The Glatstein Chronicles by Jacob Glatstein Page B

The sun might be shining as brightly as it did that day when I walked out on my job at American Surety, but there must be no more talk of resignation. I was now a paterfamilias and must bow to the special demands of the role.
    “I’ll think it over,” said the supreme authority.
    “Thank you. Good day,” I replied.
    There was no rejoinder, but I had finally seen the provider of my sustenance, seen, too, that he considered me only a debit in his account book, a mere inkblot in his business ledger. Coming out of his office, my left ear burning and cheeks aflame, I ran smack into my supervisor. He threw me a sympathetic look, well aware of the agony I had just undergone, but he quickly drew himself up so that I, in my helplessness, shouldn’t think him a friend and cry on his shoulder.
    So the small joy that I felt at the prospect of my first trip abroad in twenty years was reversed, and I was seized by a strange foreboding. The fear persisted as I prepared to board the ship.
2
    In the morning, informed by the ship’s newspaper that Hitler had done away with his closest associates in the so-called Night of Long Knives—apparently taking to heart Mussolini’s advice never to share your rule with the fellow revolutionaries who aided your rise to power (by the same token, rather than pay back a debt owed to good friends, it might be easier to slaughter them)—I went looking for Jewish faces among the passengers.
    The paper, an attractive miniature version of its counterparts on land, conveyed the news simply, without commentary, as if this were no more than a sensational tidbit, the severed heads of a dozen or so Nazi pederasts served up on a silver platter for the delectation of the passengers after their rich breakfast—yet another item on the ship’s program to stave off boredom. The effort was wasted on the Gentile passengers, who got no thrill from the news. They thumbed the scant pages, reading the jokes, the sports items, the announcements of afternoon activities, barely pausing over Hitler’s bloody purge. When I tried to elicit some reaction from them about this report that had traveled from land to us at sea, many admitted that they hadn’t seen the news at all, and those who had said things like “Hitler’s a damn fool!” “Let them knock each other’s brains out!” “Hmm … this is just the beginning!” My Scandinavian friend gave me a sharp lecture on Marxism, exclaiming, “By God, the Danes hate the Germans! It’s high time Roosevelt said something about this.”
    None of these responses cheered me, lacking as they were in Jewish understanding and feeling. I realized that to the Gentiles, Hitler meant something altogether different than he did to me. My non-Jewish fellow passengers, whether provoked to anger or not, regarded Hitler as merely Germany’s dictator. To me, to 600,000 German Jews, and indeed to all the 17 million Jews worldwide, Hitler was the embodiment of the dreaded historical hatemonger, latest in a long line of persecutors that stretched from Haman, Torquemada, and Chmielnicki to Krushevan and Jozef Haller, a beast with a murderous paw, wielding a bloody pen that was writing a dreadful new chapter of Jewish history.
    The casual reaction of my Gentile fellow passengers to the Hitler-news was the first slap in the face I had received as a Jew on this floating international paradise. I felt isolated, even offended that news of such importance to me should fall on such indifferent ears. I longed for a “warm Jewish heart” to share my emotion. The boxer had complained about the “bastards” trying to pass for
goyim,
but I began to discern a few Jewish faces. Perhaps under the impact of the Hitler-news, they were coming out of hiding and also looking for company.
    My first such discovery was a dignified gentleman in house slippers, a prosperous-looking man with a trimmed beard, sitting on a bench, poring over a sacred text, soundlessly mouthing the words. He was altogether an