I began to doze off, and the formula came to me in a dream: that which we called death was life, and that which we called life was death. The stone in the street lived and I was a corpse. The stone didn’t hope nor suffer; for it, time, space, and causality didn’t exist. It didn’t have to eat; it needed no apartment; it was part of the mighty, extensive life that was the universe. That which we called life was a scab, an itching, a poisonous toadstool that grew on old planets. The earth suffered from an eczema of its skin. From time to time it scratched itself causing an earthquake or a flood, but there was no danger of this eczema penetrating deeper or of infecting other planets. The prognosis was a favorable one. All that was required was that for a few minutes the earth should grow a few hundred degrees hotter or colder on its outer surface. The earth could easily manage this, but the eczema was so light and the earth so involved with its activities that she neglected to do this since the eczema might one day vanish of its own. The symptoms of this eczema were quite familiar to the cosmic medicine—a little dust on the surface became ill and transformed into consciousness, which in God’s dictionary was a synonym for death, protest, goals, suffering, doubting, asking countless questions and growing entangled in endless contradictions ….
I had fallen asleep and Gina woke me. She had washed up in the kitchen and her flesh felt damp and cool. We embraced and lay silent for a long time, then Gina said: “Little colt, I made a decision today that may change my whole life and maybe yours, too.”
“What kind of decision?” I asked, and she said: “I want to have a child with you ….”
A YOUNG MAN IN SEARCH OF LOVE
* * *
One
1
I had more or less settled in Warsaw, the city of my dreams and hopes. I was a proofreader for a literary magazine, which gave me an opportunity to be in contact with writers and intellectuals. My mistress, Gina, was perhaps twice as old as I but a woman whom I could love and from whom I could learn. In a moment of exaltation I had promised her that we would have a child together, but the forces that rule the world didn’t want Gina to be the mother of my child. We lived together, but she didn’t conceive. I quickly realized that she was even older than I thought. Among her things I found photographs showing her dressed in fashions prevailing before I was even born. She still had her periods, but not regularly. Yes, this woman might easily have been my mother, but not the mother of my child.
My literary and my other troubles were such that I no longer fretted about my romantic complications. I had presented myself for conscription and had been given a “B” classification which under the Russians had been called a green ticket. This meant that I had to present myself again a year hence. During the few hours I spent with the conscripts I got a taste of the army. Some soldiers ordered us around as if we were already part of it. The Christians already cursed the Jewish conscripts and called them all kinds of names. The Jewish youths tried to curry favor with the Gentiles, paid them compliments, offered them cigarettes and chocolate, and even pressed coins upon them. Stripping naked in front of a crowd was to me an ordeal. My skin was unusually white, and my hair as red as fire. Someone gave me a slap in the rear, another flicked my nose, a third called me “slob, jerk.”
The soldier who was temporarily my superior measured me head to toe and from toe to head, made comical gestures, and remarked: “Woe to the Polish nation if this has to be her defender.”
This evoked a burst of wild laughter. The notion that I might be spending two years among this crew drove me into despair. I looked on with amazement as the other youths somehow made peace with their situation and did their best to adjust. They quickly assumed a military tone; they even made fun of me on their own initiative. A tall youth with a heroic physique came up to me and said: “Are you a mama’s boy? The army will make a man of you. Have a cigarette.”
I grew so befuddled that I stuck the wrong end of the cigarette in my mouth, which brought a new howl of laughter and applause. The boys had already tagged me with a nickname: Ofermo, which was applied to an inept soldier. I sidled over into a corner and mentally vented all my complaints, not against the people who insulted me but against God. What resentments could one hold against these youths? They had been raised in the streets, and nature had endowed them with the ability to adapt to difficult situations instead of breaking. But the creator of the universe should have had more decency than to subject young men of my nature to such degradations. I had made a firm resolution that if I were taken, I would commit suicide despite the fact that this would forever darken my mother’s years, she whose bashfulness, pride, and rebelliousness against the laws of life I had inherited. I also toyed with the notion of killing her first before putting an end to myself.
The two military doctors who examined me didn’t concur. One was of the frank opinion that I had intentionally starved myself which had brought about my weakened condition. The other waved his hand as if to say: “Let him wander around a bit longer.” After I had dressed and the other conscripts learned that I had been deferred for a year, they seemed astounded. In their estimation I should have been classified “D,” which meant rejection even during a time of war. One of the wise guys who had already begun to fraternize with the soldiers and speak their jargon had been freed with the classification I should have gotten.
When I came out into the street and glanced into a mirror in the front window of a furniture store, I was frightened at my own appearance. I looked emaciated as if from consumption, pale, and like someone who has just narrowly escaped death. I felt light, hollow, and it seemed to me that my feet were racing as if of their own accord. Now that I was temporarily freed from the fear of military service, I began to agonize about my literary efforts. I had already been writing for several years but sooner or later I had thrown my manuscripts into the wastebasket. The themes employed by Yiddish writers and the writing itself struck me as sentimental, primitive, petty. Too often it had to do with a girl whose parents wanted an arranged marriage while she really loved someone else. Quite often the girl came from a wealthy family and the youth was the son of a tailor or shoemaker. Would it be possible to describe in Yiddish the kind of relationship I had with Gina? Although Yiddish literature flirted with socialism and more recently with communism, it had remained provincial and backward. Besides, Yiddish—the language itself—had become repugnant both to Gentiles and to a great number of modern Jews. Even such Yiddish writers as Mendele Mocher Sforim, Shalom Aleichem, and Peretz called Yiddish a jargon. The Zionists considered Yiddish the language of the Diaspora of which the Jews had to divest themselves along with the Exile. I knew enough Hebrew to attempt writing in that language but at that time few people spoke Hebrew. It lacked words used in day-to-day conversation. Ben Yehuda was just on the verge of creating the new Hebrew. Writing in Hebrew meant constantly consulting dictionaries and trying to recall sentences from the Scriptures, the Mishnah, and the Gemara. Both the Yiddish literature and the Hebrew avoided the great adventures inherent in Jewish history—the false Messiahs, the expulsions, the forcible conversions, the Emancipation, and the assimilations that had created a condition in which Jews became ministers in England, Italy, and America; professors in large universities; millionaires; party leaders; editors of world-famous newspapers. Yiddish literature ignored the Jewish underworld, the thousands and tens of thousands of thieves, pimps, prostitutes, and white slavers in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and even in Warsaw. Yiddish literature reminded me of my father’s courtroom where almost everything was forbidden. True, Sholem Asch had in a sense created a minor revolution and had taken up themes that till then had been considered taboo, but he was and remained a rustic, at least that’s how I saw him then and still do to this day. His stories personified the pathos of the provincial who has been shown the big world for the first time and who describes it when he goes back to the town where he came from.
The problem was that in order to write with skill about people of the world, one needed to know the world, and I only kne
w a small segment of Jewish Warsaw, Bilgorai, and two or three other small towns. I only knew Jews that spoke Yiddish. Even then I knew a writer can only write about people and things he knows well.
I had promised to let Gina and my brother Joshua know what had happened to me but neither he nor she had a telephone at that time. I went to the Writers’ Club and everything there was just as usual. Several journalists played chess. Others read newspapers that came there from all over Poland and from abroad. I knew everyone here and each of his idiosyncrasies. One of them, an old writer named Saks who came from Lodz and who had lived for a time in Central Asia, waged a private feud against the Allies for having wronged Germany. He hurled fire and brimstone upon the Versailles Treaty for taking Upper Silesia away from the Germans and creating the corridor between East and West Germany. In prophetic terms he predicted that Germany would one day rearm and take everything back. By this time Hitler had already conducted his famous Putsch and perhaps also published his Mein Kampf, but this Lodz Jew knew nothing of this, or maybe he ignored it. I would occasionally ask him:
“What did Germany ever do for you that you take up for her so? After all, we’re Polish citizens, not German.”
He would glance at me with bewilderment and reply:
“You can’t take a great nation, a pillar of civilization, and dismember it.”
If I’m not mistaken, this same journalist later died in a Nazi concentration camp.
I recalled Spinoza’s words to the effect that everything could become a passion. I had resolved beforehand to become a narrator of human passion rather than of a placid life-style.
Nearly everyone here at the Writers’ Club bore some passion and was blinded by it. The young writers all aspired to become literary geniuses and many of them were convinced that they already were except that the others refused to acknowledge their genius. The Communists waited impatiently for the social revolution to start so that they could exact revenge upon all the bourgeois, Zionists, Socialists, petit bourgeois, the lumpenproletariat, the clergy, and most of all, the editors who refused to publish them. The few women members were convinced that they were victims of male contempt for the female sex. One of the hangers-on here was an actor named Jaque Levi, who had made guest appearances with a troupe in Prague in 1911 and had become a close friend of Franz Kafka there. He often spoke of this Kafka of whom I had never heard. Jaque Levi walked around with pockets stuffed with yellowed letters from Kafka.
I would ask him: “Who is this Kafka?”
And he would point a finger and say:
“One day he will be world-famous!”
I did not want to discuss either the evils of the Versailles Treaty or Kafka’s greatness, but Levi and Saks had to talk to someone. At that time, an actress used to come to the Writers’ Club with whom Kafka was allegedly in love—a Madam Tchizhik. She had performed with Jaque Levi in Prague. It was hard to believe that anyone could be in love with this woman, but I told myself that the passions—like Leibnitz’s monads—had no windows.
Gina never came to the Writers’ Club for I had forbidden her to do so. I was too shy to be seen with her by the older writers. I felt that everyone would be able to tell from my face that we were having an affair. Most of all I was ashamed before my elder brother with his knowledge of life and sense of irony. My shyness at that time assumed the character of a neurosis.
2
Sitting that day at the Writers’ Club, I took yet another accounting of my life. I had barely missed being conscripted that day. I had seen this clearly in the doctors’ eyes. A year hence, I would have to present myself again and I lacked the strength to subject myself to further weeks and months of deprivation. My brother suggested that the best solution for me would be to go to the Land of Israel. Maybe I could obtain a certificate from the Palestine Bureau in Warsaw which issued the few certificates that the English Mandate Authority allotted for Jewish immigrants. But what would I do in Palestine? Physical laborers were needed there, not a young man who was trying to write stories and in Yiddish besides. I had met several youths and girls who had gone to the Land of Israel and had come back disillusioned and sick with malaria. They told frightening stories about the privation, the unhealthy climate, the bureaucracy of the English as well as the Jewish officials, the exploitation by the contractors who did the hiring, and the dangers posed by the Arabs. In those days, Yiddish was an anathema in Palestine. Hebraist fanatics invaded meetings in institutions where Yiddish was spoken.
My own concerns were promptly transformed within me into consideration of the world condition. I no longer believed that God had issued the Torah on Mount Sinai along with all the innovations and restrictions that commentators and exegetes had added in every generation. Whether God was a substance with infinite attributes, or the absolute, or blind will, or whatever the philosophers chose to call Him, one couldn’t depend on His justice and mercy. I could never forget the tens of millions of people who had perished in the World War, in the Bolshevik Revolution, in the pogroms, the famines, the epidemics. Millions of peasants in Russia had been labeled kulaks and exiled to Siberia. Whole villages had been starved out. There was fighting in China, in Manchuria. In generation after generation people sacrificed their lives in battle, but nothing was ever realized. How did one become a writer in such a universal slaughterhouse? How could I write about love while millions of innocent creatures writhed in the clutches of slaughterers, hunters, and vivisectionists of every ilk? I imagined that I heard the sound of all the living through all the ages. I had been freed for a year but countless other young men had to begin learning to kill and be killed while enduring the insults and blows of those a rank higher.
I knew full well that Gina was waiting for me but I somehow didn’t feel like going home. I owed her months of back rent. I had begun to grow weary of her pathos, her endless assurances that she was in constant touch with the dead, her hunger for love that I could never manage to satisfy. However many compliments I paid her, she still demanded more. She suffered from a terrible inferiority complex (a term I had first heard a short time before). She constantly demanded my avowals of eternal love. She kept saying that she was ready to lay down her life for me—as well as with me—but I neither needed her to die for me nor was ready to enter into a suicide pact with her. During the months that I had been depleting myself I had given in to all her sexual desires. This had been a means of losing weight and strength. Now I was so sated with sex that I longed for a night when I could sleep alone. I was overcome by a fatigue and a feeling that my end was near.
With my last groschen I had ordered something to eat from the buffet at the Writers’ Club. I was joined at the table by several fledgling writers, each with his own plans, complaints, vexations. One had been left out by a critic who had complied a list of prose writers of the younger generation in a literary journal. A second had been promised to have his poem printed by an editor but months had gone by and the poem still lay in the editor’s drawer, or possibly he had lost it. A third needed an operation and was getting ready to enter a hospital. A fourth told a joke about a man who went to a brothel, found himself impotent, and was scolded by the Madam for coming on a Sabbath when the house was so full of patrons.
I chewed my sausage, mused that a cow or steer had paid with its life for it, smiled at the joke, tried to console the writer whose prestige had been so neglected, and wished the sick colleague a speedy recovery knowing all the while that the writer lacked talent and the sick man had no chance of recovery. We all clutched at something that a knife, a drop of poison, or a rope could curtail in less than a minute. We were all cursed with that self-love that no blows or disappointments can diminish, and of which one is freed only with one’s final breath.
On the way home, I stopped before the window of a bookstore. I was preparing to write books yet the world was inundated with books. Thick, dusty volumes lined the store from floor to ceiling. I had bought a Yiddish newspaper in which a writer waged a polemic against the Polish anti-
Semites who accused the Jews of trying to dominate the world. The chief anti-Semite, Adam Nowaczynski, had tried for countless times to prove to his readers that the Elders of Zion, the Masons, Stalin, Trotsky, Leon Blum, the Rabbi of Gora, Weizmann, Mussolini, and Hitler were part of one big conspiracy to dismember and again partition the newly founded Polish nation. Nowaczynski also included Pilsudski in this cabal, he who a few years earlier had won the war against the Bolsheviks. The Yiddish newspaper demanded logic. I had read this writer on more than one occasion. He had such an ability to arouse the emotions that reading him, I myself grew as if temporarily hypnotized by his style, his passion, his paranoid suspicions.
When I came home, Gina assailed me with recriminations. Where had I been all day? Why hadn’t I let her know the good news? True she knew that I was free since her dead grandmother had revealed herself to her and informed her, but where had I been all these hours? My behavior had given Gina a headache and she had to take aspirin or some other pills. She had prepared lunch for me but it had grown cold. She kissed me and scolded me. She accused me of unfaithfulness and predicted that I would treat her the same way the other men before me had done. She was ready to forgive me everything and conduct a sexual orgy with me but the moment I lay down I fell into a sleep from which no caresses or quarrels could rouse me.
Two
1
For a while it appeared that Yiddish and Yiddish literature were making progress. Great numbers of pious youths in the small towns had laid aside their Gemaras and begun reading Yiddish newspapers and books. A number of new publishers and magazines had cropped up. In every sizable city a Yiddish weekly or monthly now appeared. The literary magazine where I was proofreader had been taken over by a big publisher—the house of Kletzkin. The proprietor, Boris Kletzkin, a wealthy man and a patron of Yiddish literature, had rented quarters in Simon’s Passage at 52 Nalewki Street which included a book warehouse, Yiddish typewriters, telephones, bookkeepers, a cashier, a director, and other employees. My salary was raised slightly and I could now give Gina something toward the rent as well as pay for my meals. As if this weren’t enough, my brother Israel Joshua enjoyed a sudden windfall—he was appointed Polish correspondent for the American Yiddish newspaper The Jewish Daily Forward. In the period since the World War the Yiddishist movement in America had flourished. A whole literature had evolved there. The Forward was the largest Yiddish newspaper in America and had about a quarter of a million readers, which for a Yiddish newspaper was an enormous circulation. The Yiddish Theater presented a number of better plays. The editor of the Forward, Abe Cahan, who also wrote in English and was considered something of a classicist in American literature, ruled the paper with an iron hand. The Forward, which was closely connected with the Workmen’s Circle and with many trade unions, had its own ten-story building on East Broadway. One day, Abe Cahan happened to read my brother’s collection of short stories entitled Pearls and was inspired by the writing. He promptly invited my brother to publish his literary works in the Forward and soon afterward, he appointed him its Polish correspondent. My brother’s salary came to about fifty dollars a week, but in those days fifty dollars was a considerable sum when exchanged into Polish zlotys. Literary and journalist Warsaw seethed over my brother’s success.
Love and Exile Page 11
