The Yid Page 16

  “Where should I aim?”

  “A Yid has but one place to aim: the throat. Be true to what your audience expects.”

  “Why do what they expect? Why not surprise them?”

  “I answer with a question: Why do we kill?”

  “We kill to teach.”

  “How will the audience learn, unless they get the realization of their biggest fear? What do they fear, Kogan?”

  “They fear ritual murder. Is this what you suggest?”

  “I suggest nothing but what they fear. They write the play: a ritual murder. Or maybe just ritualistic.”

  “And a conspiracy?”

  “They fear it, which means they’ve earned it.”

  Lewis steps up to the ring.

  “Last night I killed a man.”

  Levinson and Kogan interrupt their match of swordsmanship.

  “How do you feel?” asks Kogan.

  “Much better than I’d like.”

  “I understand. The first time I killed was in 1918, the day I met der komandir.”

  “That was war,” says Levinson.

  “War is relative. I hate killing, but I don’t hate myself for having killed.”

  “You haven’t asked me who he was,” says Lewis.

  “I didn’t think I had to,” Kogan replies.

  “He was a night guard.”

  “Butusov, then,” says Kogan. “May he rest in peace.”

  “You haven’t asked me why I did it. And how.”

  “I didn’t need to ask,” says Kogan. “He saw you get out of the Black Maria, and then he saw your face.”

  “It was a case of him or me.”

  “And then you killed him with my sword, and let him drop onto the tracks,” says Levinson.

  “I did. Tell me about him, Kogan.”

  “No sense in it. He was an anti-Semite, but a good man.”

  “Do such things happen?”

  “Often,” says Kogan. “He hated us in the abstract. He hated the idea of our being. But one-on-one, he was a decent man. I’ve fought beside men like him, and I would again.

  “I would have trusted him with my life.”

  * * *

  “The old Bundist couldn’t stay away,” says Levinson as a short, muscular man with a prominent chin walks through the gate of the dacha.

  “How much does he know?”

  “He cleaned up my room. He knows.”

  Levinson first introduced Kogan and Moisey Semyonovich before the war, at a performance of Kinig Lir. The two renewed their acquaintance near Stalingrad. Though they spoke Yiddish whenever they were out of the earshot of others, they eschewed the informality of Yiddish culture, addressing each other as Doktor and Khaver. Moisey Semyonovich was technically a major; Dr. Kogan, a colonel.

  After the war, Doktor Kogan and Khaver Rabinovich developed a separate, professional relationship. Whenever Moisey Semyonovich needed to refer a patient to Pervaya Gradskaya, he called Kogan, and whenever Kogan needed to obtain medication for an acquaintance, he called Moisey Semyonovich, who took out his own scales and measured out the required substances.

  LEVINSON: To what do we owe the honor?

  MOISEY SEMYONOVICH: You needed me, and I came.

  LEVINSON: We whispered into the wind and you heard?

  KOGAN (extending his hand): Nonsense, Khaver Rabinovich. I invite you now.

  MOISEY SEMYONOVICH: Thank you, doctor.

  LEVINSON: Lewis, Moisey Semyonovich has a function in God’s creation. He illustrates a principle: an old conspirator invariably thinks he smells the revolution—even when something completely different is in the air. Just think revolution, just whisper the word into the wind, and next thing you are staring at an old Marxist like this one, smelling of mothballs and thinking bloody thoughts. Just whisper ever so softly, and they will come, lone wolves, wizened sparrows.

  KOGAN: I thought it was the other way around. First, you have the revolutionaries, and, second, they make the revolution.

  LEVINSON: Reading Lenin? Stop! He was then. We are now.

  MOISEY SEMYONOVICH: Genig, khaverim. Enough. They can occupy themselves like this all day.

  LEWIS: And if you let them, revolution is kaput.

  LEVINSON: Let’s get our terminology straight, Lewis. There is no revolution. We will do what history calls for.

  LEWIS: And it’s calling for a single, isolated act of terror?

  LEVINSON: Lenin was wrong. It’s a mistake to negate the individual’s role in history. Class isn’t everything. Revolution isn’t always the answer. There are times when simple terrorism is good enough.

  5

  A yearning for solitude descends on Lewis suddenly.

  What is he doing in this cold, impoverished, barbaric land? The Moor of the World Revolution, a Yiddish-speaking Moor who killed one man and dumped three dead ones in a well.

  The newly acquired status of murderer hasn’t begun to bother Lewis, and the only remorse he squeezes out of his soul that day is the remorse for feeling no remorse. While logic is commanding him to sense eternal doom, he stubbornly continues to feel hopeful, energized, free.

  Are Levinson and Kogan serious about their plot to assassinate Stalin, or is this a theater game staged by infantile old men? Has Lewis really joined the plot, or the farce, or whatever it is?

  Levinson and Kogan are real-life Red partisans, real guerrillas from the Civil War, yet they are nothing like the characters from Soviet war epics or the heroes Lewis imagined at the outset of his obsession with Russian Communism.

  These men are profoundly disorienting. Did they fight wars in this ambiguous state of mind, between pursuit of victory and utter nonsense? How can they switch so easily from killing to absurdism, from swordplay to wordplay? With all that smoke, do they have the capacity to understand each other?

  Has Lewis agreed to follow these clowns in a horrific, heroic, hilarious dive off the trapeze? He has just killed a man. Was this in self-defense, for a cause, or for a gag?

  Humor plays no role in Lewis’s life. Certainly, he can never acquire the ability to treat death—especially death he caused—as a lighthearted matter.

  This disconnect has nothing to do with language. He speaks Russian like a Russian and Yiddish like a Jew. Lewis understands all their humor, registers it, even plays along with it sometimes, but after receiving aggravation or pleasure from it, moves on to more important matters. Men like him learn to laugh much later in life, if at all. Lewis has only one way to find out what is real: by testing.

  “It would be nice to have some help,” he suggests later on the afternoon of February 25.

  “From whom? Americans?” asks Levinson. “You know any?”

  He looks serious. But, of course, he is an actor.

  “Not anymore. Do you, gentlemen, know Zionists?”

  “I knew Mikhoels,” says Levinson.

  “I heard that after the war, a group of religious fanatics took a trainload of their people across the border,” says Kogan. “I think they crossed it, but I know one who stayed.”

  Kogan seems serious, too. That is, perhaps, a little more meaningful than Levinson’s perpetual straight face. Of course, Kogan has been around theater for so long that he may be in character as well. And the compact of their friendship seems to require Kogan to play a supporting role.

  “And how, may I ask, would a Bolshevik like you know religious fanatics?” asks Levinson.

  “I live next to the Jewish cemetery. I know every Yid around.”

  “Including some traitors,” Moisey Semyonovich interjects.

  This offends Lewis. He has heard that some exotic factions of the Bund were so loyal to their mother countries that they regarded emigration as treason.

  He knows that some of these zealots advocated imprisoning their brethren for speaking Hebrew, the language of the rabbis, instead of Yiddish, the language of the workingman. Could such absurd beliefs have survived this deep into the revolution, to be encountered in February 1953? Now a living, brea
thing answer stands before him.

  “If I know my fanatics, he will tell us to go take a shit in the sea,” says Levinson.

  “Maybe he will,” says Kogan. “But maybe we can give him a present.”

  “What present do we bring to a fanatic?” asks Levinson.

  “We have weapons,” suggests Lewis. “Three pistols. I can give him mine.”

  “For what does a fanatic need a pistol?” asks Kogan. “Whom will he aim it at?”

  “God,” says Moisey Semyonovich.

  So this unflappable man has a sense of humor, albeit indistinguishable in tone, content, and delivery from political information lectures.

  “Lewis, you’ve just witnessed a moment of Bund humor,” says Levinson. “This is exceedingly rare, so savor it. I have known this man for thirty years, and in that time he hasn’t even smiled.”

  “Your religious friend will need a pistol when it begins,” Lewis concurs.

  “And what will you use?” asks Levinson.

  “I’ll use your sword.”

  Intuition tells Lewis to relinquish doubt: This is indeed a plot.

  * * *

  Technically, Kogan knows several Americans—members of his own family.

  In the autumn of 1927, when he was studying in Berlin, he came across a news story that mentioned a man who was almost certainly his father. The story mentioned him as an executive of a New York shipping company that was doing battle with striking dockworkers.

  Kogan dropped a postcard to the company, mostly to tell the family that he was alive, that he had finished an accelerated medical course for veterans, that he had been practicing medicine in a regional clinic, and that the Commissariat of Health had sent him to get surgical training in Berlin.

  Three months later, a tall young man in a fedora and a trench coat came to the hospital and asked for Dr. Aleksandr Kogan. He identified himself as Dr. Kogan’s brother.

  Kogan was assisting one of the hospital’s luminaries in scraping out a tumor that originated in a child’s bone. That day, the decision was made to amputate. Kogan was present during that discussion before he went to the cafe across the street from the hospital where his brother waited.

  What do you say to the brother you haven’t seen in over a decade? Vladimir was fourteen years old when they parted. Now he was twenty-four, a tall American who spoke Russian perfectly, but with a slight accent. He had graduated from Yale and was now doing something remarkably strange for an advertising company with offices in New York and Chicago.

  The family had reestablished itself nicely. Being a shipping entrepreneur with money in Switzerland is a wise strategy if your goal is to ride out humanity’s greatest perils. The family lived on Park Avenue. His mother had a Steinway again (the one left behind had been commandeered by the Odessa Opera). “She can play Chopin and glance at the park,” Vladimir said, and Aleksandr was happy to hear this.

  Vladimir’s job sounded vaguely interesting. Sitting in an office on Madison Avenue, he read every tidbit of information emanating from the Comintern, the Soviet bureaucracy created to stoke the flames of world revolution. Kogan had no problem with the Comintern, even when it engaged in espionage. Countries do engage in such pursuits. And, of course, he personally knew Zeitlin.

  “What relevance does it have to your American life?” Kogan asked with genuine surprise.

  “You would be surprised. Speaking broadly, your Comintern is about social engineering. My job is to try to find ways to adapt your experience for commercial purposes.”

  “For businesses?”

  “To engineer their relationships with the public.”

  “You are trying to create business out of our pursuit of the overthrow of capitalism?”

  “Exactly. That’s what I do all day every day.”

  “I will be sure to bring this story to Moscow. I am sure my friends at Comintern will be amused.”

  “Tell them I can get them good jobs in the advertising industry.”

  You might think that discussion of the emerging American business of public relations is a strange topic to come up at a meeting of brothers who hadn’t seen each other in a decade. Kogan realized that, of course, but Yale and the Red Army are universes apart, as are surgery and advertising. The fact that the two young men had anything to say to each other was to be accepted for what it was.

  Vladimir was sent as an emissary from their parents. He had an offer: if Aleksandr wished not to return to Moscow after his training in Berlin, the family would support him as he obtained American credentials. Kogan was touched, of course, but the idea of leaving his country struck him as unthinkable.

  It seemed to violate some fundamental principle—a commandment—something akin to “Thou shalt not kill” and Primum non nocere. He will not kill. He will do no harm. He will not run to the United States. He will remain in Russia, doing his part, as his young country rises from the rubble of the Civil War that he helped win.

  Kogan’s response to the family’s generous offer was a polite no.

  And now, as steam engines pull cattle cars toward Moscow, as mobs of street thugs and Red Army units are being organized to carry out a coordinated action, as the prospect of public executions looms, does Dr. Kogan wish he had accepted that offer? Does he wish he were performing appendectomies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or teaching anatomy at Yale, or listening to rich patients whine on a couch somewhere on Park Avenue, or—more likely—taking care of Negroes in Harlem?

  No. Kogan made his choices decades ago. Whatever comes, he is where he wants to be.

  * * *

  When she stops at the dacha, Kima looks like she has been running. Lewis surmises that she has important news to report.

  The cautious stares Kima exchanges with the stranger—Moisey Semyonovich—betray an instantly formed feeling of mistrust.

  “Kima Yefimovna, this is our comrade, Moisey Semyonovich Rabinovich.” Kogan makes his usual formal introduction as Kima stands uncomfortably by the door.

  The balding, middle-aged man with a measured, procuratorial demeanor has silently extinguished the enthusiasm of the young woman excited by her role as the bearer of urgent news.

  Moisey Semyonovich slowly sets down his glass of tea, raises himself briefly out of a chair, and nods in Kima’s direction, a probing elder asserting rank over a young comrade.

  “Your last name?” he asks.

  “Petrova.”

  “And your real name?”

  “Her name really is Petrova,” says Kogan.

  “That would have to be her mother’s name. What about her father’s?”

  “What is this? An interrogation?” asks Kima, retreating into the tense demeanor that for her is never far away.

  “Her father’s last name was Zeitlin,” says Kogan. “You knew him. Yefimchik.”

  “That’s why I ask. They look alike.”

  “Let me guess, you think he was a traitor, too,” says Levinson, seizing the opportunity to stick in a needle.

  Moisey Semyonovich nods.

  “Because he went with the Bolsheviks in 1906, when your Bund took a turn with the Mensheviks?” asks Kogan. “So how does this make him a traitor? He did in 1906 what a lot of others have done since. You, for example, don’t go around advertising your belonging to the Bund.”

  “He doesn’t?” says Levinson. “Why, just the other day I saw him in the Bund parade, marching on Gorky Street.”

  Levinson is now in the middle of the room, goose-stepping in place, pretending to catch imaginary bouquets of flowers, blowing kisses to the adoring crowd.

  “The Bund saves Mother Russia from her legendary, monumental idiocy! And, listen here, Lewis, the loudspeakers on rooftops are blaring ‘Di Shvue,’ the anthem of the Bund. Let’s see if I can…”

  Continuing his march, Levinson belts out:

  “Brider un shvester fun arbet un noyt,

  ale vos zaynen tsezeyt un tseshpreyt,

  tsuzamen, tsuzamen, di fon iz greyt.”

  (Brothers
and sisters in labor and fight,

  Those scattered far and wide,

  Assemble, assemble—the banner stands poised.)

  “Shut up, komandir!” shouts Kogan as Kima turns around and starts to open the door.

  Alas, Levinson seems unable to stop short of completing the verse:

  “Zi flatert fun tsorn, fun blut iz zi royt.

  A shvue, a shvue af lebn un toyt.”

  (It flutters with woe, with blood it is red!

  We swear. A life-and-death oath we swear.)

  “Kimochka didn’t come here to watch your Bundist parade, you idiot!” shouts Kogan as Kima closes the door from the outside. “Now I have to convince her to come back.”

  As Kogan leaves coatless to try to convince Kima to return, Moisey Semyonovich takes a sip of tea and, without a trace of either insult or amusement, says to Levinson, “Solomonchik, you of all people should know that I don’t respond to provocations.”

  * * *

  After she is convinced to return, Kima reports that earlier that morning, one Nadezhda Andreyevna Khromova had stopped by the GORPO cellar to redeem the bottles emptied by herself and her husband, a regional militia commander, Lieutenant Mikhail Petrovich Khromov.

  The number of bottles—seventeen—strikes Kima as unusual. It suggests that the lieutenant has spent nearly his entire monthly salary on vodka.

  “Rodnya s’yekhalas’,” Nadezhda Andreyevna volunteered an explanation. Family came to visit.

  Then, without a pause, her breath still smelling of alcohol, she whispered: “Zhidov to nashikh skoro ne budet. Tyu-tyu. A v domakh ikh budet zhit’ Russkiy narod.” Our Jews will soon be gone. Bye-bye. And their houses will be occupied by Russian people.

  “Chto, nachalos’?” asked Kima. Has it begun?

  “Pochti chto,” replied Nadezhda Andreyevna. Almost.

  With the understanding that the young Russian woman employed in bottle redemption could be trusted with such information, she proceeded to explain that Lieutenant Khromov was having a difficult time preparing the lists of Jews and half-bloods.

  It’s not hard to see why half-bloods would be a problem. In their identity papers, nationality can be listed as, say, Russian.

  Even in the case of half-bloods whose fathers have Jewish names, the situation is far from clear. What if their fathers are half-bloods as well? Should quarter-bloods be on the list? Should octoroons be given a pass? And what about half-bloods listed as Russian under Russian names? They can evade detection, unless other criteria for ascertaining nationality are introduced. Are such criteria possible? Can such criteria be sensitive, specific, and reproducible?