The Yid Read online

  In the fateful summer of 1941, with Panzers roaring through the former Pale of Settlement, the urge to kill had returned.

  In his late forties, Levinson was no longer prone to Byronism. Now, the urge was to kill and survive, and kill again, as directly as possible, preferably silently, in darkness. Levinson understood both who he was and who he wasn’t. He was a lone fighter, at his best in a detachment of fighters he knew, fighters he had learned to trust. No, a soldier he was not. He required autonomy. Taking orders was not his forte.

  Yet, on June 27, 1941, five days after German troops poured across the Soviet borders, a commission of doctors found Levinson unfit for service. This finding came with no explanation. It was utterly absurd. He felt no less battle-worthy than he had been in his early twenties.

  Within a week, Levinson was on a truck full of actors, heading toward the retreating Red Army. Yes, while the Red Army was abandoning positions, moving eastward, toward Moscow, Levinson and his players were heading westward, toward the Panzers.

  He wanted to find the front even as it moved back toward Moscow, toward catastrophe. Whatever history dragged in, Levinson would be on its cutting edge. He fired few shots in that war, but he was there, always as close as he could get to the front. There were a dozen of them: musicians, singers, actors. For four years, der komandir brought the Bard to the trenches, mostly in Russian, sometimes in Ukrainian, and sometimes in Yiddish.

  Since Mikhoels was nowhere near that truck, Levinson could choose any part he wanted. Mostly, he played Lir.

  These performances invariably concluded with the stunt that made Levinson famous.

  After the bow, Levinson came out of character and said, “I fought with swords in the Civil War, but I developed this leap onstage, to slay Romans. I think it will work just as well against the soldiers of the Third Reich.”

  Levinson then picked up a pair of smallswords and, with no visible preparation, suddenly allowed his body to unfold into a dazzling leap, a pirouette with a sword in each hand.

  With repetition, the leap became higher, faster. You might dismiss this as a vaudevillian display not grounded in character, but if you are inclined to be charitable, you might see that Komandir Levinson was leading Red Army soldiers on an airborne journey across the chasm that separates the stage from life.

  * * *

  The doctors who found Levinson unfit for service in the Great Patriotic War could have been right.

  As Lieutenant Sadykov and the boys continue to search Levinson’s room, the actor’s demeanor swings suddenly from animated to deflated. Just as Sadykov expected, Levinson starts to settle down. He is wearing himself out; psychopaths always do.

  A physician might have begun to suspect a presentation of cardiac symptoms or a sudden seizure.

  Levinson eases his frame onto the floor, letting the cane drop in front of him.

  This is of no concern to Lieutenant Sadykov and the boys.

  They look into desk drawers and rifle lazily through Levinson’s belongings. Sadykov opens the mirrored glass door of an armoire, bracing for a strong scent of stale wool and naphthalene.

  They aren’t looking for anything in particular, for surely they’ve realized from the outset that if this man has any material of a conspiratorial nature, it would be outside their intellectual grasp. It would likely be in a foreign language, or in some sort of code.

  Squatting, Levinson sways lightly, his hands clutching his chest beneath the loose cloth of the robe. This is a position that suggests a combination of prayer; chest or gastrointestinal pain; and, perhaps, a stiff, arthritic spine.

  With eyes wide open and focused on Sadykov and the boys, Levinson starts humming a tune, swaying with its simple rhythm. A student of Yiddish culture would recognize it as a nign, a singsong that starts softly, slowly:

  Ay-ba-da-bamm-ba, addadabam,

  Ay-biri-bombom biribibom

  Biri-bi-bomba, biri-bi-bam …

  Since an ordinary nign is intended to express feelings, not to impart verbal messages, this nign cannot be described as ordinary, for Levinson molds its sound, dropping in fragments of familiar words, gradually shaping partial phrases. Tatatatambadi, yambadi yam …

  Several of the sounds that creep into that rubbish pile make the boys chuckle, and when the Russian phrase “Gruzinsky khuy sosyot tatarin-kurva” (a Tatar traitor sucks a Georgian cock) emerges as a leitmotif, Sadykov realizes that Levinson’s behavior can be ignored no longer.

  “Stop the noise, Citizen Levinson,” orders Sadykov.

  Levinson drops his response into the flow of his nign: “Ne mogu.” I can’t.

  They stare at each other.

  Sadykov is, by function, a predator, but an exploration of his eyes reveals that he doesn’t live to hunt.

  Untouched by the passion of pursuit, he is going through the motions of playing a role, an actor badly cast. Why would any arresting officer allow his arrestees to rave? Why would a hunter establish contact with his prey? These are fundamental errors that could have been prevented through better training.

  Levinson’s stare reveals something completely different. This dying scene is his alone: the set, the cast, the costumes, even the orchestra is his.

  The boys look away. They have nothing at stake. Deployed, they are lethal. Undeployed, they drift into passivity. They await orders. They feel no urgency to slit throats. They are the opposite of citizens. They are your basic cogs, and can anyone imagine anything more soulless than a cog? Would anyone be surprised that Levinson’s biggest fear involved leading men of their ilk on a nighttime raid?

  * * *

  Levinson has no particular dislike for Tatars, Georgians, or, for that matter, men who pleasure each other orally.

  On the night of February 24, 1953, his goal is to use the so-called problem of nationalities and what will later be known as homophobia to his tactical advantage. The formula is remarkably simple: the nineteen-year-olds are Slavs (Ukrainians), their lieutenant a Tatar, and their ultimate commanders—Beria and Stalin—Georgians.

  To defend the honor of his uniform, to defend his manhood, Sadykov now has to beat this old madman into submission.

  Sadykov takes a step toward Levinson.

  Levinson is not an inviting target. There can be no assurance that he will not stiffen or even fight back. His exaggerated courtesy and deranged singing notwithstanding, something in his eyes says plainly, “Don’t come near.”

  The instant he bends over the actor, Sadykov surely understands that he has made a mistake, for Levinson’s arms are no longer clutching his chest.

  As they swing open, suddenly, forcefully, spring-like, Sadykov feels a cold intrusion beneath his chin. It’s far short of pain. Sadykov wants to emit a scream, but cannot. His legs no longer support his body. They buckle, and black arterial blood gushes onto the front of his tunic.

  Levinson continues the trajectory of his twirl toward a Ukrainian boy whose hand grasps the handle of a sidearm. He is spring-loaded, graceful.

  This movement is not rooted in Levinson’s bloody adventures in the taiga along the Trans-Siberian. There, he was unburdened by technique. This is all stage.

  In 1937, the pirouette with smallswords, which Levinson first performed in a shepherd’s getup as the curtain fell at the end of the second act of Bar-Kokhba, made Levinson famous among Yiddish-speaking audiences in Moscow and in the provinces. Indeed, in the touring company, Levinson was promoted to the part of Bar-Kokhba.

  And now, in 1953, Levinson is airborne once again, a one-man Judean Air Force: a single pirouette, two Finnish daggers, two throats severed, a nign stopped. An acrobat would have bowed, but an acrobat Levinson is not.

  The third boy is spared in the leap.

  He is becoming cognizant of the fact that his tunic is smeared with the blood of his comrades. This is only his third operation. He started the night with a sense of power. Now, in a flash of smallswords, the sense of power has vanished, replaced by what can best be described as a porridge of quest
ions: Why? How? Who is this man?

  The boy raises his hands, an absurd gesture that bespeaks his inability to think strategically.

  What is the meaning of surrender to a resister of arrest? How would you expect Solomon Shimonovich Levinson to take you prisoner in the center of Moscow? How would he feed you? How would he house you, especially if you happen to be a soldier of the MGB? Most important, do the Geneva Conventions apply to individuals who find themselves in situations of this sort?

  These largely theoretical problems resolve themselves as this would-be prisoner takes a panicked step toward the door. Levinson is all adrenaline now. Movement of the adversary is all it takes to make him pounce. A moment later, the boy lies on the floor, the handles of two Finnish daggers protruding from his back.

  * * *

  It’s anything but an accident that der komandir aims at the throats of his would-be captors.

  This choice of targets is consistent with his frustration with what is known as the Jewish Question. The Jewish Question is the subject of many conversations in the winter of 1953. In the streets, people say that Jews have always used Christian blood in their rituals, and that they continue to do so.

  They say that Christian blood is used in matzos—dry, cracker-like bread they eat on their Easter. They say that if you look at it, you see the scabs. Also, they say blood is added to sweet pirozhki called hamantaschen. The victims are usually children, who are bled painfully, slowly. But if the Jews can’t find a child to bleed, they use an adult, and if they are afraid of being discovered, they slit their victim’s throat instead of waiting for the blood to drain out of the pinpricks.

  They say that when Jews pray, they strap little black boxes with magic writings onto their heads and arms. They hide diamonds in those boxes, too.

  They say that the Jews who had become doctors since the Revolution are now secretly killing Russians under the guise of medicine. They do this out of pure hatred, not as part of religious observance, so no bleeding is involved. The newspapers say that a group of them, who worked at Kremlyovka, brought on the death of Comrade Zhdanov and conspired to kill Comrade Stalin. They were caught and imprisoned. Murderers in white coats.

  They say that a Jewish doctor was draining pus from the swellings of cancer sufferers and injecting it into healthy Russians. He was caught on a bus, and it couldn’t be determined how many people he had injected. They say he used a special thin needle of his own invention. You wouldn’t feel it, but if he stuck you, you were dead.

  They say he was a professor named Yakov Rapoport. They say he was arrested and kept in a Lubyanka cellar.

  * * *

  Levinson surveys the carnage. A smile creeps onto his elongated face. A line pops out of the mass of all the lines he’d ever committed to memory. It flashes before him, a spark from a play never staged, a text never translated:

  Ikh for bald opvashn, inem Heylikn Land,

  Dos merderishe blut

  Fun mayn zindiker hant.

  It’s wordier than the English original, and the meter is off, but Levinson is not a poet. This is the best he can do to relay the words spoken by Henry Bolingbroke in the final scene of Richard II, as the coffin of the murdered monarch is brought onstage:

  (I’ll make a voyage to the Holy Land,

  To wash this blood off from my guilty hand…)

  * * *

  On February 24, 1953, at 3:34 a.m., exactly four hours before sunrise, as a consequence of Levinson’s brilliant pirouette with Finnish daggers, Bolingbroke’s parting line is awash in fresh blood, and comedy, tragedy, and history abruptly join into one mighty stream.

  3

  On February 24, 1953, at 3:57 a.m., Friederich Robertovich Lewis gets out of a taxi at 1/4 Chkalov Street.

  After more than two decades of shuttling between Moscow and the industrial cities of the Ural—Magnitogorsk, Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk—Lewis considers himself primarily a sibiryak, a Siberian.

  As an outsider, he understands that Moscow is best appreciated before dawn, with moonlight and a fresh, thin sprinkling of snow. Its streets turned white, the big, grimy city acquires a purity of form, even the delicacy of a Japanese print. White powder, of course, is a promise of something better.

  His destination, the residence of Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, an actor known to friends and family as der komandir, is on the second floor of a prerevolutionary building overlooking a small park strewn with the ruins of plank-and-wrought-iron benches.

  Lewis has a key to der komandir’s communal flat. He takes off his shoes, hangs up his sheepskin coat, and, stepping softly, walks through the long dark hallway of the komunalka. He knocks on the door, trying to wake up Levinson and no one else. This is a formality. Levinson’s door usually stays unlocked.

  Related by marriage, Levinson and Lewis are survivors of what had been a large extended family. Loyalty to the dead is an element of their bond. There is a practical element as well. Lewis needs a cot in Moscow, sometimes for weeks at a time, and Levinson isn’t inconvenienced by the presence of a guest.

  Over the years, they developed a greeting ritual. Every time Lewis knocks on the door of his room, Levinson responds in Yiddish: “Dos bist du?” Is that you?

  “Neyn, nit ikh bin dos. S’iz Elye-Hanovi!” Lewis answers. No, it’s not me. It’s Elijah the Prophet!

  There are variations on this theme. Lewis can announce himself as der Royte Kavaleriye (Red Cavalry), klezmorim mit muzike (an orchestra with music), Yoske Pendrik (a mocking Yiddish name for Jesus Christ) or Molotov mit von Ribbentrop.

  He looks forward to the customary torrent of insults delivered in Levinson’s raspy voice.

  Lewis no longer objects to the nickname Levinson gave him sometime in the thirties: der Komintern-shvartser.

  This is grossly inaccurate. Lewis had nothing to do with the Comintern, the organization formed to stoke the flames of World Revolution. It was a job with the Arthur G. McKee Company of Cleveland that brought him to Russia two decades and two years ago. The other part of the nickname—shvartser—is accurate and therefore not offensive in the least. His pigmentation, which is unusually dark for an American Negro, gives him the appearance of an African sovereign.

  This time Levinson doesn’t answer.

  Lewis opens the door, and before his eyes adjust to darkness, his toes come in contact with a large, dark shape, and a warm, sticky liquid starts to seep into his thick woolen socks. After his initial shock, Lewis comes to the realization that he is standing in a pool of blood and that his toes are wedged beneath the fingers of a dead man.

  “You crazy old motherfucker,” he whispers in English. “Now you done it.”

  “Red yidish,” says Levinson, who speaks no English.

  Three corpses lie on the floor, each in its own dark puddle.

  “A meshugene kop,” says Lewis, shaking his head in disbelief.

  A madman.

  * * *

  Lewis has seen many a bloodied corpse. His encounters with violent death began when he was a child, during race riots in Omaha. In 1931, Lewis arrived in Magnitogorsk to become a welder in Stalin’s frozen City of Steel. Safety was a bourgeois luxury, casualties not a problem. Welders worked on rickety scaffolds or walked the girders thirty to fifty meters in the air, struggling not to lose their footing on the ice, praying to stay upright in the brutal Siberian wind. Those who fell out of the sky were christened krasnyye lepyoshki (red flatbreads).

  The presence of three corpses per se doesn’t shock Lewis. The uniforms do. In addition to accepting that this is not a hallucination, he has to assess the implications of having become an accessory to a crime against the state.

  First, he whispers nervously in Yiddish. (In his private papers, the Afro-American poet Langston Hughes wrote that during his extensive stay in the USSR he spent an evening with a Negro welder and engineering student who expounded on his interest in Yiddish. Hughes’s interlocutor explained that speaking Yiddish allowed him to express solidarity with the Jewish working ma
sses. Saying fuck you to both Jim Crow and the Black Hundreds, he felt like a “double nigger.” This was, of course, Lewis.)

  In a dull rant, Lewis calls Levinson an alter nar (old fool); an alter payats (old jester); and, of course, a mad, wild alter kaker (old shitter). He wishes Levinson a case of cholera in his side, the draining of his blood by leeches, an abundance of painful boils, an uncontrollable lice infestation, and a variety of other illnesses, plagues, and medical conditions.

  With each curse, he blows off more steam, bringing closer the moment when he will be able to begin the deliberate process of integrating this fantastic event into the world of real things.

  * * *

  Upon arrival in the USSR, Lewis noted that his new comrades almost uniformly exhibited a shocking indifference toward death. In Magnitogorsk, a human life was regarded as an input, an attachment to a welding torch or a mason’s trowel. He shuddered to think of what happened when his new countrymen went to war.

  Covering his eyes with a shaking hand, Lewis presses his brows until they cover his eyelashes, creating something of an inner shelter. Then, in the darkness of his skull, he counts, starting at ten and descending slowly to one.

  “When did this happen?” he asks, regaining a semblance of control.

  “About thirty minutes ago,” says Levinson. He seems unaffected by what he has done.

  “And you’ve been sitting in the dark since?”

  Levinson nods.

  “Why did you do it?”

  The old man has to think before he answers. “Because I knew how.”

  If you have weapons and combat skills, and if you don’t fear violent death, why not fight back? This is at least somewhat logical.