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• 114 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, windtossed 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? I. J. Schwartz | 115 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 of that generation? Oh, how few! In all, a small band that can be counted on the fingers of one hand even if one takes into account one who has been paralyzed for so many years in a home for the chronically ill. If he were not taken into account, we would be only four. All of them are dear and close to me, and I tremble for some of them as I tremble for myself. But especially close and precious to me is I. J. Schwartz. How long have I known I. J. Schwartz? About forty-eight years, since he came to America in 1906. He was introduced to me on East Broadway near the library. And I liked him immediately for his appearance alone. Tall and thin with a finely formed face and a beautiful head with pitchblack curls, a thin smile on a fine, sensitive mouth. An impudent-happy flame shone from his brown eyes through a pair of glasses. And just as handsome and just as straight is he today after celebrating his sixty-ninth birthday and beginning to come closer to the age of the “sweet singer” in Israel.1 One can often still see the fine smile on his lips, though not as often the impudent-happy smile. Of course his head is completely silver. But that lends dignity to him. When I saw him for the first time, I already had read his poem “Afn Nieman” (On the Nieman), the first thing that he had published here in America in Tsukunft and perhaps also the first thing he had ever published . And I have to say that the poem made me like him even before I had met him personally, even though it was quite rough and had, in 1. Probably a reference to King David...

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