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  For my parents, whose names were in the lists:

  Goldberg, Boris Finiasovich—born 1932

  Rabinovich, Sofia Aronovna—born 1937

  БАР-КОХБА (взмахивая мечом):

  Раб, взявшийся за меч,—не раб!

  Самуил Галкин, Бар-Кохба

  Государственный Еврейский Театр, 1938

  BAR-KOKHBA (raising a dagger):

  A slave who wields a dagger is not a slave!

  Shmuel Halkin, Bar-Kokhba

  Moscow State Jewish Theater, 1938

  In the early morning of March 1, 1953, when Iosif Stalin collapsed at his dacha, he was preparing to solve Russia’s Jewish Question definitively.

  Military units and enthusiastic civilians stood poised to begin a pogrom, and thousands of cattle cars were brought to the major cities to deport the survivors of the purportedly spontaneous outbursts of murder, rape, and looting.

  Stalin intended his holocaust to coincide with the biggest purge Russia had seen.

  The West would have to choose between standing by and watching these monstrous events or taking the risk of triggering a world war fought with atom and hydrogen bombs.

  Stalin’s death was announced on March 5, the day his pogrom was scheduled to begin.

  Act

  I

  1

  At 2:37 a.m. on Tuesday, February 24, 1953, Narsultan Sadykov’s Black Maria enters the courtyard of 1/4 Chkalov Street.

  A Black Maria is a distinctive piece of urban transport, chernyy voron, a vehicle that collects its passengers for reasons not necessarily political. The Russian people gave this ominous carriage a diminutive name: voronok, a little raven, a fledgling.

  At night, Moscow is the czardom of black cats and Black Marias. The former dart between snowbanks in search of mice and companionship. The latter emerge from the improbably tall, castle-like gates of Lubyanka, to return laden with enemies of the people.

  The arrest of Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, an actor from the defunct State Jewish Theater, is routine. An old, likely decrepit Yid, Levinson lives alone in a communal flat at 1/4 Chkalov Street. Apartment 40. No hand-wringing wife. No hysterical children. No farewells. No one to hand the old man a toothbrush through the bars of a departing Black Maria.

  In the parlance of state security, arrests are “operations.” This operation is easier than most: collect some incriminating rubbish, put a seal on the door, help the old man into the truck, and a little before dawn, the Black Maria drives back through Lubyanka’s armored gates.

  Lieutenant of State Security Sadykov is slight and pale. His hair is straight and dark red. He is a Tatar, a dweller of the steppes, a descendant of the armies of Genghis Khan, an alumnus of an orphanage in Karaganda. With him are two soldiers, naïve nineteen-year-old boys from the villages of Ukraine, dressed in anemia-green coats, each armed with a sidearm. One of the boys carries a pair of American handcuffs.

  * * *

  Another night, another knock-and-pick. The function of the green, covered light trucks that fan through Moscow at night is clear to everyone. There is no reason to hide their purpose or to flaunt it. It’s best to approach through the courtyard, turn off the engine and the lights, and coast gently to a halt.

  The driver, one of the nineteen-year-olds, skillfully pilots the vehicle through the dark, narrow cavern of an archway built for a horse cart. With the engine off, he surrenders to inertia.

  Bracing for a burst of frost, Sadykov and the boys step out of the Black Maria. A thin coat of crisp, pristine snow crunches loudly underfoot. Sadykov looks up at the darkness of the five-story buildings framing the sky above the courtyard. The night is majestic: dry frigid air, bright stars, the moon hanging over the railroad station, pointing toward mysterious destinations.

  Whenever possible, Sadykov avoids going through front doors, favoring tradesmen’s entrances. The back door of 1/4 Chkalov Street is made of heavy oak, devilishly resilient wood that has defied a century of sharp kicks and hard slams. Protected by an uncounted number of coats of dark brown paint, it stands impervious to weather and immune to rot. Opening the door, Sadykov and his entourage plunge into darkness.

  Since 1/4 Chkalov Street is close to the Kursk Railroad Station, travelers use the building’s stairwell as a nighttime shelter. As they await morning trains, these vagabonds curl up like stray dogs beneath the staircase, their bodies encircling suitcases and burlap sacks. If it’s your lot to sleep beneath those stairs, you have to be cold or drunk enough to tolerate the overpowering smell of urine.

  Ignoring the odor and the sound of a man snoring under the stairs, the three soldiers feel their way to the second floor. Sadykov lights a match. A blue number on a white enameled sign identifies apartment forty.

  With the match still lit, Sadykov motions to the boys. When duty takes Sadykov and his comrades to large communal flats, the arresting crew has to wake up someone, anyone, to open the door and, only after gaining entry, knock on the door of the person or persons they’ve come to collect for the journey through Lubyanka’s heavy gates. More often than not, the proverbial “knock on the door” is a light kick of a military boot.

  Three men standing in cold, stinking darkness, waiting for someone to hear the kick on the door is not an inspiring sight. They might as well be scraping at the door, like cats, except cats returning after a night of carnage and amour are creatures of passion, while nineteen-year-old boys with sidearms are creatures of indifference, especially at 2:55 a.m. on a February night.

  On the tenth kick, or perhaps later, the door opens. Sadykov discerns a frail face, an old woman. Blue eyes set deeply behind high cheekbones stare at the three men. These old crones are a curse, especially for those who arrest people for a living.

  Whenever a Black Maria or its crew is in sight, a Moscow crone is certain to start mumbling prayers. Sadykov regards prayers as futile, yet he secretly fears them. He has an easier time with hand-wringing middle-aged wives; their hysterics affect him no more than a distant cannonade. (As a product of an orphanage, Sadykov has had no exposure to familial hysterics.) For reasons Sadykov cannot fathom, a prayer threatens, even wounds.

  “Does Levinson live here?”

  Making the sign of the cross, the old woman disappears into darkness of the hallway. The three men walk in. It’s a long hallway of a five-room apartment, with three doors on the right facing Chkalov Street, and two on the left, facing the courtyard.

  Sadykov lights another match.

  He hears a door creak. It has to be the old woman. She is watching. Her kind always watches. No, righteous she can’t be. She may be the resident snitch, and now she lurks behind the door, pretending to drag God into this purely earthbound affair while in fact savoring the results of her anonymous letter to the authorities.

  Sadykov doesn’t know which door is hers, yet hers is the door he wants to avoid.

  According to instructi
ons, Levinson’s room overlooks the courtyard. That leaves a choice of two doors.

  During operations, neighbors sit behind closed doors, like trapped rodents. And in the morning, they feign surprise and indignation. Just to think of it, Levinson, an enemy! A loner. Always grumbling. Had no use for children. Hated cats. Fought in the partisan bands along the Trans-Siberian Railroad during the Civil War. Would have thought he was one of us, a simple Soviet man, but with Yids nothing is simple. Treachery is their currency of choice. And if he really is a traitor, fuck him, let him be shot!

  Have you seen old Yids creaking down the street, going wherever it is they go, carrying mesh bags and, in their pockets, rolled-up newspapers? With the pigmentation of youth wiped off their faces, they still look dark, bird-like, bleached angels ready to fly to God, or the Evil One.

  Such is Sadykov’s mental image of Levinson.

  Lighting his third match of the night, Sadykov steps up to another door. This time, he doesn’t order the boys to kick.

  He knocks three times with the knuckles of his clenched fist. There is movement behind the door, no more than what you’d expect.

  “Dos bist du?” asks a raspy voice in a language that isn’t Russian.

  “Poshel v pizdu,” answers one of the nineteen-year-olds in Russian.

  Sadykov and the boys don’t know the meaning of the question Dos bist du? Why would they know that these words mean, “Is this you?” But, of course, the Russian words “poshel v pizdu,” translated literally as “go in the cunt” or “fuck off,” rhyme with this enigmatic question.

  It’s a dialogue of sorts:

  “Dos bist du?”

  “Poshel v pizdu.”

  It’s more than a rhyme. It’s a question and an answer.

  When you are nineteen, you play with your kill. On your first operation, you get a sense of newness that you think will never go away.

  You get the power to choke off another man’s freedom, even end his life. Sadykov’s first operation took him to a big four-room apartment on the Frunze Embankment; it was a colonel, a war hero.

  The man was silent at first, placid, but in the middle of the search, he grabbed a Walther he had hidden in the desk drawer, placed the muzzle against his lower lip, shouted “Long live Stalin!” and pulled the trigger. He did this in front of his wife and daughter. Another crew had to be called for cleanup.

  You never forget your first operation or the second, but after you get to the fifth, you realize that one man’s suffering is like another’s, and your memories start to change shape around the edges.

  Sadykov is beyond the exhilaration of the job. He is almost twenty-five, and he has been doing this for over six years. He wants every operation to end before it begins. Perhaps one day he will get a transfer, perhaps to investigations.

  “Otkroyte!” Sadykov knocks again. Open the door!

  “Ikh farshtey. Nit dos bist du.”

  The meaning of this exchange escapes Sadykov, but it merits unpacking.

  2

  Had there been a Yiddish-speaking audience present, it would have surely rolled with laughter.

  Try to imagine the situation described above as a vaudeville skit:

  They come to arrest an old Yid. They knock on the door.

  “Is that you?” the old man asks in Yiddish.

  The goons answer in juicy Russian. (The rhyme: “Dos bist du?” / “Poshel v pizdu.”)

  “I see,” responds the old man. “It’s not you.”

  In this scene, the audience never learns whom the old man refers to as “you,” but it’s a safe guess that he is not anticipating the arrival of Lieutenant Narsultan Sadykov and his boys.

  You can imagine what the audience would do. They would emit tears and saliva. They would slap their knees. They would turn beet red from elevation of blood pressure and constriction of air supply. Alas, at 2:59 a.m. February 24, 1953, a Yiddish-speaking audience is not in attendance at 1/4 Chkalov Street, apartment forty.

  * * *

  The time has come for Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, a man known to friends as der komandir, to take a journey in a Black Maria.

  Yet, surely you will agree that the absence of spectators makes his final, decisive performance more pure. It merges comedy, tragedy, absurdity, fantasy, reality, and—voilà—the material becomes endowed with a divine spark.

  “Please wait, comrade, I will pull on my pants,” says Levinson in Russian.

  Standing at that door, Sadykov realizes suddenly that Levinson is the first man who shows no trepidation upon the arrival of a Black Maria. His voice is calm.

  More surprised than angered, Sadykov knocks again.

  He hasn’t arrested an actor before. His past hauls include one violinist, an opera singer, two writers, three geneticists, one architect, several military officers, many engineers, and many more Party workers.

  “Otkroyte,” Sadykov repeats. Open the door.

  “Otkroyte-shmot-kroyte…” Levinson’s voice responds in broken Russian. “What, are you? Robber?”

  “Prokuratura,” says Sadykov.

  Sometimes Sadykov is instructed to say “state security,” shorthand for the Ministry of State Security, or the MGB.

  Other times he says “prokuratura,” the procurator’s office. Though these entities are technically different, when Sadykov knocks on your door, it makes no practical difference which arm of the government he claims to represent.

  “Prokuratura-shmok-uratura,” says the old man, and the door swings open.

  Yes, in this career-crowning performance, Levinson deserves a Yiddish-speaking audience, for he has combined the word “shmok” (a limp, at best modestly sized, penis) with the word “procurator.”

  Through its unforgivable failure to exist, the audience is missing a tour de force by Solomon Levinson, formerly an actor of one of the most respected theater companies in the world, the Moscow State Jewish Theater, known to Yiddish speakers under the Russian acronym GOSET.

  * * *

  Was Solomon Levinson a GOSET star?

  No, another Solomon—Solomon Mikhoels—was the star, the face of the theater, an actor who could move from a village idiot to a Shakespearean king to a conniving, villainous contrabandist, an actor who could direct, a writer who could act, a laureate of the Stalin Prize, the Soviet Union’s unofficial ambassador of goodwill, a leader of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, a star in Moscow, and a celebrity on Second Avenue, the Yiddish Broadway.

  His fans in America understood that under capitalism, every Jewish theater had to pay for itself or even produce a profit. Under Socialism, Mikhoels and his GOSET received a state subsidy. Indeed, GOSET was the only state-subsidized Yiddish theater on Earth and, presumably, in the universe.

  In 1943, when Mikhoels was sent to America to raise money for the Red Army, New York Jews and leftists of various shades stumbled over each other for a place in line. Tens of thousands came to hear him speak. He returned with millions of dollars and a big, new fur coat for Comrade Stalin, its lining emblazoned with greetings from New York Jews. He met with Albert Einstein, who, at the height of 176 centimeters, towered over him like a giant. He debated the place of politics in art with Charlie Chaplin, the courageous American comedian who had dared to lampoon Hitler in the film The Great Dictator. A committee of the U.S. Senate was preparing to investigate that comedian’s effort to get America into the war. “I was saved by Pearl Harbor,” Chaplin told Mikhoels. In New York, Mikhoels met with Chaim Weizmann, the man who would become the first president of Israel. He caught up with his old friend, the German theater director Max Reinhardt, shared the podium with the New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and bowed his head at the grave of Sholem Aleichem.

  Alas, for Solomon Levinson, Mikhoels was a mighty nemesis and GOSET not a happy place. If you regarded yourself as a talented actor like Levinson and if you were unfortunate enough to spend your entire career at GOSET, you couldn’t even rise to Number Two.

  The Number Two slot belonged to another
actor, Venyamin Zuskin. It was beyond mere favoritism. In GOSET’s established order, Zuskin had to be Number Two.

  When Mikhoels played Benjamin in The Travels of Benjamin III, the Jewish Don Quixote, Zuskin played Senderl, his male companion in a dress, Sancho Panza in calico. When Mikhoels was Kinig Lir, his most famous role, Zuskin was his Nar. They played it like two sides of the coin, der Kinig and his Nar.

  If you worked at GOSET, you worked in the shadow of Mikhoels and in the shadow of Zuskin.

  What opportunity was there for Solomon Levinson to demonstrate his talent?

  None. Which explains why you may not have heard of Solomon Levinson.

  At the time a boy kicks the door of apartment forty, Mikhoels has been dead for five years. Killed in an “auto accident.”

  Where is the truck that killed him? Find it, please. Zuskin is dead, too. No phantom truck. A bullet in the head. An execution in a Lubyanka cellar.

  No Mikhoels. No Zuskin. No Kinig. No Nar. No GOSET. No audience. No stage. No subsidy. No truck. Gornisht. Nothing.

  * * *

  After opening what sounds like a heavy latch, the occupant of the room, presumably Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, noiselessly retreats into deep darkness.

  Something about the setting—the night, the snow, the long hallway, the dark room—prompts one of the Ukrainian boys to cross himself. Not much can be made of that. He is a village boy in a big city, where many things seem menacing, evil—and where many things are. Lieutenant Sadykov walks in first, the boys behind him. He fumbles for the light switch, but it’s not next to the door, where he would expect to find it.

  Sadykov lights another match. Ideally, the circumstances of every death reflect the life that precedes it. Death should be life in miniature, a microcosm. Arrest also. Sadykov hasn’t paused to verbalize this maxim, but he feels it within the depth of his being.