The Landsmen

by Peter Martin

  And nothing in the ironic folktales and gentle fantasies of Sholom Aleichim or Mendele Mocher Sforim or I. L. Peretz convinced him, any more than it did Laib, that “if Israel’s eyes were on heaven you yourself could live in a barrel of crap.” For the virtues of humiliation and abjection, suffering and privation, he presently discovered, eluded flesh-and-blood Jews who had firsthand memories of the Pale.

  These were Spring Valley’s old-timers—the proste or common folk whose “weird gutteral Yiddish” Henry Adams loathed when it reached him through a Russian railway car in 1903. Martin encouraged them to talk and to tell him how it was to live from day to day under the Romanovs. Now and then he found himself taking a few notes to show his wife and his two young sons; by 1947 he’d accumulated several Talmud-size ledgers spilling over with down-home shtetl details—the daffy stiff-necked caste system which put land- and hand-workers in the back rows of synagogues by the worst drafts; rough sketches of smithies, taverns, brothels, and garrisons; how much it cost to have a twelve-

  Afterword 37 -

  year-old maimed by a professional crippler so that he might evade Tsarist conscription laws; the duties of a beadle; the dimension and design of the cast-iron stoves which heated the houses of the gentry; when to petition a provincial governor or a local squire; the habits of wolves and peasants; recipes for kvas, candle-sugar, and garlic-carp; the way to mend a harness, patch a roof, set up a market, wash down the dead, cajole a drunken Cossack.

  And so he decided to undertake a trilogy.

  Through the eyes, skin, and nerves of some shtetl Jews, he planned to capture the whole dense oppressive complex of East European life just as this life was succumbing to the blows of history. One or two Jews would reach America, carrying a burden of undefined moral responsibility. For he had a past, and money was never enough to obliterate it, though money would be the most he would get from America. (“I think of my father’s face,” said Laib in America, ‘‘that painted by the right artist would cause a rock to blow its nose. Alas, even here the State has other plans for artists. ”) Hitler, only Hitler, would suffice to show his sons and daughters who they were, what they wanted, and how the world saw them.

  All during the next year Martin immersed himself in nineteenth- century Russia. He wanted to know about . . . but what did he not want to know about? Pogroms and pan-Slavism; The Protocols of the elders of Zion and the Black Hundred; the Enlightenment and its effect upon the Russian masses; the Russian Orthodox teachings which linked Jews with Satan; the ‘‘League of the Russian People” and its secret fighting squadrons; the anti-semitic forgeries of Hippolytus Lutostansky; the trial of Mendel Beiliss; the deportation, in 1891, of 17,000 Jews from Moscow; the writings of Nikita Pogodin, who opposed ‘‘the profundity and magnificent violence of Russia to the frivolity and triteness of the West.”

  At first, Martin set up a murderous schedule for himself, writing from four or five in the morning till it was time for the then two-hour commute into Manhattan. When his health failed—doctors had long ago noticed a tendency toward embolisms—he arranged a three-day week with CBS. Even so, nothing came easy during the five years he invested on The Landsmen . He feared that his rage and grief would stay

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  imprisoned in words, that those who felt nostalgia for Sholem Aleichim’s Kasrilevke would be repelled by the unrelenting bleakness of Golinsk, by characters redolent of horses and wagon grease, sour milk and chicken entrails, that the pace was too lethargic, the plotting too intricate, the canvas too broad.

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  Little, Brown and Company was “not proud, but honored” to include The Landsmen in its 1952 list.

  Angus Cameron, Martin’s editor, wanted the salesmen to understand that they were dealing with “an American Turgenev.”

  All the same, The Landsmen appeared during mid-summer, a season then allocated by the publishing trade to brilliant first novels and other ordained failures.

  The ruck of reviewers were alternately enthusiastic, lyrical, benevolent, sweet-tempered—and uniformly depthless. Frederick Morton, in the Sunday Herald Tribune was so overcome by “this rich exuberant pastoral” that he caught whiffs of “a puissant nostalgia hovering over the volume.” Carl Ruckhaus, fretful about the “general reader” in the San Francisco Chronicle , suggested approaching The Landsmen as “an invaluable source of exotic ethnic information.” Rabbi Abner Kessler, in the Cleveland Call , pleaded with “Americans of all denominations to put this book alongside the priceless moral texts of Drs. Joshua Roth Liebman and Norman Vincent Peale.” Only Anzia Yezierska, in The New York Times Book Review , bothered to mention the Squire and throw in a line about “the powers of darkness”; she wound up “bewitched” by the Golinskers’ “folk-wit as they laughed, sang, and danced through their many ordeals.”

  I’d guess Martin, like any first novelist, had armored himself against the possibilities of failure. But no armor, believe me, avails against the kind of semisuccess The Landsmen achieved. (Two modest printings; a Book Find Club selection; a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; and sales sufficient, though only barely, to keep it off the remainder racks.) By 1953, when his royalty statements

  Afterword 379

  showed more returns than reorders, he had stopped talking about “the gift of time, the year as my own man.”

  As single-minded and disciplined as ever, Martin went ahead with the second volume of his trilogy, The Building (I960). Withal, he managed, as was then said, to keep at the business of living. In I960 he followed the television industry to the Coast. He sold a pilot script for a whaling series which never got off the ground and wrote for other shows. Then an old friend from New York involved him in one of those “He had the motive, plus opportunity, plus his fingerprints are all over the place, but he’s anyway not innocent” courtroom dramas. It would star some unknown and be called either “Perry Mason to the Defense” or plain “Perry Mason.”

  Martin wrote a script, and the network offered him a contract as story editor for the series at $30,000 a year. He planned to lay aside part of each week’s salary as a “freedom fund” until he had enough for a year’s work on the third volume of the trilogy and a jazz novel. Driving to the studio to discuss the contract on 18 May 1961, Peter Martin suffered a heart aneurism and died at the age of fifty-three.

  Textual Note

  The text of The Landsmen published here is an exact photo-offset reprinting of the first edition (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1952). No emendations have been made in the text.

  LOST AMERICAN FICTION SERIES

  published titles, as of October 1977

  please write for current list of titles

  Weeds. By Edith Summers Kelley. Afterword by Matthew J. Bruccoli

  The Professors Like Vodka. By Harold Loeb. Afterword by the author

  Dry Martini: A Gentleman Turns to Love. By John Thomas. Afterword by Morrill Cody

  The Devil’s Hand. By Edith Summers Kelley. Afterword by Matthew J. Bruccoli

  Predestined. A Novel of Neiv York Life. By Stephen French Whitman. Afterword by Alden Whitman

  The Cubical City. By Janet Flanner. Afterword by the author

  They Don’t Dance Much. By James Ross. Afterword by George V. Higgins

  Yesterday’s Burdens. By Robert M. Coates. Afterword by Malcolm Cowley

  Mr and Mrs Haddock Abroad. By Donald Ogden Stewart. Afterword by the author

  Flesh Is Heir. By Lincoln Kirstein. Afterword by the author

  The Wedding. By Grace Lumpkin. Afterword by Lillian Barnard Gilkes. A Postscript by the author

  The Red Napoleon. By Floyd Gibbons. Afterword by John Gardner

  Single Lady. By John Monk Saunders. Afterword by Stephen Longstreet

  Queer People. By Carroll and Garrett Graham. Afterword by Budd Schulberg

  A Hasty Bunch. By Robert McAlmon. Afterword by Kay Boyle

  Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise. By David Graham Phillips. Afterword by Elizabeth J
aneway

  Inn of That Journey. By Emerson Price. Afterword by the author The Landsmen. By Peter Martin. Afterword by Wallace Markfield

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  BRARY

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  MARTIN.

  The landsmen.

  Connetquot Public Library

  760 Ocean Avenue Bohemia, New York 11716

  Wallace Markfield, who has written the Afterword to this new edition, is the author of three brilliant novels: To an Early Grave (1964), Teitlebaum’s Window (1970), and You Could Live If They Let You (1974).

  Matthew J. Bruccoli, the editor of the Lost American Fiction series, is Jefferies Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. Among his recent books are “An Artist Is His Own Fault”: John O’Hara on Writers and Writing and “The Last of the Novelists”: F. Scott Fitzgerald and “The Last Tycoon

  Published titles in the Lost American Fiction series (as of October 1977 )

  Weeds by Edith Summers Kelley-$7.95 Dry Martini: A Gentleman Turns to Love by John Thomas-$7.95

  The Professors Like Vodka by Harold Loeb- $7.95

  The Devil’s Hand by Edith Summers Kelley- $8.95

  The Cubical City by Janet Flanner-$8.95 Predestined by Stephen French Whitman- $8.95

  Yesterday’s Burdens by Robert Coates-$7.95 They Don’t Dance Much by James Ross-$8.95 Flesh Is Heir: An Historical Romance by Lincoln Kirstein-$7.95

  Mr & Mrs Haddock Abroad by Donald Ogden Stewart-$7.95

  The Red Napoleon by Floyd Gibbons-$9.85 The Wedding by Grace Lumpkin-$8.95 Single Lady by John Monk Saunders-$8.95 Queer People by Carroll and Garrett Graham- $7.95

  Susan Lenox, Her Fall and Rise by David Graham Phillips—$ 1

  A Hasty Bunch by Robert McAlmon-$8.95 Inn of That Journey by Emerson Price-$7.95 The Landsmen by Peter Martin-$8.95

  Printed in the United States of / - tea

  Peter Martin, who died in 1962, was born in Brooklyn in 1907. The Landsmen was his first novel. He also wrote for Broadway, radio, the movies, and TV, and was a script editor for NBC, ABC, and Universal Pictures. The'Landsmen w; tion here in the Lost An novel in the canon of sti

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