski and I have selected 5 poems from The Crossed-OutSwastika that we feel illustrate and embody this goal. The feature includes links to a wonderful reading Cassells gave in November at the Rothko Chapel in Houston and to a recent review of this book by Dan Shewan, as well as a personal statement about his enterprise and his vision.

I would like to add one more item to this feature: a 20-line excerpt from “The Weight of Brothers,” from Soul Make a Path Through Shouting: here is the drusy beauty of phrasing and the moral clarity that I associate with the writing of this exceptional poet:

To see at all is grace:

This child offers the camera

His blighted gaze.

This man peers through a mask of fire;

It has come to this:

Hen feathers, rubble, shards of broken dolls,

Rubbish from the pockets

Of a Russian soldier’s corpse,

Culled from the dust

Of his gutted shelter;

A tourniquet of turban cloth:

His blood and shock

Carried on a ragged mule

Through the winter-toothed mountains,

Over the poisoned ground,

Under hoary stars, grenades

Strapped to kites,

Over the border,

A cusp of iced trees,

To the camp —

A GREAT BEAUTY

                                              

And when her son never returned

from the meant-to-crush-him camps,

the crucible of Poland,

always-hard-at-work Isa slept

for endless hours,

and once, under her lids, she was led,

by diligent female Virgils,

to a vast meadow

where an inspirited Isa embraced,

one by one,

countless women who remained

in mourning for their cherished sons.                               

Gallant and stricken,

together the myriad bereaved               

but defiant women formed

an ever-widening circle,

prodigal with bitter tears,

and then, suddenly,

like a jackdaw darting

from eave to sun-drenched eave,

something flew between the throats

of the grieving,

heart-gutted mothers,

and a great beauty arose:

In the dream, Isa recalled,

the singing of the harrowed women

with war-taken sons   

hushed the world’s barrenness.

In the dream, the startling river of sound

altered the embattled earth.

SABINE WHO WAS HIDDEN IN THE MOUNTAINS

                                                                                                      

I.  A Girl of Vichy France

Blue paper filled her first windows,

not snatch-gossip sparrows

or the sun’s reveille,

but a verdict of iron,

perfect-for-hopscotch parks,

Seine-lit stores

with exquisite engines

of this-and-not-that,

became, for “me–first” Sabine, impossible:

everywhere almond-green greatcoats

and boots like trampling hooves—

Bells of invaded parishes

tolled the sallow hours;

fine-made mezuzahs were mauled

by braying patriots,

and learners whose hair

would never thin or silver

were banished from their desks and inkwells:

École de Garcons, rue Neuve Saint Pierre,

École de Filles, rue de L’ave Maria . . .

Where a cellophane France,

all flyapart assurances,

renounced Sabine and her peers—

plane trees and regretful plaques

urging N’oubliez pas

or Ne les oublions jamais,

so that the questing pilgrim

or the alert passerby

might perceive,

in the midst of the sumptuous city,

soulhollows

where even the smallest Parisians

were obliterated without pity.

II. A Resemblance

A contrite Paris has unveiled

photos and still-vile documents to decry

the specter of sundering trains

aiming star-patched children

through tunnels and laconic fields:

11,400 hopes--

Sabine, who was hidden in the mountains,

has nudged me to city hall

to live awhile in the duress,

the dog’s-snarl cosmos

of never-grown deportees.

But will Parisians take time,

Sabine laments, to bear in mind

the children of verboten sidewalks,

verboten parks?

Look, Sabine remarks:

before his transport to Poland,

a brave boy left on a wall,

We are leaving Drancy in good spirits,

but for the traveler, the commuter,

today Drancy, where we Jews were held,

is only a place you whisk by

on the train to the airport—

Near us, some vying kids

are unsettled

by the uncanny resemblance

between a child in a yellowed photo

and a schoolgirl who lingers,

crestfallen, hollow before

the image of her deported twin–

When the welter of kids passes,

Sabine whispers:

Ma pauvre petite!

Hurry, we’ve got to help her:

she was too stunned to notice

the girl in the picture lived!

  

III. Ghosts

Sabine with her forest-colored blouse

fills my summer rooms

on the rue des Rosiers;

on Sabbath mornings,

Hebrew singing floats

from the temple on the rue Pavée,

competing with the voluble

pigeons who adore my ledge.

Clear-eyed Sabine is quick to notice

how my writing desk faces

the École de Travail with its doleful plaque

blessing deported pupils and teachers--

So the war has become

your devoirs:

Yes, Sabine, my homework

that I can’t seem to escape:

My friend, when I entered your flat,

I could feel it in my bones:

the family that once lived here

was deported!

No surprise in your neighborhood:

the Pletzl!

Sabine, yesterday my landlord read

my poem rooted in the war

and revealed: as a small girl,

she was hidden like you.

Poet, from cellar to cellar, I remember

I held onto, of all things,

a picture book about a magical goat,

inscribed by my witty father:

This storybook belongs

to Mademoiselle Sabine

the way Paris once belonged

to Marie Antoinette—

Somehow having that book

helped me to endure

the cold and fear---

And when I returned to Paris

it was to a world of ghosts,

the void shaped

by my murdered generation.

Was it the same for you

in the epidemic--

when you returned,

after so many deaths,

to San Francisco?

Do the men, like my school friends,

still come to  you in dreams?

At the exhibit, I thought:

Small as they were in life,

my playmates,

their souls must be immense by now.

                          

JULIEK’S VIOLIN

                          

Even here?

In this snowbound barrack?

Suddenly, the illicit sounds

of Beethoven’s concerto

erupt from Juliek’s smuggled violin,

suffusing this doomsday shed

teeming with the trampled

and the barely alive,

realm of frostbite and squalor,

clawing panic and suffocation—

Insane, God of Abraham,

insanely beautiful:

a boy insisting

winter cannot reign forever,

a boy conveying his brief,

bounded life

with a psalmist’s or a cantor’s

arrow-sure ecstasy—

One prison-striped friend

endures to record

the spellbinding strings,

the woebegone—

and the other,

the impossible Polish fiddler,

is motionless by morning,

his renegade instrument

mangled

under the haggard weight

of winterkilled, unraveling men.

Music at the brink of the grave,

 

eloquent in the pitch dark,

tell-true, indelible,

                              

as never before,

as never after—

Abundance,

emending beauty,

linger in the listening,

the truth-carrying soul of Elie,      

soul become slalom swift,

camp shrewd, uncrushable;

abundance, be here, always here,

in this not-yet-shattered violin.

THE POSTCARD OF SOPHIE SCHOLL      

There is the lightning-white moment

when I learn—

the way my costive train to Krakow

stopped

and I woke to find myself,

in jostling twilight,

at the Auschwitz platform—

that the Italian postcard

I garnered in Milan years ago

as a genial talisman,

isn’t of a pipe-dreaming

Italian boy,

no, no, but an androgynous

image of Sophie Scholl,

the young, intrepid resistance heroine—

as if I’d registered,

in my Schubert-adoring daughter,

my school-resisting son,

a fire undetected before:

Doric-strong nouns demanding

What would you undertake

to stop tyranny?—

stouthearted nouns:

integrity, probity, courage;

in benighted Munich,

the spit-in-the-eye swiftness,

the unbossed bloom

of a crossed-out swastika,

the fierce integrity

in the gust of the word freedom

sprayed over the walls

and ramparts of a deranged

fatherland that rent flesh

as if it were foolscap—

Someday you will be

where I am now,

a steely, premonitory Sophie

proclaimed to the rapacious

Nazi tribunal that rushed her

to execution—

Gazer, collector, in clarity’s name,

look close, then closer:

it’s not just a bud-sweet,

pensive beauty,

a bel ragazzo’s charm;

all these years:

it’s the spirit of crusading youth

that I’ve cherished.

AUSCHWITZ, ALL HALLOWS

Look, we have made

a counterpoint

of white chrysanthemums,

a dauntless path

of death-will-not-part-us petals

and revering light;

even here,

even here

before the once-wolfish ovens,

the desecrating wall

where you were shot,

the shrike-stern cells

where you were bruised

and emptied of your time-bound beauty--

you of the confiscated shoes

and swift-shorn hair,

you, who left,

as sobering testament, the scuffed                   

luggage of utter hope

and harrowing deception.

Come back, teach us.

From these fearsome barracks

and inglorious fields

flecked with human ash,

in the russet-billowing hours

of All Hallows,

let the pianissimo

of your truest whispering

(vivid as the crunched frost        

of a forced march)

become a slowly blossoming,

ever-voluble hearth—

revealing to us,

the baffled, the irresolute,

the war torn, the living,

more of the fire

and attar of what it means

to be human.

___________________

The Crossed-Out Swastika by Cyrus Cassells is available at Amazon
.  

A review of Cassells' book by Dan Shewan appeared recently online at The Rumpus.  You can read it by clicking here.

Cyrus Cassells is the author of five books: The Mud Actor, a National Poetry Series winner and finalist for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award; Soul Make a Path Through Shouting, hailed as one of the Best Books of 1994 by Publishers Weekly, the winner of the William Carlos Williams Award, and a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize; Beautiful Signor, winner of the Lambda Literary Award, the Sister Circle Book Award (for African-American literature), and a finalist for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award; More Than Peace and Cypresses, a Lannan Literary Selection, named one of the Best Poetry Books of 2004 by Library Journal; and The Crossed-Out Swastika, 2012. Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas, translated from the Catalan, is forthcoming. Among his honors are a Lannan Literary Award, a Pushcart Prize, and two NEA grants. He is a Professor of English at Texas State University-San Marcos.

Helen Eisen

I received a note yesterday telling me that Helen Eisen recently died, on Oct. 29, 2012 in New York.

I never met Helen, but I did read her book of poems, The Permeability of Memory, and it touched me deeply.  Like me, Helen had been born in a Displaced Persons camp, a refugee camp, after World War II to parents who were Polish survivors.

In 2009, I did a blog about Helen and her writing.  I would like to repost it now as a memorial to Helen.


THE PERMEABILITY OF MEMORY

Helen Eisen's The Permeability of Memory drew me in because she did something that I find myself unable to do.

 

I've written a lot about my father and mother and their experiences in the concentration camps, but I've seldom been able to write about my own memories of my experiences in the refugee camps, the DP camps, after the war. Part of this, I'm sure is my inability to remember much about those times. I was born in 1948 and left the camps in 1951 to come to America with my parents. Another part of this, however, I think, is my sense that my story -- as opposed to the story of my parents and the people of their generation -- is nothing. I find it almost impossible to think of my parents' experiences within the context of my experiences. I can't think about that connection. When I write, I write about them.

Helen Eisen, however, has somehow found a way of connecting herself to her past and her parents in ways I can't, and I admire her writing and her gift for doing this.

I asked her a couple questions about memory and about the title of her work The Permeability of Memory.

Here's what I wrote to her:

The Permeability of Memory? Can you please explain the title? Memory is something that really interests me. I write a lot about my parents and I know that my memories of their past don't always line up with their memories of their past or my sister's memories of the past. In fact, I wrote a poem about the distance between my mom's memories and mine. It's called "My Mother Reads My Poem 'Cattle Train to Magdeburg.'" In addition, my mother didn't want to share her memories for a long time, while my dad was always interested in doing so.

Here's Helen Eisen's response to my questions:

I also find memory fascinating, what it is, how it works, how it's transmitted. I meant the title to talk to that-- how memories are passed on, the movement of memory over time and distance. I think it is lovely that you use the word "distance" when you say in your email, "I wrote a poem about the distance between my mother's memories and mine." At different times I've been asked, "When did you first learn about the Holocaust?" (By the way, we never used the term. We just called it the war. It's like if a relative were standing in your kitchen dressed in an old bathrobe and you say, "Mr. Buckleboren, what would you like for breakfast today? I do hope we can appropriately accommodate you.") The thing is I don't remember when I learned about the war, it's like I always knew about it, which of course at some level I did. Its effects, if not the actual verbalized memories, were transmitted by my parents and the other survivors that used to visit our apartment, but seemed to live with us. Their visits were never just visits. And with them came all the memories, like butter spread on rye and radishes in the cottage cheese. Everyone disagreed about the wheres and whens, and there was a lot of (to me bizarre) laughter. I'd stay very quiet and listen, trying to make sense of it all. I have memories of hiding under the kitchen table, but I don't believe I really did because it was a small table. But I think I imagined this memory because I knew if they became aware of me in the room they'd shoo me out, so how would I have stayed in the room if I wasn't hiding?

To return to my explanation: I learned about the war through the memories of my parents, which they relayed verbally and non-verbally. (Father much more verbal and very, very confusing). Memories live (and die) in the body. I think the non-verbal transmission was more potent, more constant/consistent, more direct, more exact--even if I can't translate this exactness. All mothers sigh, no mother sighs like my mother. She is holding me as a baby, and when she let them other women in the DP camp held me. What passed through them to the children, in my case, to me? I'm sure the particular tensing of their muscles, their breath, their scent, all their vital, non-verbal, sub-vocal, innate and learned vocabularies left some kind of imprint.

Mostly knowledge of the war--my memories of the war--came through the body of my mother. I think memories live in the body, and die, change, devolve, grow, dependent like anything else on relative conditions and context. Who is listening? What's the temperature when I'm talking? How well do I remember this recipe when I'm starving? When I'm full?

From the body of my mother to my body. I see it as a kind of osmosis--the permeability of the membranes between us, and the membranes between memories within her. What she's closed off, what she's let through. How far through? What's the resistance to letting me see them, letting me in, how much of it because she wants to keep me out, how much because she wants me to see because she is alone there, but doesn't want to want me to be there.

Osmotic passage occurs from the more dense to the less dense. From my mother's milk, I drew my breath, and she filled me.


Here's one of the poems from Helen Eisen's Permeability of Memory:

MY MOTHER MY MOTHER

Was starving
Was starving
After the war
Was another war
My mother my mother
Was starving
After the war
She stuffed food into me
Because she was starving
After the war during
Which she was starving
She stuffed food into me
Because she was starving
I can see her pushing the food into my mouth
I cannot feel I cannot feel the food pushing into the mouth
I can see my mother
Starving
For the food she put into me
To feed herself
My mother pushed food into me
To feel herself
While she was starving all of the life pushed
To feed herself
To feel herself
Starving
I can't feel the food
Or taste
What my mother fed me
She took
The food away
From herself
I can see her starving
To feed me
Greasy lamb from her fingers
Here taste
Of her saliva
On my tongue
My mother
I loved her
I fed her
Myself

___________

Helen Eisen's The Permeability of Memory is published by Cherry Pie Press. You can read more about the book by clicking here.

The Holocaust in the News and on the Web

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Clinton: Remain vigilant against Holocaust denial Jewish Telegraphic Agency WASHINGTON (JTA) -- U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that Holocaust denial and Israel criticism that crosses into anti-Semitism require vigilance. On Tuesday, Clinton addressed a symposium at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on preventing ... See all stories on this topic »

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United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Unveils New Poll: Americans ... MarketWatch (press release) A new poll commissioned by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum finds that 67 years after the Holocaust, Americans believe genocide is still very possible, yet preventable, and they would like to see the US government play a major role in stopping ... See all stories on this topic »

HOLMBERG: Holocaust Museum ouster a battle of wills? WTVR RICHMOND, Va (WTVR)- It appears the controversy surrounding the emphatic dismissal of Virginia Holocaust Museum president, director and co-founder Jay Ipson is winding down, but the behind-the-scenes machinations over his ouster remains largely ... See all stories on this topic » WTVR

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SHAME: Western Holocaust Denial In Congo Black Star News On the other hand, the powers now roaring loudly with respect to Syria have maintained deafening silence and are in fact accomplices in the Holocaust of over 7 million people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The violence is being perpetrated by ... See all stories on this topic »

Holocaust survivor tells his story for the first time The Journal News | LoHud.com An overflow audience listens to Holocaust survivor Eli Stern of Monsey during the annual Tisha B'Av program at the Holocaust Museum & Study Center in Spring Valley on Sunday. Also on the program was a presentation by Rabbi Barry Shafier. See all stories on this topic »

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God on Trial

 

Often when I give presentations about my parents and their experiences in the concentration camps in Germany, people ask me to talk about how those experiences shaped my parents' faith.  It's not an easy question to answer.  My own parents came away from their experiences with very different attitudes toward God and religion.  My mother's faith was shaken by what happened to her family and what she went through under the Nazis.  My father's faith on the other hand was strengthened.  I've written about this in various poems but two that I usually bring up when I'm talking about faith and my parents are "What the War Taught My Mother" and "What My Father Believed."  If you click on those titles, you'll be able to read those poems.

Recently, I saw a film that focuses on the faith of prisoners in Auschwitz.  The film is called God on Trail, and it takes place in Auschwitz where a group of Jewish prisoners put God on trial and argue about whether or not He has abandoned the Jewish people.  It is a BBC/WBGH Boston production and was originally aired in the US in 2008.

The complete film is available through the following youtube link:

JACOB GLATSTEIN’S PROPHECY

JACOB GLATSTEIN’S PROPHECY

Dara Horn

Jewish Review of Books, Summer 2011

It isn’t every day that one has the opportunity to read a literary masterpiece. But a literary masterpiece that doubles as a work of prophecy? Such books have been rare since the death of Isaiah--which is why this new English edition of The Glatstein Chronicles deserves not only praise but its own cantillation. Largely set in a Jewish sanatorium-resort in 1934 Poland, The Glatstein Chronicles is easy to label as a Jewish Magic Mountain. But Thomas Mann’s novel about the decline of European civilization as dramatized at a sanatorium-resort was published in 1925, after the ravages of World War I made his characters’ prewar lives poetically moot. The Glatstein Chronicles might have been that book, had it been written in 1946. Instead, this devastating kaleidoscopic vision of doom for Jewish Europe first appeared in print in . . . 1934. Jacob Glatstein was no mere poet, but a Yiddish prophet. And now American Jews can rediscover what prophecy really means.

Like most prophets, Glatstein at first resisted the call. Born in Lublin in 1896, he escaped Poland’s painfully circumscribed opportunities by convincing his parents to send him to America at age 17--where his one American uncle couldn’t even leave his sweatshop job to meet him at the dock. Bright enough (and fluent enough in English) to enroll in New York University Law School, and also bright enough to voluntarily drop out, Glatstein at 24 made a conscious decision to live his literary life in Yiddish. His early poetry is phenomenal, world-class modernist verse that catapulted Yiddish into the worlds of Eliot and Joyce and beyond. Almost untranslatable because of his punning and layering of nearly every word (in Yiddish, Hebrew, English, and Polish) and his clever references to both Yiddish highbrow and children’s culture (all, by 2011, requiring extensive footnotes), Glatstein’s first three published books of poetry are works of genius by a writer stretching his wings in a Jewish world that felt too small for his talents.

But in time Glatstein saw that these brilliant tours de force could be no more than brilliant, and the growing crisis in Europe made him see the pitiful aspect of writing Yiddish verse modeled on the language games of Anglo-American poets. Like claiming today that his novel is a “Jewish Magic Mountain,” this kind of work suggests that Jewish literature is a pale imitation of “world literature,” rather than the generator of world literature’s most fundamental themes. Without anti-Semitism, this assumption would be merely pathetic. But when one considers the active degrading of Jewish culture within the most lauded realms of Western civilization, the idea that Jewish literature ought to mirror its non-Jewish counterpart becomes worse than base. After violent pogroms in Poland in 1938, Glatstein in New York wrote his most famous poem, “Good Night, World,” which bids a sarcastic farewell to the supposed glories of Western civilization, insisting to the non-Jewish world that “Not you, but I slam the gate,” as the poet rejects Western culture for a stunted Judaism that at least opposes the wider world’s moral hypocrisy:

Good night, world. I’ll give you a parting gift
Of all my liberators.
Take your Jesusmarxes, choke on their courage.
Croak on a drop of our baptized blood…
From Wagner’s idol-music to wordless melody, to humming.
I kiss you, cankered Jewish life.
It weeps in me, the joy of coming home.

In The Glatstein Chronicles, the poet literally comes home. Composed as two novellas here combined in one English volume, The Glatstein Chronicles is a work in the great 200-year-old tradition of Jewish autobiographical novels--including masterpieces ranging from S.Y. Agnon’s A Guest for the Night (also about a Jewish man visiting his hometown in 1930s Poland) to Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March. But it surpasses even those, because its majesty derives from the author’s reimagining of the Hebrew Bible’s recurrent motifs of personal and national betrayal--and from his astonishing power of genuine prophecy. Of the dozens of thematically interlocked layers that this book offers its readers, many of which have been richly mined by scholars, it is its prophecy that resonates loudest of all in 2011. Reading this work today, one cannot help continuously flipping back to editor Ruth R. Wisse’s insightful introduction to check the book’s publication history, incredulous. The second novella first appeared in 1940, though it was likely composed long before that. The first was already serialized in 1934.

The novel’s putative story is that of an unnamed narrator whose biography matches Glatstein’s exactly (the Yiddish titles included the narrator’s name, “Yash,” a diminutive for Jacob), and who after 20 years in America is called back to Poland to attend his mother’s death. The book’s first half, “Homeward Bound” (in Yiddish, Ven Yash is geforn, “When Yash Set Out”), follows the narrator’s Atlantic crossing and his journey through Europe, focusing on his encounters with the cosmopolitan Jews and non-Jews whom he meets on the way. Its second half, “Homecoming at Twilight” (in Yiddish, Ven Yash iz gekumen, “When Yash Arrived”), takes place at a Jewish sanatorium-resort in southern Poland where the narrator stays after his mother’s death--and where his fellow residents from all walks of Polish Jewish life share their stories and ultimately die. We never meet the narrator’s dying mother, who was supposedly the purpose of his journey; nor does he even mention her, except in a few flashbacks to his childhood and negotiations over her burial, which are written to resemble the biblical Abraham’s purchase of the Cave of Machpelah. Instead, we are left with the impression that the dying mother to whom he has come to bid farewell is Jewish Poland itself. And this is where the book crosses the line from travelogue to prophecy.

The narrator’s prophetic visions begin on the Atlantic crossing. During the voyage, word arrives of the “Night of Long Knives,” Hitler’s first violent purge of his Nazi rivals. Seeking others who share his panic, the narrator tests out the news on his fellow passengers--and finds that the ship is divided, as Europe soon would be, between Jews and non-Jews:

"I realized that to the Gentiles, Hitler meant something altogether different than he did to me. My non-Jewish fellow passengers . . . regarded Hitler as merely Germany’s dictator. To me, to 600,000 German Jews, and indeed to all the 17 million Jews worldwide, Hitler was the embodiment of the dreaded historical hatemonger, latest in a long line of persecutors that stretched from Haman . . . wielding a bloody pen that was writing a dreadful new chapter of Jewish history."

These discussions remain theoretical until the ship docks in Europe--and the narrator must travel to Poland through Germany, via trains packed with Hitler youth.

In Poland, it becomes clear that anti-Semitic fury has already begun to take its toll on Jewish youth. Young people train for professions that will not admit them, and then fall back on flimsy businesses that barely survive ongoing boycotts, causing “love to die among them” as even romance falls prey to the practicalities of their artificially-induced poverty. They endure this poverty on a knife’s edge. At first, the narrator’s intimations of mortality are subtle or atmospheric, taking the form of dreams involving “a vague fear of impending destruction,” or an observation that “It was the end of August, and these men were probably the first to become aware, in the midst of summer pleasures, that winter was on the way.”

But as he meets more and more desperate Jews who try to stuff his suitcases with messages begging for help from their American relatives, the narrator’s intimations of doom give way to a stunning clarity. On nearly every page of this magnificent novel, one finds astonishing remarks like these from Polish Jews in 1934:

“The fact is that a real war is being waged against us, a war of attrition. . . . There’s no escaping it: all the countries have imposed a siege. . . . Believe me, the Poles are much cleverer than Hitler. They don’t rant and rave, they just pass over our bodies with a steamroller and drive us right into the ground. . . . Formerly you could escape by emigrating. Today our people are staring death in the eyes.”

Nor is this intended to be figurative, as conversations like the following make abundantly clear:

“It started with Pharaoh who bathed in the blood of Jewish children. Why, oh why, why do we deserve this, Mr. Steinman? What do they have against us, Mr. Steinman?”

“Ah, you’re raising fundamental questions,” Steinman said. He had become grave. “You want to go to the root of things. Well, I’ll tell you: they want to destroy us, nothing less. Yes, to destroy us. For instance, take me--I am a patriotic Pole. And yet they’d destroy me too. They want to exterminate us, purely and simply. Yes, exterminate us.”

The “Haman” dimension of current events is hauntingly evoked near the book’s conclusion, when the narrator visits Kazimierz. A picturesque resort beloved by artists, Kazimierz is a town with a Jewish-Polish myth attached to it. Its ruined castle was once occupied by King Casimir the Great, a real 14th-century Polish monarch who, according to legend, had a Jewish lover named Esther who lived in the castle as his queen. The story was imagined variously in Polish and Yiddish sources as abduction or seduction, but among Polish Jews it usually evoked a sense of Polish-Jewish interdependency and belonging, echoing the biblical Book of Esther with its irresistible Jewish woman married to a non-Jewish king--with the queen placed in the palace for the Jews’ eventual rescue.

The narrator goes to Kazimierz almost by accident, when a driver appears at the hotel with the mistaken information that he has planned a day trip there. Another guest, in love with the town, decides to go and invites the narrator along, explaining: “You see, it’s fate. A man has to visit Kazimierz sooner or later, so what difference does it make when you go?” With its echo of the appointment in Samarra, “visiting Kazimierz” becomes a metaphor for the destiny of Polish Jews: everyone believes in this myth of Gentile-Jewish romance at some point, just as the poet Glatstein once did, until the myth is revealed to be a picturesque ruin--or worse.

Once in Kazimierz, the narrator climbs up to the ruined castle with his traveling companion, who caresses its stones and describes it as holy, suggesting the ruins of the ancient Temple:

For what has really gone on here in Kazimierz? I think I can help you to understand. The Jew had his own poor world, and the Gentile led his own separate life. We always walked as far as the city gates, beyond which death lies--a great cemetery full of ancestors. In other words, walk no farther than the gates and turn right back, for you can see only too clearly what lies in store. The grave. But the people created a legend in defiance of the limitations of this life.

This legend claims to be a Purim story, but in Glatstein’s prophetic vision, it is really a story about Tisha b’Av--and Jewish Poland is the latest holy temple on the verge of destruction. Returning from Kazimierz, the narrator considers this “dark omen.” Alluding to a Spanish novel about a wounded Casanova, he reflects: “All of us . . . would very soon arrive at winter with a hand shot off. That would be the hand which, I had vowed, I would let wither if I forgot you, and you, and everything that had ever imprinted itself on my eyes and mind.”

Reading The Glatstein Chronicles is itself an act of mourning, and the editor and translators must have endured this grief all the more acutely. The translation is rendered magnificently, and Wisse and the translators (Maier Deshell and the late Norbert Guterman) have taken great pains to produce the illusion that we are reading this masterpiece as the author wrote it. Terms that would have felt natural to 20th-century Yiddish speakers have been subtly explained within the text; more complex cultural references are explicated in unobtrusive endnotes.

But the reader familiar with the original cannot but mourn--not only for the doomed community captured within its pages, but also for the world of readers lost with it. The book offers its readers endless unspoken references to once-famous works of Yiddish literature, like I. L. Peretz’s “At Night in the Old Marketplace,” a surrealist play set among the living dead (at one point the novel is subsumed by a surrealist play), as well as brilliant portraits of real figures who once illuminated the Jewish world: the Hebrew poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik, the German historian Heinrich Graetz, the Yiddish playwright Jacob Gordin, and even a sanatorium resident modeled on Peretz himself. One misses, painfully, the world that once existed where every reader of this novel would have known these references as household names.

Unfortunately, The Glatstein Chronicles is unlikely to find a wide audience among American readers, even American Jewish ones. Americans are taught to seek in literature the satisfaction of our own hunger for action and unambiguous resolutions--neither of which are on offer here. In a contemporary review of Glatstein’s book, Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose popularity came largely from fulfilling American literary expectations, complained that “Jules Verne would not have wasted ten lines on a journey so bereft of adventure or romance.” He was certainly right, but the observation does more harm to the critic than to the author. For the patient reader open to other possibilities, The Glatstein Chronicles does progress--in a symphonic rather than a linear fashion--toward important revelations. And time has only added new layers of power to its prose.

Now that the prophesied destruction has come to pass, the few moments where Glatstein’s prophecies fail him have an even more terrible poignancy. “It occurred to me,” Glatstein’s narrator muses as he arrives in Europe, “that in twenty-five years such travelers returning to pay respects to the graves of forefathers will have disappeared. . . . Should their children ever think of visiting Soviet Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, they would go as one might visit Paris, Switzerland, or Italy. . . . There will be tourists, but no one going home to see a dying mother or father, or to mourn dead parents.”

In 1934, even the prophet Glatstein could not imagine that American Jews would someday go as tourists to Poland exclusively to mourn.

But Glatstein’s Poland is not only a place of mourning. It also has an eerie consoling power. In the sanatorium, where “you never know whether you’re talking to a mental case,” the narrator’s prescience is amplified by the haunting symbolism of the hotel guests. In one scene, the narrator comes across the hotel’s proprietor standing watch in the hallway at the witching hour:

“You aren’t asleep yet?” I stammered, vaguely frightened.
“I can’t sleep until my last guest has turned in,” he said. “I’m responsible for the lot of you, you know. That’s the kind of job it is.”

Reading these lines, one thinks of the translators of Yiddish in the 21st century--and of the editor Ruth R. Wisse, who has brought this and many other Yiddish masterpieces to new generations of readers and students. The second novella’s opening line, spoken by one of the central figures at the hotel, is “Even from the gutter will I sing praises to Thee, O Lord, even from the gutter.” Seventy years after Glatstein’s devastating prophecy came true, the consoling miracle is that these volumes still sing.

(Dara Horn is the award-winning author of three novels,
the most recent of which is All Other Nights [Norton].)