Read Online The Glatstein Chronicles by Jacob Glatstein - Free Book Online Page B

soul, was left an orphan at seventy. Grandfather Avrom was a widower, who lived with us for as long as I can remember, as much a fixture of the household as my father, mother, and brothers. He had a beautiful white beard that had become slightly stained from all the snuff he had pushed up his nose, and he owned a number of snuff boxes, all of them plain, proletarian ones, made of wood or bone, not silver, let alone gold. It took Grandfather longer than a prima donna to perform his toilette. Before going out, he would polish his boots, comb out his beard, and look himself over in the mirror. When he was already standing in the doorway, he would call me over for a final inspection, to make sure that no bit of feather still clung to him. Every Friday afternoon he went to the bathhouse, returning home with time to spare for a nap, before going to usher in the Sabbath at his Hasidic rebbe’s synagogue. It was our custom never to touch the braided Sabbath loaf, the
hallah,
until Grandfather had come home to recite the
kiddush
blessing over the wine.
    Grandfather was a goldsmith. He had all sorts of strange tools, the strangest being a bellows used in the melting of gold that left a coating of soot over the whole house. He made his services available, gratis, to all in the family, repairing and cleaning their rings, earrings, and brooches—the only exception being Mother, who had to hound him for weeks before he would attend to her jewelry. Sometimes, he would set out with his tools to nearby villages, returning with a deficit that took several glasses of brandy and a hearty meal to overcome. After such indulgence, his cheeks turned red as beets, his blue, carefree eyes started to blink, and soon he would be stretched out on his bed, snoring rhythmically into his lower lip, his beard rising and falling on his chest. The children of the house were ordered to walk on tiptoe, because, as Mother loudly declared, as much to provoke him as to command our attention, “Grandfather, the great breadwinner, has returned from afar and is taking a nap.”
    The ship was barely rocking. The slipper-clad Jew had dozed off. The air grew sharper and a wondrously cool fragrance rose from the sea, of saltwater long warmed by the sun.
3
    The second Jew caught in my net proved less complaisant. I found him strolling arm in arm with a Haitian diplomat who spoke a heartrendingly beautiful French. In his polite yet proud demeanor, the diplomat, a light-skinned mulatto, might have been the great-grandson of Toussaint-Louverture, the black slave who, in 1801, rebelled against Haiti’s white masters and gained independence for his country, so electrifying the world with his military genius that in Europe he was dubbed the Black Napoleon. The diplomat spoke in a loud, flirtatious voice so that all could hear how beautiful the pearly vowels of French could sound. He drew on all his powers to convey the subtleties of the language. Absorbing every word, his companion was in seventh heaven when he was able to interject a French sentence of his own, which in turn elicited from the Haitian a fresh torrent of elegant phrases. He pursed his lips like a fish, and every word he uttered was a kiss, sent into the air like a bird freed from confinement.
    The diplomat was slender, with polished features and a long, bumpy, almost Jewish-looking nose. He had shrewd eyes and theatrical gestures. If he had to beg someone’s pardon for the slightest inadvertent contact that might be mistaken for a shove, he would gallantly bow his head in apology. In sum, though he represented a small, poor land, he was the very model of a diplomat, with all the requisite savoir faire.
    Since his companion was much shorter than he (and nondescript looking, to boot), the tall diplomat was constantly bending down to reduce the distance between them, in yet another gesture of tact and courtesy. When, in my quest, I interrupted the pair to solicit the shorter one’s reaction to the news about