The Glatstein Chronicles (New Yiddish Library Series) - Softcover

Jacob Glatstein

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300095147 ISBN 13: 9780300095142

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2010

Synopsis

This seminal American work from the Yiddish literary canon, in a restored English edition, offers the luminous narrative of the author’s journey home to his Polish birthplace

In 1934, with World War II on the horizon, writer Jacob Glatstein (1896–1971) traveled from his home in America to his native Poland to visit his dying mother. One of the foremost Yiddish poets of the day, he used his journey as the basis for two highly autobiographical novellas (translated as The Glatstein Chronicles) in which he intertwines childhood memories with observations of growing anti-Semitism in Europe.

Glatstein’s accounts “stretch like a tightrope across a chasm,” writes preeminent Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse in the Introduction. In Book One, “Homeward Bound,” the narrator, Yash, recounts his voyage to his birthplace in Poland and the array of international travelers he meets along the way. Book Two, “Homecoming at Twilight,” resumes after his mother’s funeral and ends with Yash’s impending return to the United States, a Jew with an American passport who recognizes the ominous history he is traversing.

The Glatstein Chronicles is at once insightful reportage of the year after Hitler came to power, reflection by a leading intellectual on contemporary culture and events, and the closest thing we have to a memoir by the boy from Lublin, Poland, who became one of the finest poets of the twentieth century.

About this title

About the Author:

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 of The 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 Booklist:

Unlike in today’s coming-to-America stories, in the old immigration classics, there was never much about going both ways, but this autobiographical novel about a Yiddish writer’s return to his birthplace in Lublin, Poland, to see his dying mother in 1934, 20 years after he left for New York, tells a rare story of an immigrant who left and returned, always a stranger. When the narrator, Yash (the author’s nickname), arrives in New York in 1914, he gets a cold welcome; his uncle, who sent the ticket, cannot leave the sweatshop. On the boat back to Poland from New York, Yash is a Jew with an American passport, exchanging lots of anecdotes and memories with his fellow travelers. In Europe, he witnesses Hitler Youth and hears about Jews in trouble. And at his mother’s funeral, he feels the resentment toward those who left and deserted the family. All the bits and pieces in the story are distracting, but the narrative confusion parallels the disjointed nature of searching for home, a journey Isaac Singer called bereft of adventure and romance. --Hazel Rochman

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0300095147
• ISBN 13: 9780300095142
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432
• Editor: Ruth R. Wisse