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Scroll to bottom for historian Michael Nutkiewicz's thought questions
Yiddish scholar and writer Dara Horn calls The Glatstein Chronicles a work of prophesy, a forecast of doom for the Jews of Poland and Yiddish culture. This quasi-mystical characterization of Glatstein's book by the author of the novel The World to Come is apposite.
But Horn's view glides over the difficult and complex questions of genre and content that Jacob Glatstein's two-part book presents. How are the two parts alike and how do they differ? What do the differences signify in terms of identifying what Glatstein thinks and believes.
Readers will notice that like contemporary journalists and ethnographers, Glatstein allows his characters ample room to speak for themselves. And like many a Jewish novelist, from Der Nister to Chaim Grade, Glatstein the poet portrays a range of types. Who are these characters? Who, for example, is Steinman in Part II? Is Steinman a portrait of a "real" individual or a fictional construct? Is Steinman a father figure or alter ego?
In other words, what role does Glatstein take as a writer and artist? Why does he skip over the actual encounter with his dying mother? Why does he devote whole sections to dreams and even to the performance of play that he writes and presents within one of his own dreams? Do we know what Glatstein actually experienced and thought?
Is The Glatstein Chronicles best characterized as a book of prophesy in the Biblical sense of a moral warning? If so, a warning to whom? How can we untangle Glatstein the author from his narrator and characters? Who is Glatstein? What does he say?
Michael Nutkiewicz earned his Ph.D. in History from UCLA. He taught at the University of Missouri-Columbia and the University of New Mexico. In addition, Michael served as Director of The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, Senior Historian at the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Executive Director of the Program for Torture Victims in Los Angeles, and manager of the refugee resettlement program at Catholic Charities-New Mexico. He has published in the areas of Jewish history, early modern Europe, the uses of oral testimony, and social justice education. Michael’s book A Ukrainian Chapter: A Jewish Aid Worker's Memoir of Sorrow (Slavica, 2022) is an annotated translation from the original Yiddish publication in 1921 and is available on Amazon.
1. The eminent historian Salo Baron wrote in 1963: “All my life I have been struggling against the hitherto dominant “lachrymose conception of Jewish history” … because I have felt that an overemphasis on Jewish sufferings distorted the total picture of the Jewish historic evolution….” Does Steinman’s claim (and apparently Dara Horn’s review of The Glatstein Chronicles) buttress what the historians used to call “the lachrymose history of the Jews”?
2. Can we identify Glatstein’s politics from his rendering of Bundists, Zionists, Communists, and other statements he makes about Jews affiliated with parties and movements? Does Glatstein have a political worldview? Further, does he repudiate ethical universalism when he has the Dutch Jew say: “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.” How does Glatstein negotiate particularism (Jewish group identification) with universalism (belief in others and self as citizens of the world)?
3. Reviewer Dara Horn states that “It isn’t every day that one has the opportunity to read a literary masterpiece. But a literary masterpiece that doubles as a work of prophecy?” A traditional Jewish trope is that “Esau hates Jacob” (Esau in rabbinic tradition represents Christianity; Jacob represents the Jewish people). Steinman appears to repeat that idea in Book 2 (226): “What do they have against us, Mr. Steinman?” “Ah, you’re raising fundamental questions,” Steinman said. He had become grave. “You want to go to the root of things. Well, I’ll tell you: they want to destroy us, nothing less. Yes, to destroy us.” Do you agree with Dara Horn that the book is a work of prophecy?
4. Some sections of the Chronicles read like Jewish folktales, e.g., the segment about the marketplace (206), or Book 1, chapter 6 (179), which is reminiscent of the Hasidic story about R. Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev who argues with God. Does this dilute the autobiographical/historical nature of the Chronicles? Does The Glatstein Chronicles belong to a particular literary genre, to several genres, or is it a new genre (sui generis)?
5. Did the Chronicles seem didactic (inserted to teach a moral or to make a point)? For example, when in Book 1, Chapter 4 Glatstein begins to describe the different kinds of Jews he encounters on the ship: the assimilated Jew, the self-hating Jew, the religious Jew, etc.
6. Book 2 skips through Jewish history in the modern period, with references to Hasidism, the Haskalah (228-9), the Wissenschaft des Judentums (the 19th c. Science of Judaism), (230), Zionism (239), etc. Some references are esoteric, e.g., Jacob Gordin and the Jewish-Christian sects of Imperial Russia (236). What makes the story compelling to a reader who isn’t acquainted with Jewish history?
7. Why do you think Glatstein’s discursive style becomes looser and more free in Part 2, as compared with Part 1? How do the parts differ? What is gained and what is lost?
8. The narrator is sometimes sarcastic and ironic about being a writer (so were Sholem Aleichem and Mendele). He is both an outsider (20 years away from Poland and is the American Jew) but also an insider (can get nostalgic about small town Poland). He describes himself as “a hybrid” (146). What do you think he means? Has reading Jewish literature in translation made us hybrids? Or are we hybrids already?]
9. What is Glatstein lamenting: the fear of physical destruction or the demise of Eastern European culture?
10. Narratives of death are found in the book (e.g., the teacher on the lower east side, the student, and the suicide of unknown neighbor). Is there an existential theme pervading the book, Glatstein’s reckoning with his place as a Yiddish writer in the face of death, as individually experienced and as a collective threat?
11. The Oxford English Dictionary defines nostalgia as “a form of melancholia caused by prolonged absence from one’s home or country; severe homesickness.” Nostalgia plays a large role in Book 2—for example, the section about “the boy” (pp. 206-208) or Finkel reminiscing about food (p. 222-223). Is Glatstein’s Chronicles an exercise in nostalgia? Does nostalgia bring us closer to the world that was, or does it amplify/emphasize the distance between then and now? For Glatstein? For us as readers?
12. Glatstein struggles with the question of generational continuity (218). Steinman: “I often think to myself that I’d like to adjure you to hold something dear, but what it is I haven’t found yet. And time is moving on.” And on the same page: “A tune solves everything, even the toughest problems. There were among the rabbis inarticulate souls who couldn’t speak to God through the Torah, so they spoke to Him through melody.” This episode is reminiscent of the following Hasidic story of the Baal Shem Tov:
When hope threatens to leave this world, the Baal Shem Tov would go to a secret place in the forest where he would light a fire and say a prayer speaking the long-forgotten most sacred name of God. The danger was averted and hope stayed alive.
In later times when disaster threatened, the Maggid of Mezrich, his disciple, would go to the same place in the forest and say, “Master of the Universe, I do not know how to light the fire, but I can say the prayer.”
Still later, his disciple, Moshe Leib of Sasov, would go to the same place in the forest and say, “Master of the Universe, I do not know how to light the fire or say the prayer, but I found my way to this place, and that must be enough.” And it was. Hope stayed alive.
And later when Israel of Rizhyn needed intervention from heaven, he sat in his chair with his head in his hands and said, “Ribono Shel Olam, Master of the Universe, I no longer know how to light the fire nor how to say the prayer, and I don’t know the place but I can tell the story and that must be enough.” And it was.
How is story-telling a “glue” that holds the Jewish people (or any ethnic group) together? Is it enough for us today (“and it was”)? Was it enough among the characters in Glatstein's book?
13. Can we tell whether the narrator is changed as a result of his return home to Poland? If so, how? Does he see himself as Polish or American? Or simply Jewish?
14. What tone or mood does the narrator end his Chronicles? Using the seasonal metaphor of life’s four stages, (363-365) he writes that he has reached “the autumn of my life,” and adds that this was “in step with Jewish life as a whole….” Of course, winter follows autumn which is followed in turn by spring. Does Gladstein end on a hopeful note?
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