The Glatstein Chronicles by Jacob Glatstein

words
Colombia
and
Bogotá
—accent on the
a
—even if you were a mapmaker you wouldn’t know what these places are like. Only
Sambatyon
can begin to give you some inkling. Do you think you’d understand it better if I said ‘South America’? One man’s South America is not another’s. You’re from New York—isn’t that right?—so I’ll try to explain where I live in relation to where you live. Let’s say you suddenly go mad, poor man, and decide that you want to go to Bogotá. You’d board a ship in New York and sail seven days till you reach the small port of Cartagena. That would put you in Colombia, but don’t lick your chops just yet, your troubles would just be beginning. Next, you’d take the train to the Magdalena River—your true Sambatyon—and those nasty, little Red Jews on the far bank, those are us, the chimps, or what you in the States call peddlers, the guys who have to wheel and deal to earn a meal.
    “So, here we are at the Magdalena. You navigate it by boat, or what passes for a boat but is actually a wreck, a piece of floating lumber that idles down the river for a day, two days, three, four, five—and suddenly you’re on another train. How come? Because the Magdalena has a slight obstruction, it runs smack into a waterfall, and waterfalls, as you realize, don’t welcome either boats or passengers. Only a train can get you past this obstacle. Then it’s back to the Magdalena till you reach a small village where—can you believe this?—you get on another train, but finally one that takes you all the way to Bogotá (accent on the
a
).
    “The train crawls uphill, until you’re four thousand feet above sea level. You pass coffee plantations, some barely cultivated, others lush, with heaps of coffee beans drying in the sun. The coffee bush likes the cold mountain air. No taller than a man, it loves to enslave the human species. The energy it takes to put even a spoonful of coffee on your table is like what it took the Hebrew slaves to build the cities of Pithom and Ramses in Egypt. The coffee bush needs pampering, nursing, and feeding before it makes the grade. Its berries look like red cherries. You have to pick them by hand and throw away the soft, fleshy part, leaving the hard kernel—the bean. Well, what do you know? You’re off to Bogotá so you’ve gotten a free lecture—bully for you! The train keeps going for hours and hours, passing one pretty little village after another, until, finally, you arrive at your destination.
    “Now, try telling me that I don’t live across the River Sambatyon! Better yet, here’s my cheek, go ahead and smack it. Don’t be afraid, smack it real hard. I can take it, and I bloody well deserve it, because across the Sambatyon is where I buried the best years of my life. Don’t go thinking that I went bust there. I’ve actually managed to put away a tidy little sum, but that’s worth no more to me than a pinch of snuff. What matters to me more than the $80,000—maybe $100,000—that I’ve scraped together is my mother’s longing for me, back in Bessarabia, and my longing for her and for my old home. What is a man, anyway? Just a money-grubbing pig—or shouldn’t he be doing something worthwhile with his life besides making money?”
    Having opened the spigot, the burly Bessarabian went on to recount how he had come to Ecuador in 1922 as a bachelor of twenty, and gone on from there to Peru, where straight off, in his very first year, he made $10,000 as a peddler. Why Ecuador and Peru? Better not ask questions of life. A friend had dragged him out there, and thanks to that same friend he had made his fortune, but right now the fortune sticks like a bone in his throat.
    In Peru he found a thousand others like him, young Jewish men working as peddlers, and since he had always been something of an entrepreneur, a real hustler, he became their manager, selling them supplies, lending them money, and making his thirty percent profit. It all went