The Yid Read online

  Moisey Semyonovich had a wife and children, too. But they didn’t survive the train journey from Moscow to evacuation in Siberia. When German planes attacked their train and it stopped, his family was mowed down as they ran toward the woods.

  Wounds and losses unchained Moisey Semyonovich from concerns about his life, limbs, and family, freeing him to make his machine gun into a sword of justice that meted out punishment consistent with the crime.

  In February of 1953, with the newspapers declaring war on the international Jewish conspiracy, a sense of history ingrained in his bones tells Moisey Semyonovich that a scheme similar to Hitler’s Final Solution of the Jewish Question is about to be revealed. He senses that—just as was the case with the Black Hundreds in his pre-terrorist, pre-Bund days—the mobs will be deployed. The next war on the Jews will be a people’s war.

  Why arrest those clueless doctors? Why this anti-Semitic frenzy? Why the outbursts of blood libel?

  And why the knock on Levinson’s door instead of his? Only one explanation satisfies Moisey Semyonovich. It was a clerical error. Someone misfiled his dossier.

  * * *

  Walking out into the cold morning on February 25, Moisey Semyonovich turns left, toward Drugstore Number Twelve, which he manages.

  He heads for the store’s stoop and, standing there, surveys the small park. A group of drunks sits uncomfortably on cold benches, waiting for stores to open. Alkashi, dokhodyagi, men on the edge between withdrawal and the next dose. Vodka, that luxury of luxuries, is out of the question for these poor devils. Most of them drink Svetlana, a cologne, or Valocordin, a stinky alcohol-based anti-anxiety drug sold without prescription. It does neither harm nor good.

  Moisey Semyonovich isn’t going to the drugstore. After ascertaining that he isn’t followed, he heads toward the Kazan Station. The sun has not yet risen, and the trolleys have not yet begun to roll.

  His destination is Malakhovka, the home of Dr. Aleksandr Sergeyevich Kogan.

  He walks into the Kazan Station at 6 a.m., half an hour ahead of the first electric train of the morning.

  * * *

  As he lies beneath his sheepskin coat on his cot, staring at the light that floods the dacha, Lewis thinks of the final words of the man he murdered.

  “Paul Robeson,” he repeats, trembling.

  In Magnitogorsk, in 1932, Lewis was proud of having stood up to that new aristocrat.

  Take my advice, Comrade Mikhoels. You go get yourself a bug-eyed, toothy Jew and paint him black.

  After putting Mikhoels in his place, Lewis returned to the scaffold. He did his best thinking up there, on iced-up wooden planks, swaying with the wind, hanging on like a cat.

  Why was he in Magnitogorsk? Why did he, a progressive, a revolutionary, lack a party ticket? Why hadn’t he renounced his seemingly redundant American citizenship? Why were the same questions that haunted him in the land of Jim Crow resurfacing in the context of Comintern?

  He loved the idea of defining himself as a member of a class—a proletarian—and, to the extent possible, forgetting the rest. But Negro comrades in America warned him to watch out for Jews, Russians, Lithuanians, Irishmen, and WASPs. Can anyone tolerate being called a baboon while trying to teach Hegel’s dialectic to fellow enlightened workers? And what if Russian comrades of Jewish origin refer to you as an orangutan, presumably not realizing that the word is the same in English?

  Perhaps this was something about America, a remnant of slavery that afflicted the Right and the Left alike, Lewis thought. Surely, this wouldn’t exist in the Soviet Union, a country where racial differences didn’t mimic America’s. Other Negro cadres were being sent to the USSR for Party work, but Lewis couldn’t get close enough to the Party, let alone rise high enough to be sent officially to the land of victorious revolution.

  Finally, he joined McKee as a welder, and in a matter of months, he was bound for the land where race was purportedly negated, irrelevant. It wasn’t hard to find that job. At a time when capitalism was trudging through an economic crisis, Russia was gearing up for its great leap forward, selling meaningless treasures—melted-down gold, outmoded art—and pumping hard currency into the construction of heavy industry.

  He was the first American worker in Magnitogorsk. Bunyan, an engineer, was already there, living in American City, a cluster of bungalows on the city’s edge. Another worker, a radical college-educated white youth named John Scott, would arrive six months after Lewis. Lewis’s first shelter was a tent, where sheepskins made the difference between life and death.

  He learned Russian quickly and easily. After less than a year, his ability to join steel earned him the respect of his comrades, and Bunyan’s intervention made him a brigadir, the brigade leader.

  So why did people like this Mikhoels seem hell-bent on treating him like a younger brother? They were embarrassingly ignorant, clumsy, and no less evil than their American counterparts. For his own sake, for the sake of the Soviet Union, Lewis was determined to stand in their way.

  That night, Lewis took a circuitous route to his room in the barracks.

  He stood in line to pick up a loaf of black bread, which was all that could ever be found in the cooperative store.

  In line, he ran into Scott, a fellow welder, who was heading to classes at Komvuz, the Communist institute, where he studied Marxism-Leninism alongside future Party workers. A lanky graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Scott had fantasies of becoming the John Reed of the Great Leap Forward. Years later, he would write Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel, a splendid book.

  “They call it the ‘nationalities question,’ right?” said Scott, chuckling at Lewis’s Comrade Jim story. “If you are a strict Marxist, it’s all about class, no nationalities, no race.”

  “You can’t have your world revolution if you perpetuate that same old shit,” said Lewis.

  “Comrade Jim is not much better than Nigger Jim. Is it?”

  “Comrade Tom’s no good either.”

  “It’s all in the name of reaching the stage of social development where there are no Negroes, no Jews. Just the proletariat, colorless, interbred, free of the prejudice of the past,” said Scott.

  “And you believe this, John?”

  “Less and less.”

  * * *

  Lewis walked into the barracks, whistling Dixie, of all things. As he inserted his key in the door, he felt a tap on his shoulder.

  “I am sorry, Comrade Lewis, but I was unable to get myself painted,” said the girl in a peculiar, vaguely British accent that has evolved at the English departments at Russia’s institutions of higher learning.

  “Sorry, ma’am, I can’t help you none,” said Lewis, smiling broadly and blinking in a manner the movie script surely required. “I be just a simple niggah weldah.”

  “Will you invite me in?” she asked.

  “To help you write a report for the Comintern?” Lewis was no longer in character.

  “I don’t work for the Comintern.”

  “Then whoever…”

  “I don’t write reports, Comrade Lewis.”

  “Then what do you write?”

  “I am a literary translator,” she said. “Invite me in, please.”

  “Well, come right in, ma’am,” he said, opening the door (he did have a heated room with a door) with a doorman’s sweep of the hand.

  “Call me Miss Goldshtein, if you insist on formality. Tatyana Goldshtein,” she said, squeezing past him through the narrow doorway.

  * * *

  It should be noted that at the meeting with Mikhoels, Lewis realized that the girl in front of him was already his, and—this is even less rational—at that very instant Tatyana Goldshtein came to a corresponding realization.

  This notion—this flash of insight—was a formidable puzzle to Lewis. Be it a hunch or a revelation, he shook his head in disbelief and returned to the scaffold. Not being as committed a rationalist, the girl found this occurrence less puzzling.


  Let us return to the question Mikhoels posed to Lewis: “How do you like our women?”

  Surely by the time Mikhoels understood that the answer was sitting to his right, he developed a craving for tea, but it was too late. The girl missed the entire conversation, except for Lewis’s triumphant finale, his teaching moment.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure, Miss Goldshtein?” asked Lewis, closing the door.

  “I can’t explain,” she said, and at that instant, they moved toward each other and their lips met.

  After some time, she pulled away.

  “I hope you don’t think that I do this all the time. I never have. Not like this,” she said, and their lips met again.

  * * *

  Though no official tallies of such things exist, most sexual encounters in Magnitogorsk were vertical: in the bushes, behind the bread store, leaning against a shed. There were no trees.

  The city was a construction camp, an amalgamation of barracks, tents, and prison zones. The foreigners lived better than the Russians, but Lewis didn’t have a room until Bunyan’s intervention made him a brigadir.

  That night, their lovemaking was horizontal, atypically unhurried. He woke up before dawn, before the sound of the combinat horn that punctuated his life.

  She would leave for Moscow later that morning.

  He ran his calloused fingers through her thick, dark hair. He kissed her eyelids, first one, then the other.

  “Paul Robeson,” she said, waking up. That would become her name for him.

  Paul Robeson. A Russian-speaking Negro who gave his voice to the working men. A Yiddish-speaking Negro. A hero of the Left. An athlete, actor, musician, champion of the oppressed, a Red Othello. There were worse names to call a man—and in America, Lewis was called those names, as was Paul Robeson.

  * * *

  After seeing that responsible comrades at the Regional Committee of the Party gave him a motorcycle for the five-kilometer trip to the airstrip, Mikhoels slathered a thick layer of TeZhe cream onto his face, to prevent frostbite. In his shoes, which were more appropriate for the boulevards of Paris than for the snowdrifts of Magnitogorsk, he was at the very least guaranteed a cold.

  Tatyana returned to the hotel after dawn. They had two adjoining rooms, for they had been, for quite some time, intimate.

  Tatyana’s role in preparing the production of Kinig Lir was never acknowledged. She was the last person in the translation process. The Yiddish text was completed by the poet Shmuel Halkin. Halkin’s verse tended toward elegant Hebraic form. Academic translations of Lear into Russian were dead, unacceptable. Poetic translations were textually unreliable. Halkin spoke Russian, but no English or German. (There were many excellent translations of Shakespeare into German.) Mikhoels spoke German, but no English. The director, Sergei Radlov, spoke some English, but only a little Yiddish.

  “Halkin had to be watched closely, in part because his excessive fondness for ‘biblical stylistics’ threatened to overwhelm other important characteristics of Shakespeare’s style,” Mikhoels wrote in one of his many essays on the subject of his own achievements.

  Working from Russian translations, Halkin refused to distinguish Shakespeare’s prose from the iambic pentameter, and had to be stopped from converting the entire play into verse.

  Phrase by phrase, the three men fought their way through the text, transforming King Lear into Kinig Lir, keeping what they could, sacrificing what they had to. Not even Halkin and Radlov were told that at night, Mikhoels sat down (and, yes, sometimes reclined) with a language student, and went through the play line by line, comparing the Yiddish and English texts.

  In those days, the trip back from Magnitogorsk could take days, largely because the single-track railroad was chronically bottlenecked. After obtaining a mandate from Yefim Zeitlin, head of the Comintern offshoot for youth, Mikhoels commandeered a military plane to simplify his hunt for Comrade Jim.

  Much is said about high party officials who used their positions for personal enrichment or for fixing problems for their friends and family. Commissar Yefim Zeitlin was not like that. Finding a military plane for Mikhoels and a collaborator was part of Zeitlin’s official duties to facilitate production of propaganda materials aimed at America’s Negro population.

  * * *

  The pilot, Grisha Gershenson, greeted them in Yiddish. Grisha grew up in Boston, speaking English, Yiddish, and Russian. When he emigrated to the USSR with his parents at age seventeen, he had dreams of becoming a test pilot, but instead became a glorified taxi driver on Comintern missions.

  The scene he witnessed that morning figures in his unpublished memoir.

  Tatyana opened an old tome of the Falstaff edition of Shakespeare. Mikhoels opened the manuscript in a yellow folder.

  “Me hot zi ufgehangen,” he read. They’ve hanged her.

  “It’s not in the original,” said Tatyana.

  “How does it begin?”

  “In English: ‘And my poor fool is hanged: no, no, no life?’”

  Tatyana translated these words literally into Yiddish.

  “Too much all at once,” said Mikhoels.

  “Halkin gives us a simplistic declaration not rooted in the text.”

  “Yes, but it gives us an image we can relate to. They’ve hanged her! And we see that she has indeed been hanged! Her body is right there. Onstage. And we think of people we knew who have been hanged, and of people who are being hanged, and of those who will be hanged. And we imagine ourselves trading places with them.”

  “Yes, but you aren’t doing Shakespeare.”

  “Maybe you are right. And if you are, so what? I set my stage for the audience I have. Translate what Shakespeare wrote, and the audience will think my character is insane.”

  “He is.”

  “Not in this scene! Here, he experiences grief, actively, painfully, slowly. Rush through it, and he’ll become what? English?”

  Gershenson writes that at that point Mikhoels wiped off a tear, which the pilot attributed to the cold winds of Magnitogorsk.

  “Mayn narele, mayn lets, dos lebn hot / Shoyn mer keyn vert far mir,” Mikhoels continued. My little fool, my clown / Life has no longer any value to me.

  “This, too, is not in the text,” said Tatyana. “Here, he uses the diminutive suffix for fool, narele, instead of kleine nar, little fool. Then he repeats himself by calling his narele his clown, lets. We already know that Nar is a clown. That’s his job. By now we’ve seen everything but the concluding scene.”

  “I like the sound of it,” said Mikhoels. “It repeats the point … narele … lets … diminutives accentuate the weight of his loss. Little is big. Big is little. I don’t know how the English feel their losses. This is for us:

  “Me hot zi ufgehangen.

  Mayn narele, mayn lets, dos lebn hot

  Shoyn mer keyn vert far mir.”

  He continued reading:

  “… A ferd, a hunt,

  A moyz—zey lebn oykh, un du, mayn kind,

  Du otemst nit, du vest shoyn mer tsu undz

  Nit umkern zikh keynmol … keynmol … keynmol.

  Ikh bet aykh, Ser, tseshpilyet mir ot do.

  Azoy. A dank. Ir zet? O, tut a kuk.

  Di lipn ire … zet … nu … kukt zikh ayn …

  “‘I feel my losses slowly, I give myself permission to dwell on them,’” Mikhoels continued.

  “Like Kinig Lir,” she said.

  “Like Kinig Lir.”

  “And then he dies.”

  “And then I die…”

  Gershenson notes that Tatyana and Mikhoels were in tears by the time his plane touched down for refueling in Sverdlovsk. He attributes this to the power of Mikhoels’s first performance of the final words of Kinig Lir.

  * * *

  Through Tatyana, Lewis accepted a new language, another family, life beyond pigmentation.

  Tatyana introduced him to Moscow: stage, directors, writers, actors. Lewis discovered—and met—Meyerhold, Stanislavsky, Bulgakov.
He met Zuskin, and Tanya’s uncle Solomon Levinson. He saw Kinig Lir on opening night in 1934, the two hundredth performance in 1938, and many performances in between.

  In 1938, after Lewis completed training in engineering, he received a package from Magnitogorsk: a box of twelve shirts, six white and six blue, made of sturdy American cotton. Also, there was a new black tie and a note:

  Make them look up to you, Mr. Lewis. It’s important. Your friend, Charles.

  Soon after that, Charles Bunyan vanished without a trace. The Party and the organs of state security were purging the country of bourgeois specialists and internal wreckers. Even foreigners—especially pale-skinned foreigners—were no longer guaranteed safety.

  There was no report of Bunyan’s departure via Black Maria. Even his company Ford remained in place in his driveway. The mystery of his disappearance remains unsolved.

  * * *

  In 1941, after the Nazis invaded, Lewis volunteered to join the army, but he was sent east instead. The blast furnaces he had helped construct were working around the clock, producing steel for the war.

  Tatyana went with him, completed a nursing course, and was sent to the front. She perished with the Second Shock Army, killed in the swamps of Vereya in June of 1942, a casualty of a criminally botched attempt to break through to the besieged Leningrad.

  On the morning of February 25, 1953, more than at any other time over the decade that has elapsed since he and Tatyana parted at a railroad station, Lewis longs for her. Is she leading him on another adventure beyond his horizon? Was it not Tatyana’s mad uncle who had handed Lewis the sword with which he spilled the blood of a man who called him Paul Robeson?

  Outside, Lewis hears the sound of clanging sticks. Levinson and Kogan are once again conducting war games.

  That morning, Kogan doesn’t fight like a goat. He is Levinson’s equal. The two spar verbally as well.

  “You, Kogan, fight like a goy.”

  “A goy? Explain, My Lord, how fights a goy?”

  “A goy, briderlakh, aims for the chest.”