Free The Glatstein Chronicles by Jacob Glatstein Page A

stubborn insistence on being different?”
    “But why should this disturb you?” I asked with feigned innocence. “Are you bothered by a Chinaman? A Hindu? A black man? You can’t be the free and tolerant Dutchman you think you are if you’re ashamed of a Polish Jew on the street with whom you don’t even claim kinship, who’s neither your uncle nor your nephew.”
    He ignored my barb and began to describe how safe and secure the Jews of Holland had always felt, how deeply rooted, until “this Hitler” began to act up. “So far, there hasn’t been any anti-Semitism in Holland,” he said. “Everyone is equal. There are Jewish cabinet ministers, judges, and prominent businessmen. Everything would be fine, but with Hitler so close by … The Dutch don’t even like the Germans, but who knows what will happen? Until Hitler came along, everything was fine.”
    “So you’re afraid of Hitler?”
    He admitted that Hitler gave him pause.
    “Then doesn’t that make you want to rejoin the Jewish people, to become a brother to the other twelve tribes of Israel?” I said, with a thrust of my imaginary foil.
    “No! Not at all! As I’ve already told you, above all, we’re good Dutchmen.”
    I was growing weary of this parrying. No doubt my young, two hundred percent Dutchman was sure that his were original thoughts, but to me his words gave off the same rusty, familiar clang sounded so often by other deluded Jews in other lands, with the same misplaced faith. I couldn’t resist a sarcastic retort.
    “But no matter how Dutch you think you are, my good friend,” I said, throwing him a big smile, “according to the latest research on race being conducted by German scientists, you aren’t an Aryan. The Nazi racial doctrine, a ‘proven scientific’ fact, will reach out to get you no matter how Dutch you may imagine yourself to be. It has condemned not just the 600,000 Jews of Germany but all 17 million of the Jews in the world. When we look at ourselves in the new Teutonic mirror, you, the Dutch Jew, and I, the Polish-American Jew, are equally non-Aryan.”
    I made a move to leave but he wouldn’t let me go. He wanted to talk some more about Jews and Jewishness, like someone picking at a scab. Again, I restricted myself to questions and posed the following puzzler: “When you hear about Chinese being persecuted in China, or Jews in Germany—which concerns you more?”
    “I struggle with myself,” he replied. “As a civilized person I want to care, or not care, about them equally, but I must confess that the news about the Jews hits closer to home.”
    “Why?”
    “Why?”
    We had spoken simultaneously.
    “Well,” he said, “this may be a personal fear, but I worry that Jewish calamities elsewhere might find their way to us in Holland, and that wouldn’t be fair, because we Dutch Jews are different, as I’ve already explained. We’re Dutchmen first, Jews second.”
    As he pounded away on his single theme, he grew more talkative, but his voice remained a steady drone. On and on he went, marshaling his meager learning, bandying about the names of philosophers, writers, musicians. I became deaf to his monotone and all I could think of were the hackneyed reproductions that hang in kitchens—a Dutch windmill, heavy wooden clogs with upturned toes, impossible flaxen hair, and clenched fingers busily milking a cow. Needless to say, this was not the sum of Dutch culture, which has a long and rich tradition. That culture also has Jewish resonances—Rembrandt’s substantial Jewish patriarchs, for instance, and even the sour Judeo-Christian taste of Spinoza’s
Tractatus Theologico-Politicum
—but if my Dutch friend was in any way representative, these seemed to be lost on the “thirteenth tribe” that he imagined Dutch Jewry to be.
    Lately, he droned on, Dutch Jews had begun to suffer from the affliction of Zionism, which was spreading among the youth like an epidemic. “Imagine,” he said, “sitting in