From Our Springtime by Iceland Reuben;Marcus Gerald;

Author:Iceland, Reuben;Marcus, Gerald;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2021-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

1. Yiftakh vowed that if he was victorious in battle with the Ammonites, he would sacrifice to God whatever came out of the door of his house when he returned. It turned out to be his daughter. (Judges 11:31)

2. Nakhman Bratslaver (1772–1810), the great-grandson of the founder of Hasidism, the Bal Shem Tov; he was a charismatic rebbe whose many stories and parables were written down by his followers after his death.

I. J. Schwartz

From My Diary

Yesterday, I. J. Schwartz and his wife Mary were our guests. Whenever Schwartz comes, it’s like a holiday for us. But not yesterday. We were sitting outside in the long, narrow garden that stretches from my apartment to Washington Avenue, looking at the six banana trees that grow in two clumps not far from my windows. They extend their long, wide, wind-tossed leaves like outstretched hands, like a stylized upside-down lamed, from my apartment through the entire length of the garden. We spoke of various things yet felt at the same time that something was oppressing our hearts. Suddenly, Schwartz sighed: “Opatoshu is gone!”

By that time, Opatoshu’s funeral had taken place in New York. But here, in the lovely, green garden, the corpse still lay before our eyes, so to speak. We tried to speak and dispel the quiet sorrow that oppressed us. But several times it leapt out—So suddenly snatched away! How did it happen?—and still other similar exclamations were sometimes torn from my mouth and sometimes from Schwartz’s. We gazed at a row of papaya trees that grew in the long, narrow garden. We spoke about Schwartz’s beautiful orchard behind his house and about the lawn with the beautiful trees in front of his house in South Miami, around eighteen miles from the place where I myself live. But Opatoshu’s image remained before our eyes. And that night I could not close my eyes.

Now I sit at my desk, look out at my garden at the same banana trees, papaya trees, hibiscus bushes, and others, and my heart is just as distressed as yesterday when Schwartz was here and we were sitting outside. I ask myself: What was Opatoshu to you? And what were you to Opatoshu? And I answer myself: Not very much. Both as a man and as a writer. From the very beginning when I was just getting to know him and the whole time that I knew him. He was not my kind of person and he was also not my kind of writer. Once we even came to blows, and afterward we did not speak to each other for years. So why is my heart so terribly stricken?

Apparently, however alien he may have been to me, both as a person and as a writer, he was also very close and even a little dear to me, like all writers and poets of that generation who came here between 1905 and 1915, and who were, at one time or another, counted among Di Yunge. How many of us remain

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