Jacob Glatstein: A Yiddish Genius in Anglicizing America

Yiddish literature and poetry took off in America on the crest of a huge Jewish immigrant wave at the beginning of the twentieth century. Yiddish writers kept ripening their talent as most other speakers of their language were swept into the English mainstream. Can individual genius flourish during its culture’s decline? Jacob Glatstein, or Yankev Glatshteyn, became an American original by turning that question into the driving force of his poetry and the concern of his prose. On Tuesday, March 4, 2014 at 7:00pm, Ruth Wisse, Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, will discuss Jacob Glatstein’s life and work and will read excerpts from his poetry in Yiddish.

Attend the program.

A Yiddishkayt of folk air
to prick the heart and pour
warm honey at the sight
of things that touch the cockles?
If that's the stuff we celebrate
we'd better do without.
Yiddish poets, are you bees
who close the feast
with honey-store
of song, and nothing more?

From "Yiddishkayt” by Jacob Glatstein
Translation by Cynthia Ozick

The Glatstein Chronicles by Jacob Glatstein
Jacob Glatstein; Edited and with an Introduction by Ruth Wisse; Translated by Maier Deshell and Norbert Guterman

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.

Buy the book.
Read about the Jacob Glatstein Papers in the YIVO Archives.