Have I Got a Story for You

by Ezra Glinter

  “I hate hearing such silly talk,” Chaim protested.

  From Allen Street they went to Eldridge Street. Brikman became happy. Here and there he recognized little houses, old, twisted, with fire escapes, laundry hanging. And there! Right there was the house where he once lived! And the same store on the ground floor. He was as happy to find it as if it were a good old friend. Suddenly they heard a song wafting from the old tenement. They drew closer. The song was coming from a wine cellar. They stood listening silently. Aaron wanted to continue on their way, but Chaim didn’t let him. “Shh, shh, let’s listen,” he said.

  A melancholy, tearful voice floated over the quiet night street:

  The wordless Yiddish tune will live forever

  As long as the world will stand

  Our grandfathers gave us our Yiddish song

  And so it will go on, from land to land.

  “Are you hearing these words?” Chaim Brikman cried, awed. “This is the old, good wine cellar that I remember from my greenhorn years! Dear song! Golden lyrics!”

  He tugged at his friend’s sleeve. “Come,” he said. “Come downstairs and let’s drink to a new life. To our old friendship. And to all our compatriots.”

  With firm, steady steps they both walked down the stairs to the wine cellar.

  25 A sewing-machine operator who worked on ladies’ cloaks.

  26 Morris Hillquit (1869–1933), born Moishe Hillkowitz, was a socialist politician and labor lawyer.

  27 Joseph Barondess (1867–1928) was a labor leader known as the “King of the Cloakmakers.”

  28 Abraham Cahan (1860–1951) was a socialist journalist and the longtime editor of the Forward.

  29 Literally, “person.”

  30 Mother tongue.

  31 A derogatory term for a non-Jewish male.

  32 A derogatory term for non-Jewish women.

  SECTION TWO

  Modern Times

  MODERNITY CAN BE seen as the subject of nearly all of modern Yiddish literature. Ever since Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman anguished over his daughters’ life decisions, Yiddish writers have been depicting the clash between Jewish and non-Jewish cultures, between traditional lifestyles and contemporary ones, between the values of older generations and those that succeeded them.

  No one felt these struggles more acutely than the readers and writers of the Forward. Just as the first wave of immigrants “ungreened” themselves and became alienated from the families and communities they had left in Europe, so too their children, born and raised in America, found themselves estranged from their parents’ religious, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds.

  These issues weren’t confined to the United States. In the years before and after the First World War, both American and European Jewry confronted the rise of Jewish socialism and the labor movement; the entry of Jews into higher education and the professions; a swiftly changing relationship to traditional Judaism; the challenge of Zionism; and new and different forms of both emancipation and anti-Semitism. That nearly every writer in this collection had a religious education as a child but turned towards secular culture as an adult illustrates the spirit of the times.

  All of these issues came to the fore in the journalism of the Yiddish press. In literature, however, one theme predominated: the ever-shifting terrain of romantic and sexual mores. While the days of arranged marriage were mostly past, and the effects of radical politics and first-wave feminism were in the air, traditional values were still strongly present. For the cosmopolitan young men and women writing and reading these stories, sex and romance presented a constant negotiation between propriety and desire, social expectations and personal fulfillment.

  Here the women who wrote for the Forward occupied the most important role. While many male authors also addressed these themes—canonical writers like Hersh Dovid Nomberg and Avrom Reyzen are representative here—they were often taken up by women, who expressed their own fraught situations. Female authors were so prized that the Forward took pains to highlight the gender of its contributors. And while their work exhibited a wide range of attitudes, we find in these stories skepticism of the new order and a subtle but harsh critique of male behavior.

  Here art reflected the conditions of writers’ lives. But life, no doubt, also took its cues from art. As readers struggled to make sense of the rules by which romance was conducted in twentieth-century America, they looked to the Forward to point out the possibilities and pitfalls of their unprecedented freedom.

  Hersh Dovid Nomberg

  1876–1927

  FEW YIDDISH WRITERS played as many different roles, both literary and political, as Hersh Dovid Nomberg. He was a writer of fiction and poetry; a journalist, essayist and literary critic; an architect of political Yiddishism (a term he coined), and, for a time, a politician and representative in the Polish parliament.

  Nomberg was born in the Polish town of Mszczonow, known in Yiddish as Amshinov and home to a prominent Hasidic movement of the same name. As a young adult, Nomberg experienced a crisis of faith and, at age twenty-one, left his wife and son and moved to Warsaw. There he pursued a secular education, taught himself Russian, Polish, and German, and began writing Hebrew literature.

  With the encouragement of I. L. Peretz, Warsaw’s preeminent Jewish literary figure, Nomberg switched to Yiddish and became acquainted with other young Yiddish writers, such as Avrom Reyzen and Sholem Asch, with whom he shared a Warsaw apartment. His early works were often published in both Hebrew and Yiddish, and included poetry, short fiction, novellas, and literary criticism.

  Setting a pattern of lifelong travel, the first decade of the twentieth century saw Nomberg move between Germany, France, Switzerland, and Lithuania, before relocating once again to Warsaw. In 1908 he attended the Czernowitz Conference in support of the Yiddish language, where he proposed a compromise resolution between Hebraists and Yiddishists that proclaimed Yiddish “a” national language of the Jewish people rather than “the” national language.

  During the First World War, Nomberg became active in the Yiddish secular school movement, and helped found the Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists, of which he became president in 1925. Shortly after the war he helped found the Folkspartey (People’s Party), which advocated for Jewish cultural autonomy in Eastern Europe, and for which he served as a delegate in the Sejm, or Polish parliament, between 1919 and 1920.

  In the early 1920s, Nomberg traveled widely in North America, South America, and Palestine, although he never settled permanently outside of Poland. Having suffered from a chronic lung ailment for much of his adult life, Nomberg died in Warsaw at the age of fifty-one.

  Although he published widely, Nomberg’s main journalistic outlets were European Yiddish newspapers and few of his pieces appeared in the Forward. “Friends,” which appeared from February 24 to 26, 1912, is one of Nomberg’s few contributions to the paper, and features the moody, intellectual character types commonly found in his work. Known as a “fligelman,” or “winged man,” after a character in his 1903 story of the same name, such figures are typically estranged from their surroundings and rendered impotent by circumstances beyond their control.

  Friends

  (FEBRUARY 24–26, 1912)

  Translated by Seymour Levitan

  I

  YES, IT WAS jealousy, nothing else. He caught himself feeling it, and it was no secret to him.

  He’d begun to hate his friend, his best, possibly his only friend, who had shared his loneliness for years. He couldn’t look him straight in the eyes, couldn’t speak two words to him without faltering, couldn’t bear to see his face. Every look, every grimace, irritated and provoked. The mild smile on his friend’s lips, the smile he used to love so, now struck him as false, hypocritical, unbearable; the clever, thoughtful remarks, flat and parroted.

  It wasn’t yet a full year after his marriage, and every day he was more in love with his wife. He, the lonely man already past thirty, could hardly believe that the love
of a one-and-only woman could offer him such profound happiness, could turn gray days into bright, intoxicating holidays, make him drunk with delight and with new, untried, unimagined blessings.

  It was a lucky choice, and it showed that he had good taste. Etta wasn’t a glowing or flashy or flamboyant beauty. She dressed and carried herself so modestly, was so withheld, that at first glance she hardly made an impression. Now he knew that she had hidden her beauty just for the man she had chosen. The graceful lines of her body, the delicate neck, the round, beautifully shaped arms that seemed made to embrace—all of it was a secret revealed to him little by little, a bookful of poetry and brilliance that he leafed through page by page, drawing new enchantment from it.

  He was happy. The business that he’d managed alone for the last three years was going not badly, his clouded eyes cleared, he was more cheerful and fresher, he’d been given a second youth.

  Happy people have a natural desire to see their friends happy. People who have married happily want their friends to be engaged. It was this feeling that prompted him to look up his old friend, a Yiddish poet, and bring him home. He didn’t do it, for God’s sake, to be boastful, to show off his happiness. He wanted with all his heart for his friend to drop his dreams, be practical, marry and be happy just like himself. And he would see.

  There was a time when he was himself involved with literature, was hungry, always alone, bitter, and philosophized very much about life, while life tossed him aside into a narrow corner. Finally he’d caught himself, and now he was so happy.

  In the quiet at home after supper, when he and Etta were still at the table, when the lamp was bright and the street noise that reached them was like a rhythmic pulse of life, when he loved to stroke Etta’s bright hair, search out her small ear and kiss it slowly, peacefully—he would tell her about his former life and about his friend. He described him as very deep and clever, told about his wandering life, and to his great joy noted that Etta understood the kind of person he was and was interested.

  Along with the beauty of her body, he discovered every day in this woman he loved more fineness of soul, more intelligence and appealing good sense. This girl he had taken out of a dress shop was quite perceptive, understood people, and with womanly instinct judged them remarkably clearly. She was not at all a stranger to the workings of the psyche.

  Once when he read his friend’s poems to her just before bedtime, there were tears in her eyes at some of them. And he was thankful that without knowing it, his friend had helped him uncover so much sensitivity in his Etta.

  “Why doesn’t he come up to us?” she asked. She’d only seen him once. Soon after their wedding he paid his respects, sat altogether a half-hour and never showed up again.

  “He’s a wild person. He doesn’t like the calm and quiet of home, he either wants the street noise, the crush of people, or to be entirely alone. You know, Etta,” he added smiling, “we’re after all petty bourgeois, everything about us is petty, homey and sweet.”

  And he kissed her, and she put her delicate, bare arms on his shoulders. “You’re good . . .” And while she sat on his lap, she went on talking about his friend. “Poets live a completely different life. They fly—fly far off, and they think another way entirely. I’d be afraid to live with a poet. He has such a strange look . . .”

  “You mean he has a look that frightens you! Go on! He’s good-hearted.”

  “No, I know. The goodness shows in his eyes. But when he looked at me, there was something so strange about it, the way a chicken or a dog looks at you.”

  “A chicken or a dog? Is that the way you think of him? You’re bad!” And he kissed her again on her lips. “Go on, go on, you don’t understand.” And she slapped him on the arm.

  “I mean his look is so strange, so far off—totally different.”

  He looked at her amazed, enchanted. She had expressed it so well, caught his old friend’s look exactly!

  When he ran into his friend some time later, he brought him home, and from then on he was a steady visitor. And that’s when it began.

  Jealousy entered quietly, unnoticed, stole into his heart, and like a sickness that you have without knowing it, grew until it was ripe.

  II

  ETTA WAS IN her bed, asleep. The apartment was dark; it was long past midnight. He tossed from side to side and couldn’t sleep. It was his first sleepless night, the end of his happy days.

  What had he actually noticed? Nothing. It amounted to nothing. His friend drops in often. Well, yes, but he had invited him so often, and after all, he’s a solitary person, and Etta is interesting and beautiful. Somehow his friend’s eyes, his chickeny or doggy eyes, had acquired a strange glow. But wasn’t it foolish, petty, to be obsessing about it and poisoning one’s own life? Absolutely foolish and petty.

  What else? When his friend hovers around Etta, there’s a smile on her lips that he doesn’t understand. Again pettiness—she’s become a woman, the girlish reticence has melted like mist. This is how a mature woman smiles, like mother Eve, who gratified her curiosity with the forbidden apple. Just two hours ago, as she grew tired and sleepy, he was overtaken by such strong love for her that he held and kissed her passionately, to the point of forgetting. And in the midst of it he saw the smile on her lips, the new smile, and he sobered.

  Now he knows the true meaning of her laughing eyes. There’s a new beauty in his Etta. He knew her so little before this, and every day he discovers something new. Right! What a petty fool he is! To harbor suspicion of her and insult her this way in his thoughts—his one and only Etta.

  And so what if Etta’s fingers brushed his friend’s hand. It was accidental. She was handing him tea and wanted to pass the sugar to him. It was an accident! And he’s just nervous, nothing more. The check that bounced today . . . Somehow he hears the train whistle, he even thinks he hears the noise of the wheels . . . he had no idea the train was so close. Etta is sleeping, but not restfully, it seems. He can hear her breath, broken at times.

  He calls quietly, barely whispering, “Etta . . .” And she answers immediately:

  “You aren’t asleep? What’s wrong, Chaim?”

  “Nothing. I’ve been sleeping. I was dreaming. What time is it?”

  “It just struck two.”

  “Two? You know? I don’t remember whether the gas is turned off tight.” He came up with this story about the gas intentionally. He wanted to see Etta’s face, to read it. He turned up the gas and went over to her bed.

  She was lying curled up in the blanket and the pillow. And when he came over, she turned to him, her head completely curtained by her bright hair. He brushed the hair from her face and felt he was doing it not with a lover’s hand, but with the cold hand of an investigator and judge. He wanted to see her. But her face, a bit tired and beautiful—beautiful! beautiful!—told him nothing about what he wanted to know.

  “Do you love me, Etta?” She opened her eyes and looked at him. God! Wasn’t this the chickeny, doggy, distant look that she described when she spoke about his friend? And what did the cold smile mean? With tragedy and shakiness in his voice that even he could hear, he asked again, “Do you love me, Etta?”

  “You have to ask that at two in the morning? Go to sleep, love.” She stroked his head, and he obeyed like a child, turned off the gas and lay down. “Love,” that’s what she said. He repeated it to himself a hundred times. “Love,” but how was it said? What lay in it? Was this just a way of soothing, the way one soothes a foolish child? “Love” and not “dearest.” Why not “dearest”? Foolishness! But why wasn’t she sleeping? What unsettled her?

  At the very worst it would only be that she was in love with this friend, yet nothing had happened. But if not, her sleep wouldn’t be restless. That was clear! Tomorrow he had so much work to do, and, as if in spite, he couldn’t sleep. It struck three and then four and his nervousness increased. He was bathed in sweat, his head was pounding.

  “Etta . . .” he called out quietly, but with
pleading and despair in his voice. But there was no answer from the other bed. Etta’s breathing was even, regular. She was sleeping.

  And he was attacked by oppressive anxiety and dread. How would this end? What would come now? This was it, jealousy, and it was just beginning. More and more would follow . . . clouded days, sleepless nights. It would be hard to pay the price for his few months of happiness. Yes, nothing on earth is free of charge. Why should he have deserved a second youth? This was how he had to pay for it!

  It would be best if he met with his friend tomorrow and told him plainly: “Look, we’re old friends, we can talk openly. You’ve destroyed my happiness. I was the happiest man on earth just a while ago, and now I’m the unhappiest. Now I toss and turn in bed, covered in sweat and trembling all over. This can’t go on, do you understand? It has to stop. Sorry.” And would his friend smile quietly and take his measure with his distant chickeny or doggy look? Let him! The point is that he wouldn’t come up anymore.

  At about six he dressed and made himself tea. His head was horribly heavy. He had a slight fever. Like a trained dog, he kneeled beside his wife’s bed and laid his tired head on her. He wanted her to wake but didn’t want to wake her. Quietly, calmly, he lay that way. The tea on the table grew cold, the sun shone in at the sides of the window shades, a strand of light stole over Etta’s face, and she woke, startled. “What’s wrong, Chaim?” There was fear in her voice. “Nothing, Etta. I couldn’t sleep, so I made tea.” “But you’re trembling.” She sat up in bed. Her half-uncovered young body overwhelmed his senses. He fell to her and kissed her hotly and forgot himself in her arms.

  And at night the three of them sat together, he, she and his friend, and played cards. He was sleepy and wanted to break off and say goodnight, but his friend’s eyes had a strange, lively glow, and Etta smiled. Yes, this was the new beauty that he’d discovered in her—a cold, clever smile.