THE JEWISH SCULPTOR GLYCENSTEIN
I first saw him at the seventh annual Zionist Congress at Basel. It was a preliminary conference of the Russian delegates. Party feeling was at its height. A dark cloud hung threateningly over the heads of those assembled. Pandemonium prevailed. The passion of a people long doomed to silence and patient suffering now broke forth in boundless might. . . . In a corner stood a man, a stripling of a man. His eyes, dark and enigmatic, seemed to see what no one else saw. He was a little Jew, with the marked face of an artist. . . . Much excited, he gesticulated: “Bambini!” he exclaimed, “Bambini! That’s the way. There is much talk, much excitement. That’s good! I am in the midst of Tews.”
No sooner had he thus spoken than the present and all its bitterness fled. The clash of party interest did away—all the noise of hell and all that which for the moment seemed brutally grotesque and of savage unrestraint, now merged into a deep, symbolic significance. At first it was the turmoil and noise of Zionist parties wrangling for supremacy and power; now it was a thunderous roar of an old lion who, breaking from the cage where he had long lain, makes his bound for freedom. Into a mystic and mysterious individual and vast proportions this crowd now blurred; and also the manners and expressions of this crowd flowed into definite lines as manners and expressions of this one individual; and the changes, ever varying and ever flitting, that crossed the different faces, now crossed one broad face. The ugly was no more. In everlasting beauty the fleeting moment was transfixed for eternity by the all-seeing eyes of an artist. This small Jew, with the eyes of a dreamer, was Henryk Glycenstein.
A few days later we were again together.
We stood in the congress hall before the work of the artist, his Messiah. He calls it Messiah. I would not call it so. It is a Messiah as the phantasy of a mystic would conceive it—a savior of our sinful world, not of Israel. Never did a people’s imagination create an old Messiah. A youth was Buddha when he set out to free the world from the hardships of existence and led it into “Nir- vana.” The savior of Christianity, also, lingers in the minds of believers as a young: man. Strong, mighty, and of strident power is the Messiah conceived by the Jews. It matters not that he sat fettered and wounded before the portals of Rome, the all-conquering. Let but the hour strike and the giant, the youth, the beautiful one awakens—and the world will be. rejuvenated. This is Messiah. The forms.of pseudo-Messiahs are the plastic proofs thereof. Glycenstein’s Messiah is not yet a Messiah. One fettered with chains is his Messiah, and yet to be atoned for. Not the rejuvenation, the leader who wakens to power and action do we behold; but one—though mighty of limb, still—old. In his limp hands the horn lies mute. It is the “Shofar” of the world’s last judgment. To life this horn must rouse the dead in the valleys of Johosephat, and new life must it conjure out of mortal dust and clay. Still— there it lies, mute in his limp hands. And in this man—of powerful limb, but old and inactive—we see the bound Messiah. “Israel sows” —Israel, the old, the aged, do we behold in this Messiah of the mystic mind, the mind that later wanted to unite Israel and the world, the “King” and the “King’s children.” This motive reasserted itself in Glycenstein. In him moves the life and deep mysticism of the Jew, that: beholds all manifestations through the haze of sublime exaltation.