Free The Glatstein Chronicles by Jacob Glatstein Page B

Holland and dreaming of Palestine!” A cousin of his, a well-educated young man from a wealthy family, had thrown everything away to become an ordinary worker in the Land of Israel. “His parents want nothing more to do with him,” my Dutchman continued, “but he sends them letter after letter, telling them how happy he is to have found solid ground under his feet. Now why would someone like that, who was on the point of converting to Christianity, suddenly become a Zionist? The devil only knows!” Actually, he noted, a number of Jews, who were more Gentile than Jew, had begun to identify actively with Zionism, which seemed to attract the most assimilated elements of the community. “It’s probably the panic about Hitler,” he said, more to soothe his disquiet than in agreement with me. “The good Dutch Jews look askance at this Zionist flirtation. It’s hurting us. It can undo the respect of our Christian neighbors, which we’ve worked so long and hard to cultivate. If the Dutch were to find out that our hearts lie elsewhere, beyond the borders of Holland … ”
    “Why then don’t you convert?” I interrupted.
    He wasn’t in the least insulted. For the first time his mismatched eyes showed a glimmer of longing. He confessed that he was strongly attracted by the romanticism of the Catholic Church. A number of times he had consulted his father on the matter, who had advised him against conversion, though he couldn’t give any good reason. “One of these days I’ll take it up with him again,” he said. “I just love the incense and the theatricality of Catholicism. Then again, maybe I’ll go check out the Land of Israel, to see what all the excitement is about. Maybe,” he laughed cheerlessly, “my heart will begin to throb with a biblical beat if I get to crush rocks on native soil. Ha, ha, I might just become the Columbus of the Jewish homeland. Yes, I might just hear a diapason in a Jewish mode, summoning Jews home from the far-flung Diaspora.”
    Diaspora
!
Diapason
! Lovely musical words. But wouldn’t the words of Jeremiah, if only he had known them, better have expressed his sentiment? “A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping; Rachel is weeping for her children.”
    Finally, as our conversation wound down, he cautioned me against visiting Holland, should the notion ever occur to me. “There’s nothing to see,” he said, swiveling his afflicted eye as if to emphasize the point. I suspect he didn’t want yet another Polish Jew setting foot in Holland, lest he tip the balance and ruin everything for the Dutch Jews.
4
    “To tell you the truth, I envy the way you can sit there so calmly, talking to such a jerk. If I ever caught a Jew like that in my city, I’d give him the thrashing of his life, and I’d add two slaps in the face for good measure.”
    The speaker was a tall, broad-shouldered man, with a powerful set of teeth that could easily grind a whole loaf of bread to bits, long, sturdy arms, and mocking cat’s eyes, whom I had nonetheless failed to notice all the time I was talking to the Dutchman. “I know some English,” he said, “enough to make out what that weasel was talking about. What can I tell you? He’s just the sort of Jew who needs our boys to teach him a lesson. They’d knock some sense into his head, either that or finish him off altogether.”
    What was he talking about? What city? What boys?
    He apologized for beginning in the middle, without first taking the time to inform me that he was from Colombia, from its capital city, Bogotá, with the accent on the
a.
    “You see,” he said, launching into his tale, “I’m from across the River Sambatyon, where the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel ended up, and my blood boils whenever I hear the name Hitler. Along comes this nincompoop who has no use for Judaism. Yet this Dutch noodlehead is no less a Jew than the Gaon of Vilna. Go figure it out!
    “Have you any idea where I hail from? When you hear the