The Glatstein Chronicles by Jacob Glatstein (1934 as a serial, 1940 as a book) The Yale Yiddish Library

The Glatstein Chronicles by Jacob Glatstein (edited and introduced by Ruth Wisse) consists of two very autobiographical novels combined by Ruth Wisse and Yale University Press into one book.  

The work was occasioned by Glatstein  (Poland, 1896 to 1971) return to Warsaw to visit his dying mother.  He intended the work to be a trilogy.  Part One is devoted to his sea voyage from his home in New York City to Europe.  Part Two covers his experiences in Europe, ending shortly after his morher's funeral. .  Part Three, which was never written, his trip back to America.  

These works are only in the weakest sense novels, they are really travel books with lots of political and social observations.   The most interesting of the two books was the one on the boat.  Glatstein seems a great magnet for people who want to talk.  He hears the stories of many other Jews, relaying their life in the New World, explaining why they are going back to Europe (which most passengers see as a bad idea for anybody Jewish with Hitler in power in Germany) and talking about what being Jewish means to them.  There is no plot.  Basically it is just Glatstein reselling the stories and his observations about life aboard ship.  The story I liked best was the man who talked at length about his life in Columbia and Columbian women who he described as very beautiful but treacherous if crossed.  Glatstein is acutely intelligent and observant and the voyage over was fascinatingly realized.  Part Two deals with his arrival in Europe, his views on how Europe is changing as the Nazis gain more power.  

For sure this book is must reading for anyone into Yiddish culture.  Wisse's introduction is very edifying.

Jacob Glatstein arrived in America in 1914 and went on to publish twelve volumes of poetry, seven collections of essays and literary criticism, a wartime novel for teenagers, and the autobiographical novellas translated as The Glatstein Chronicles. Ruth Wisse is the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. The late Norbert Guterman completed the first English translation of Book Two ofThe Glatstein Chronicles in 1962. Maier Deshell translated Book One. He is former editor of the Jewish Publication Society and translated (with Margaret Birstein) Yehoshua Perle’s Everyday Jews: Scenes from a Vanished Life, also for the New Yiddish Library. From Yale University 

My thanks to Yale University Press for the gift of this book and many others.

Mel u