One of the foremost 20th century Yiddish poets, Glatstein emigrated from Lublin to New York in 1914
February 1, 2024 16:55
By, Mark Glanville
Jacob Glatstein, one of the foremost twentieth century Yiddish poets, emigrated to New York in 1914 at the age 18, after a childhood spent in Lublin. There he helped found the Inzikhist (Introspective) poetic movement which insisted that reality be filtered through individual experience rather than observable facts. After 20 years away, Glatstein returned to Poland, in 1934, to be present at his mother’s death bed.
The Glatstein Chronicles are divided into two books, originally entitled When Yash Set Out and When Yash Arrived, published, respectively, in 1938 and 1940. Though the books are presented as fiction, Yash was Glatstein’s nickname, and the voyage to Europe recounted in Book One and the homecoming of Book Two clearly recount the writer’s own lived experience. As the academic Ruth Wisse points out, in her characteristically informative introduction, Glatstein instead “wrote a cascade of poems that wrestle with a catastrophe dwarfing the ‘natural; death of a parent”.
